Semantic fields of problem in business English: Malaysian and British journalistic business texts

Abstract

This paper reports on an LSP-based research project dealing with a contrastive analysis of business and management texts taken from the Malaysian business magazine Malaysian Business (MB) and its British counterpart, Management Today (MT). The objective of the research was to study the semantic fields and linguistic signals of Problem patterns in order to determine whether they display specific differences which can be ascribed to their linguistic and cultural contexts. The study adopted a corpus-based approach based on a corpus containing fifty feature-articles from each magazine. The text corpus was analysed according to Hoey's Problem-Solution textual patterns and the corpus tool, Wmatrix, was used to identify the semantic fields in the Problem patterns. Key semantic fields were found for Problem in MB and MT compared with a normative corpus (the BNC Written Informative Sampler).