Semantic fields of problem in business English:

Malaysian and British journalistic business texts

Afida Mohamad Ali 1

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).

1. Introduction

According to Flowerdew (2003), the Problem-Solution textual pattern regularly

occurs in technical reports and other academic writing, where the author
introduces a problem and then presents the main point of the paper as a
solution. From her study on student and professional technical writing, it was
apparent that little research has been carried out on the linguistic correlates of
the Problem-Solution pattern through a genre-based approach or quantitative
corpus analysis. This is especially true not just in the field of academic writing
(EAP), but also in the field of ESP. It is particularly important in the field of
Business English because teachers and learners need to comprehend and
incorporate this pattern in order to observe the lexical features and semantic
concepts that are characteristic of Problem and Solution in such texts. This
study addresses this weakness through a contrastive corpus-based analysis of

1
English Language Department, Faculty of Modern Languages and Communication,
University Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang Selangor, Malaysia
Correspondence to: Afida Mohamad Ali, e-mail: afida_m_ali@yahoo.com
Corpora Vol. 2 (2): 211–239
212 A. Mohamad Ali

Malaysian and British journalistic business texts to identify the semantic fields
denoting a Problem based on Hoey’s (1979, 2001) Problem-Solution rhetorical
pattern, along with the lexico-grammatical patterns that occur in those semantic
fields.

2. Review of the literature

As the focus of the article is on Business English, specifically semantic fields, I

will highlight the corpus research related to the semantics of Business English,
mainly of Afida (2001), Nelson (2000) and Fox (1999). With regards to past
research, two areas seem to be of importance here. First, semantic fields do not
seem to have been the focus of any corpus-based analysis of business texts.
Most studies have concentrated more on semantic associations or prosodies
(Sinclair, 1991; Louw, 1993; Stubbs, 1995; Tribble, 2000; Hoey, 2003; Nelson,
2006). Semantic field theory holds that meanings represented in the lexicon
are interrelated and cluster to form fields of meaning, for example, sprinting,
trotting and jogging cluster into a field of running, which, in turn, group with
many other verbs into a larger field of human motion (Malmkjaer, 2004: 340).
Secondly, most of the lexis of business texts investigated by corpus linguistics
techniques, which are, overall, positive in nature, has not been examined within
the framework of Hoey’s Problem-Solution rhetorical pattern.
It has been noted that lexis referring to distinctly negative states, and
words expressing deep, reflective and emotive feelings are used far less in
business (Afida, 2001; Nelson, 2000; Fox, 1999). Afida’s (2001: 50) study
found that the use of more positive expressions in business and management
articles in MB signified an optimistic preoccupation of the writers which could
either be inspirational or motivational to readers. Some of the words that
connote positivism are ideal work experience, success, succeed, positive
attitude and risk-free. Words that connote a negative sense were less frequent,
e.g., perilous journey, stress, pressures, losses, agonising, risking, lose and
traps. Nelson’s (2000) categorisation of business lexis discovered that words
commonly used in business showed up clearly and formed a distinct semantic
world of business. It was found that the lexis fell into a limited number of
semantic categories. These categories included business people, companies,
institutions, money, business events, places of business, time, modes of
communication and lexis concerned with technology. Remarkably, the key
lexis of Business English was found to be overtly optimistic in nature, with
very few negative words featuring at all. Fox (1999) concentrates on words
that signify concepts related to time, human propensities, value assumptions,
spatiality, profit and productivity. She argues that these dominant conceptual
areas of management language clearly reflect the professional and social
Semantic fields of problem in business English 213

