Handbook of Business Communication

The book takes a specifically linguistic approach to business communication, drawing together perspectives from various research traditions. These include genre analysis, LSP research, and language teaching. There are 30 chapters organized into five parts: (1) Introduction; (2) genres and media (e.g., presentations, negotiations, meetings, sales talk, e-mail, websites, advertising, annual reports; (3) Foreign languages and culture (e.g., intercultural business communication, language needs and policies, multilingualism and English as a lingua franca in international business contexts, teaching and learning foreign business languages), (4) Lexical phenomena (e.g., structure and semantics of business terms, metaphor, metonymy and euphemism, language planning, the language of marketing and accounting, proper names in business, lexicography, corpora and corpus linguistics), (5) Building bridges across disciplines (e.g., organizational discourse, corporate language and design, standardized text modules). 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.