Naslov
Idiom variation in English for Business – an unlevel playing field

Autori
Parizoska, Jelena ; Rajh, Ivanka

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Skup
EUROPHRAS 2014 "La phraséologie: ressources, descriptions et traitements informatiques"

Mjesto i datum
Pariz, Francuska, 10.09.2014. - 12.09.2014

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
idioms; variation; English for Business; corpora
(frazemi; varijantnost; poslovni engleski; korpusi)

Sažetak
Figurative expressions, including idioms, are an important research topic in ESP, especially in English for Business since economics texts abound in figurative language (Boers 2000, 2011 ; Charteris-Black 2000 ; Charteris-Black and Ennis 2001 ; Charteris-Black and Musolff 2003 ; White 2003 ; Herrera and White 2010). As a result, idioms have become an integral part of some business English textbooks. For example, Market Leader contains idioms which are used when talking about competition, such as a level playing field (‘a situation that is fair for all the people involved’), be neck and neck (‘be involved in close competition’), etc. However, corpus data show that some idioms are variable. For example, the expression be neck and neck also occurs as run neck and neck, put X and Y neck and neck and a neck-and-neck race. Two questions arise here: is this variation reflected in business English textbooks and what types of variation are there? The aim of this paper is to show that idioms describing competition are relatively variable, which is not reflected in the way they are presented in the textbook and that this variation is systematic. We conducted a study of ten idioms describing competition in the British National Corpus (BYU-BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). In addition, we used data from the Financial Times since it is the main source of texts in Market Leader. In this way we obtained 1535 examples. The results show that all the ten idioms are variable and that their variation follows a number of patterns, e.g. lexical substitution, premodification and postmodification, static and dynamic variants, etc. This is in line with the findings from previous corpus-based research, which has shown that a large number of idioms occur in one or more lexical and/or syntactic forms (e.g. Cignoni and Coffey 1998 ; Moon 1998 ; Cignoni, Coffey and Moon 1999 ; Langlotz 2006). Overall, this shows that there is a solid basis in everyday business usage for including idioms in the textbook. However, their variability is not represented. This begs the question of whether idiom variation could be treated in business English textbooks in a way that it does not make the learning of idioms more challenging to the user. The systematicity behind this variation may be one way to achieve that.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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