priorities of management. This is in line with Irgl’s (1986, 1989) studies on

lexis in business and economics text where he found a large range of synonyms
used to express key concepts in the subject. As in the work of Fairclough
(1989), Afida (2001) and Nelson (2000), Fox’s (1999) findings show that, in
general, business management language has a higher preference towards
positive concepts over negative ones, e.g., good, successful, goals, strive, win,
as opposed to unsuccessful, bad, weak and old.
In their corpus-based research, Sinclair (1991) and Louw (1993)
asserted that semantic association or patterning relating to positive and
negative words was found to be used intentionally. For example, Stubbs
(1995) discovered that the word cause tends to co-occur with negatively-
associated words, e.g., accident, cancer and crisis, and that provide collocates
with positive words, e.g., care, food and help, etc. Both Louw and Stubbs
concluded that there is no linguistic theory that explains the collocation of
words connoting negative or positive concepts. Moreover, this opinion was
further expounded by Hoey (1997) who states that semantic prosody cannot be
explained by looking only at collocations. Taking on a teaching-oriented
approach, Hoey (2000) asserts that for a learner to learn a word, the best way is
to learn it in context. Hence, this study maintains that it is not only semantic
associations that are important, but also the communicative functions that are
associated with certain semantic fields in Business English. In this case,
Hoey’s (1979; 2000) Problem-Solution pattern in analysing textual patterns
will be adopted and this will be discussed in the following section.

3. Problem-solution textual pattern

The interaction between the reader and the text involves the reader asking
questions about the text, and the writer, having presupposed these questions,
providing the answers and information in the text and thereby creating a text
which responds to the reader’s expectations. These repeated questions and
answers by the reader and the writer construct structures and patterns in the
text, i.e., Problem-Solution (Hoey, 1979).
Hoey’s (2001) argument concerning frequently-used text patterns is
well accepted as these patterns appear in most texts from certain cultures.
Many texts are primarily concerned with problems and their solutions, and
evaluations of these solutions. This area of analysis was founded by Winter
(1976), who discovered that many technical texts followed a pattern of
‘Solution-Problem-Solution-Evaluation’. Such a pattern normally appears in
related clauses or sentences, having either a matching or logical sequence. For
example, a question-answer pattern is a matching sequence, while a cause and
effect relation is a logical sequence.
214 A. Mohamad Ali

The communication of problem recognition, solutions and their

evaluation is an issue of importance to all of us: we usually describe events in
the order in which they occur, so the conventional order of the four parts of the
meta-structure is ‘Situation-Problem-Solution-Evaluation’ (Jordan, 1984).
This structure need not occur in this exact order but it gives coherence between
sentences whereby the occurrence of one part tends to trigger the incidence of
another element (Jordan, 1984). For example, a problem begs a solution and a
negative evaluation creates a problem. Apart from maintaining coherence, this
pattern follows the natural time-sequence of presenting high-priority
information in a sensible order, while the effective use of signals for each part
helps the reader to understand the type of information given and how it relates
to other items in a text (Jordan, 1984). The Problem-Solution pattern is shown
below with an example taken from my research data. Sentence numbers are
added for ease of reference:

(1) Banker-turned-property developer Ahmad Zaidi Hamidi has a huge

task at hand as chairman of Syarikat Perumahan Negara, the government’s
full-fledged property developer in the making. (2) Wasting no time, he has
completely revamped his company…
(Malaysian Business)

According to Hoey, a sentence that signifies a problem – defined as a

condition that entails a response – contains lexical items that evoke a negative
evaluation in the reader’s mind. Jordan (1984: 20) defines it as ‘any form of
dissatisfaction or other stimulus that makes us want to improve a situation’.
From the example above, sentence one sets the stage for the story, but with the
words huge task, this sentence brings to mind a problematic situation.
Following Hoey’s pattern, a problem may generate a response in the reader
with the expectation of a certain action, or a solution to the problem, and this
can be seen in sentence two. However, if another sentence precedes the
problem sentence but without suggesting any expectations, then it functions as
a Situation or the setting of the topic at hand. It is the writer’s choice to encode
a particular situation as a problem and readers can sense the writer’s intention
brought forward through the chosen linguistic signals (Jordan, 1984). These
signals make the identification of a text-pattern possible.
Previous studies have found that there are two main ways to detect a
Problem – causal relations and negative lexical signals (Crombie, 1985; Scott,
2000; Flowerdew, 2003). Problem statements are commonly found in some
types of Cause-Effect relations like Reason-Result, Means-Result, Grounds-
Conclusion, Means-Purpose, Condition-Consequence (Crombie, 1985).
Causative verbs like create, cause, pose, present, become and due to indicate a
possible future problem arising. For example, ‘Shipping lines encounter
Semantic fields of problem in business English 215

