Handbook of Business Communication

Gerlinde Mautner, Franz Rainer, Gerlinde Mautner, Franz Rainer

• Editorial: De Gruyter Mouton
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501500640
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Filología
• Categoría: Lingüística

In spite of the day-to-day relevance of business communication, it remains underrepresented in standard handbooks and textbooks on applied linguistics. The present volume introduces readers to a wide variety of linguistic studies of business communication, ranging from traditional LSP approaches to contemporary discourse-based work, and from the micro-level of lexical choice to macro-level questions of language policy and culture.

IVLexical phenomena

Michael Betsch, Franz Rainer and Joanna Wolborska-Lauter

17The structure of economic and business terms

1.Introduction

2.The terminological profile of the language of economics and business in English

3.English in comparison with German, Polish and Spanish

4.Conclusion

1Introduction

All languages for specific purposes have developed their own terminology, and, although that is by no means the only linguistic feature that sets them apart from general language, and from other languages for specific purposes, it is undoubtedly the most salient one. In the light of this fact, it may come as a surprise to learn that research on the “terminological profile” of individual languages for specific purposes is still in its infancy, despite promising beginnings as early as the 1970s (cf. Ihle-Schmidt 1983 for French, a Ph.D. dissertation finished in 1978). By terminological profile we refer to the characteristic selection and frequency of devices for the coining of new terms that a language for specific purposes has drawn upon, viewed against the background of the distribution of these same devices in general language and in other languages for specific purposes.

The devices alluded to here comprise the classical triad of word formation, semantic extension and borrowing. As far as the English terminology of economics and business is concerned, we know only of a short discussion by Resche (2013: 86–92) of how economic neologisms – “neonyms”, as she calls them – are created (for German, see Hundt 2002; for a German-Italian comparison, Crestani 2010). She follows Algeo (1991) in distinguishing the six basic processes illustrated in Table 17.1, which can be found in a similar fashion, though often with somewhat different names, in most works on lexicology (cf. Sablayrolles 2000, who has assembled 100 different classification schemes from the French literature alone).

The purpose of the present chapter is to provide a first sketch of the terminological profile of the language of economics and business. While terminology has regularly been discussed in disciplines with elaborate nomenclatures such as medicine or chemistry, it seems to have been much less of an issue in the area of economics and business. To the extent that terminology has been addressed at all within these disciplines, discussion has predominantly revolved around semantics and epistemology. This is true of a certain tradition of linguistic criticism in business studies (cf. Kroeber-Riel 1969 for a seminal work), as well as of discussions about the use of tropes in economics and management, which has been a fashionable topic since the 1980s (cf. Section 2.2 of Chapter 18 on metaphor, metonymy, and euphemism). As linguists, we have no intention to meddle with these epistemological questions, but will concentrate more humbly on the language resources to which economists and management scholars have had recourse in order to build their terminologies, with special attention devoted to the central technique of word formation.

Table 17.1: Resche’s six basic processes for the formation of economic neologisms (The examples between square brackets are ours.)

Process	Subpattern	Example
Creating (ex nihilo)		[Kodak (brand name)]
Borrowing	Simple loanword	laissez faire
	Adapted loanword	laissez faire [economy (from Fr. économie, Gr. oikonomía)]
	Calque	Let the buyer beware (< Lat. caveat emptor)
Combining	Compound	flat hierarchy
	Derivative	ecomanagement
Shortening	Clipping	cocos (shorthand for “contingent convertibles”)
	Abbreviation	the three Cs (i.e. credit, collateral, character)
	Acronym	TARP (< Troubled Asset Relief Program)
Blending		stagflation (a blend of stagnation + inflation)
Shifting	Semantic change	[capital (originally meaning ‘cattle’)]
	Conversion	subprime (adjective > verb)

There are many reasons why languages for specific purposes develop distinct terminological profiles. Most important is the history of the discipline. That medicine contains so many words of Ancient-Greek origin (or coined more recently following an Ancient-Greek model) of course reflects the fact that Galenic medicine dominated medical theory and practice well into modern times. The disciplines of economics and business, by contrast, established themselves relatively late: Though Aristotle – inevitably – was also the first to theorize on oikonomía, or household management, economics only established itself as an academic discipline in the second half of the 18th century. By then, Greek was of little avail in economists’ endeavours to make themselves understood, and so reach those in power. The same was true for business studies, which became a respectable discipline even later (cf. Chapter 2 on the history of business language).

