Most Frequent Multi-Word Expressions in English for Banking: A Corpus-Based Diachronic Study

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to perform diachronic research in one segment of Business English – English for Banking to check the diachronic stability of its vocabulary. Therefore, an analysis of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in 15 syntactic categories in annual reports of four biggest US banks for fiscal years 2006 and 2021 was made. More precisely, the diachronic changes comprising the span of time of 15 years were analysed in both the frequency of the occurrence of MWEs across the 15 analysed syntactic categories and in their percentage relationship to the scope of the corpora. The corpus analysis made it possible to extract real language in use, enabling the author to determine diachronic changes in vocabulary across categories, thus bridging the gap between the existing knowledge of vocabulary in English for Banking and the current situation. The research showed that there is a high statistical significance of changes in both the frequency of the occurrence of MWEs across the 15 analysed categories and in their percentage relationship to the scope of the corpus in the period over 15 years. The research findings might be useful for both Business English lecturers and their students, due to the various possible pedagogical implications of the results. The research might function as an impetus for linguists doing research in corpus linguistics to undertake further research in other areas of Business English to determine and describe possible changes in the language used. These areas could include: international trade, logistics, wholesale, retailing, industry, business media, leadership, management, marketing or investing.