inefficiency at ports and this causes delay in their daily business’ (MB).
Causative verbs tend to collocate with lexical signals like nouns with a
negative semantic prosody (Crombie, 1985). These nouns indicate a Problem
and are generally negative words. Evaluative words like going bankrupt,
failure, loss, downfall and less successful may trigger gloomy thoughts in the
reader’s mind. Similarly, non-evaluative problematic issues like poverty, war,
disease, demonstration, strike or attack also seem to evoke a depressing
reaction in readers. In the same line as Martin (2000), Hoey (2001) contends
that if the word suggests a negative evaluation, it is an ‘evoking signal’.
Conversely, inscribed 2 signals are explicitly-encoded evaluations, e.g., problem
and trouble (Martin, 2000).
There is, however, little corpus-based work using the Problem-Solution
rhetorical pattern, and most of it has been conducted only on newspaper texts
(Scott, 2000) or technically-oriented reports (Flowerdew, 2003). Using a
small-scale corpus of feature articles, Scott (2000) looked at the key words
problem and solution by comparing the corpus with a reference corpus. Using
WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1996), his study found that the usage of problem was
restricted at a local level and that the word appeared as key in only three
articles. In a comparative analysis of the Problem-Solution pattern in a student
and professional corpus of technical writing, Flowerdew (2003) applied
Martin’s (2000; 2003) systemic-functional APPRAISAL system which analyses
the interpersonal and evaluative meanings of words and codes them as
inscribed and evoking signals. Her findings revealed a higher usage of evoking
lexis for Problem in the professional corpus while the student corpus preferred
inscribed lexis. Also, the word problem was frequently found in the causal
category of Reason-Result and collocated highly with causative verbs.
By taking into account previous studies of the Problem-Solution
pattern, this paper further explores Business English by taking a different
angle. Like Flowerdew (2003), this study used Martin’s inscribed and evoking
categories, and Nelson’s (2000) concept of semantic categories. However,
whereas Flowerdew and Nelson relied on a keyword analysis using WordSmith
tools, this study used a program called Wmatrix (Rayson, 2005) which
categorises lexis into semantic fields. This study also focussed on the Problem
category and not on the Solution, an area which has been similarly addressed
by Flowerdew and Nelson. After presenting the methodology, I will show that
key semantic fields were found to denote the Problems which are (intentionally
and significantly) foregrounded in business discourse.

2
Martin (2000) presents a similar interest on evoked and inscribed lexis using the
APPRAISAL system as a means of classifying evaluative language.
216 A. Mohamad Ali

4. Methodology

4.1 Combining an LSP and corpus-based Approach

It is worth mentioning that a corpus-based and a Language for Special

Purposes (LSP) methodology have similar orientations. A corpus-based
approach has similar aims to Hoffmann’s (1991) views on LSP text analysis.
Corpus work can be seen as an empirical approach, in which the starting point
is authentic data. The method is, therefore, inductive in that statements of a
theoretical nature about the language or the culture are arrived at from
observations of real cases. The examination of language information leads to
the formulation of a hypothesis to account for these facts, which in turn leads to
a generalisation based on the evidence of the repeated patterns in the
concordance. The final step is the unification of these observations in a
theoretical statement (Tognini-Bonelli, 2001). LSP research also analyses
texts, but these texts are of a specialised, scientific and professional nature.
This specialised text analysis should also take into account other foreign
languages in order to maximise results and contribute towards future research
in LSP. In this study, the corpus, which consists of articles from Malaysian
Business (MB) and Management Today (MT), is made up of journalistic texts
reporting on various business topics in Malaysia and Britain.

4.2 The specialised corpora:

Malaysian Business and Management Today

Analysis of the semantic fields of Problem and Solution was carried out on a
corpus of business articles taken from MB and MT created as part of my
doctoral research. The entire corpus comprises one hundred feature articles
which were selected randomly, i.e., fifty articles are taken from each magazine
in order to achieve representativeness in terms of corpus size. Using simple
random sampling, a list of all the articles’ titles taken from the year 2001 to
2002 were produced from both magazines. Using a random number generator
(Wiersma, 1995), fifty articles were chosen to form the representative sample.
The MB corpus consists of approximately 60,000 words while the MT corpus
contains 100,000 words (see Table 1). The feature articles from both
magazines relate to areas such as banking and finance, corporate management,
economy, enterprise and industry. A feature normally appears in newspapers
or newsmagazines, and deals with a wide range of topics, including events,
people, politics, lifestyles and social trends (Tiernan, 2005). A feature usually
contains the writer’s opinions with a fairly serious and comprehensive analysis
of a topic and will give statistics, examples, quotes and opinions. The topics in
Semantic fields of problem in business English 217