A second force that contributes to shaping the terminological profile of languages for specific purposes is the highly divergent conceptual necessities of different disciplines. Thus chemists had to find names for a myriad of new substances and compounds. Economists, in contrast, have mostly been concerned with phenomena already named by the speech community, such as investing, producing, storing, transporting, pricing, buying, selling, paying, providing credit and issuing money. It is therefore no wonder that the two professions adopted different principles of term formation. A third major determinant of terminological profiles, of course, is the structure of the language itself, especially its system of word formation. Last but not least, sociolinguistic attitudes also come into play, for example the attitude of a speech community, or of the leading practitioners of a discipline, towards foreign linguistic influences.

2The terminological profile of the language of economics and business in English

In order to highlight the characteristic traits of the terminology of economics and business language, two types of comparison suggest themselves: with general language on the one hand, and with other languages for specific purposes on the other. The first perspective will give an idea of how the terminologies of economics and business deviate from general language, while a comparison with other languages for specific purposes will sharpen the profile, sorting out what pertains to languages for specific purposes in general from what is characteristic of only such particular language or of a small cluster of them. Both these comparisons are riddled with methodological problems that cannot be addressed in depth in the present context, but which ought to be discussed briefly all the same.

2.1Methodological preliminaries

First of all, we are fully aware of the fact that neither the “general language” nor any language for specific purposes is a homogeneous entity in itself. It is true that standard descriptions of English word formation, such as Marchand (1969) or Bauer, Lieber, and Plag (2013), provide many observations about how the use of specific word-formation patterns varies according to geography, register, genre or speech situation. Yet we still lack large-scale descriptions of the relative frequency of patterns of word formation based on quantitative data, especially for compounding (on derivation, cf. Plag, Dalton-Puffer, and Baayen 1999). Moreover, it would have been beyond our means to compile and statistically analyse a corpus of complex words representative of general English that might have served as an explicit reference corpus. Our observations concerning deviations from general language must therefore remain preliminary.

The situation with regard to comparison of the terminologies of economics and business with those of other languages for specific purposes is a different one. In this case we can provide more explicit data, although even here we had to resort to a certain degree of idealization in order to keep the analysis manageable. As the basis of comparison we have chosen all discipline-specific terms (i.e., discarding general academic vocabulary) drawn from the natural sciences (physics and chemistry; Alonso & Finn 1992; Housecroft & Constable 2006), the life sciences (medicine; McPhee 2006) and the humanities (linguistics; Becker & Bieswanger 2006) extracted from 50 evenly distributed pages –12 only for medicine, due to the extraordinary amount of terminology − of introductory textbooks written in English. The reason for choosing introductory textbooks was that they contain the essential terminology of a discipline and cover a broad range of topics.

For each discipline this extraction process yielded lists of different length, ranging from 476 terms in linguistics to 1,084 in medicine. These lists form the basis of the tables presented in this chapter. Since we will base our comparisons on the relative weight of certain patterns of term formation within the six samples, the differing lengths of the lists should not in principle present a major problem. The relative weights will be indicated as a percentage of the total of terms in each sample. In the following subsections, the six lists will be compared along five dimensions which have been found to be the most pertinent for a characterization of the languages for specific purposes under scrutiny.

2.2Parts of speech

The vocabulary of a language is divided by grammarians into a number of word classes, or parts of speech, according to their syntactic, semantic and morphological behaviour. All languages seem to have verb and noun categories, while differing widely with respect to adjectives and other parts of speech. This cross-linguistic variety is well-known, but it may be more unexpected to learn that languages for specific purposes differ considerably in the extent to which they make use of different parts of speech. All languages for specific purposes are heavily biased towards nouns, but the proportion of technical terms that are verbs varies widely. As can be seen in Table 17.2, this figure ranges from an insignificant 0.2% in chemistry to 7.1% in economics and 8.8% in business.

The reason for this startling difference has to be sought in the subject matter of the disciplines. Economists try to explain human behaviour in the e...