a feature are sometimes challenging and may be manipulative, which

correspond to its communicative purposes – to inform, entertain and persuade.
The style of a feature includes a mix of emotional content, factual and major
arguments; emotive words to convey attitude; imaginative language to make
descriptions interesting; a story or line or argument which may or may not be
logical; selective use of facts; artwork – illustrations, photographs and graphs;
quotations or comments by important people and humour (Tiernan, 2005). The
use of informal, colloquial language and first-person narration are used to
establish a personal tone. Attractive features like relevant jargon add
authenticity to information and opinions, while anecdotes help to maintain
reader interest and facts help to validate the writer’s viewpoint. Moreover,
rhetorical questions and emotive words are also used to elicit a personal
reaction from the reader while the effective use of metaphors and description
captures the reader’s imagination, and reports of direct speech personalise the
topic.
In terms of representativeness, both magazines were chosen because of
their similar, specialised (local business) informational content, their
intentional focus and wide readership, so that a valid contrastive study of the
articles could be conducted. High distribution can be seen to reflect the size of
the company and can be regarded as a factor for representativeness
(Flowerdew, 2003). These magazines have the highest coverage in terms of
circulation and are the longest-running business magazines in their respective
countries. Table 1 presents the background details for both magazines. The
specialised corpus was statistically compared with the one-million BNC
Written Informative Sampler (BNCWInf). The BNC Sampler Corpus is a
subcorpus of the British National Corpus, consisting of approximately one-
fiftieth of the whole corpus, that is, two million words. It is divided equally
between spoken and written texts. The reference corpus consists of nine text
categories (number of words are provided for each category), i.e., informative
(779,027), pure science (32,974), applied science (117,685), social science
(29,868), world affairs (277,128), commerce and finance (92,057), arts
(51,645), belief and thought (43,626), and leisure (134,044). By using the
written sampler as the general corpus, the semantic fields and linguistic signals
of Problem and Solution in the specialised business discourse of MB and MT
can be compared with those of the more general language.

4.3 Corpus software: Wmatrix

Hoffmann (1991: 159) claims that, ‘the outcome of text-linguistic research into
LSP is an important prerequisite of informational and documentational work,
particularly if it is combined with automatic language data processing, or in
218 A. Mohamad Ali

other words, corpus linguistics’. In relation to this, Wmatrix (Rayson, 2005)

was used to quantitatively analyse the semantic fields (identified by their

Malaysian Business (MB) Management Today (MT)

Established 1972 1970

Circulation
540,000
(per annum)
Captains of industries,
Audience managers, political leaders and
decision makers.
To serve readers by helping
them make educated and
informed investing decisions
Aim by keeping abreast with
significant developments in
listed companies.
Features analysis of significant
news happenings in the local
business scene, socio-
Topic economic genre dealing with
the economy and stock
market, modern society, and
information technology.
100,464
Managers, chairmen, chief
executives and senior directors.
Management Today is about the
way you work and what you're
worth and how you advance
your career and still have a life.
About how you handle your
people, and best practice and the
digital economy.
Features modern business
practices and trends with aspects
of general management.

Table 1: Background of Malaysian Business (MB) and Management

Today (MT)

frequency of occurrence in a specialised corpus relative to their frequency in a

more general corpus) in each text and in each corpus. Wmatrix provides a web
interface to the UCREL 3 Semantic Analysis System (USAS) and Constituent
Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System (CLAWS) corpus annotation

3
UCREL (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) is a
research centre at Lancaster University, specialising in the automatic or computer-
aided analysis of large bodies of naturally-occurring language. Its work focusses on
modern English, early modern English, modern foreign languages, and minority,
endangered and ancient languages.
Semantic fields of problem in business English 219

tools, and standard corpus-linguistic methodologies such as frequency lists and

concordances. The first stage of annotation involves CLAWS, 4 a part-of-
speech tagger which assigns a part-of-speech (POS) tag or grammatical word
classes to every word in running text with about 97 percent accuracy (Garside
and Smith, 1997), e.g., ‘NN1’ for singular common noun and ‘VM’ for modal
auxiliaries.
The analysis of the concepts signalling Hoey’s categories, e.g.,
Problem-Solution was facilitated by SEMTAG, a semantic tagger. SEMTAG
assigns a semantic field tag to every word in the text with about 92 percent
accuracy. The POS-tagged text is then fed into SEMTAG, 5 which assigns
semantic tags representing the general-sense field of words from a lexicon of
single words and a list of multi-word combinations called idioms, e.g., ‘as a
rule’. Currently, the lexicon contains nearly 37,000 words and the idiom list
contains over 16,000 multi-word units (Archer et al., 2002). An idiom list
enables the corpus tool to identify any idiomatic expressions, usually non-
decompositional sequences, and to assign a special set of tags to the words in
that particular idiomatic phrase to denote a part-of-speech relation above the
level of the word (McEnery and Wilson, 1996: 122). Items not contained in
the lexicon or idiom list are assigned a special tag, Z99. Antonymity of
conceptual classifications is indicated by +/− markers on tags, e.g., A15+
(Safety) as opposed to A15- (Danger). Comparatives and superlatives receive
double and triple +/− markers respectively, e.g., larger (N3.2++) and largest
(N3.2+++). The lexicon and idiom list are updated as new texts are analysed
(Rayson and Wilson, 1996). SEMTAG can be used to raise hypotheses or
simply to confirm them (see Thomas and Wilson, 1996). For example, the
semantic tag A15- which refers to the concept of Danger, reveals words which
evoke a negative or dangerous situation signifying a Problem, e.g., danger and
risk. From here, frequency lists and text concordances can be obtained. The
log-likelihood statistic (LL) is employed by Wmatrix; only items with a LL
value of more than seven are considered to be statistically significant, since
6.63 is the cut-off for 99 percent confidence of significance. 6

4
CLAWS was developed at the University of Lancaster (Garside et al., 1987). The
latest version of CLAWS is CLAWS7, with more than 146 tags (Garside and Smith,
1997: 108).
5
This automatic semantic analysis of texts relates to content analysis which is
concerned with the statistical analysis of, primarily, the semantic features of texts
(Wilson and Rayson, 1993). This means that hypotheses about the semantic content of
texts can be generated and tested with reference to standard text norms (Wilson and
Rayson, 1993).
6
This means that the sample is significant to represent the population. In other words,
it allows only a 1 percent error. Thus, the result is highly significant (Siegel, 1988).
220 A. Mohamad Ali

For the analysis, all the sentences in the articles were manually
identified by the researcher based on Hoey’s Problem-Solution pattern and
saved in separate files for Problem and Solution. Using the computer, clauses
in the filename ‘Problem’ were uploaded into Wmatrix and compared with the
reference corpus, the BNC Written Informative Sampler (BNCWinf), to
identify the dominant semantic fields existing in the Problem clauses in MB
and MT. The same process was undertaken for clauses signifying a Solution.
From here, the key words in those semantic fields can be derived. This enabled
me to look at the dominant words, along with their contexts (using
concordances) signifying the semantic fields of Problem and Solution in MB
and MT. Therefore, sufficient examples can be called up for investigation of
the linguistic structures realising this particular pattern. Using Hoey’s
framework, I addressed the following questions: Is there a significant
difference in the semantic fields of Problem in MB and MT compared to the
BNCWInf? And what are the dominant semantic fields along with the evoking
and inscribed words that signal a Problem in MB and MT? In the following
section I present the results and discussion for the above questions.

5. Results and analysis

5.1 Semantic fields of Problem in MB and MT compared with the

BNCWInf

A comparison of MB and MT revealed only two significant negative semantic

fields denoting a Problem – Weak and Affect-Cause/Connected. For Weak,
MB (0.08 percent) has an overuse compared with MT (0.01 percent)
(LL=10.22, p<0.01). Correspondingly, for Affect-Cause/Connected, MB
(0.78) showed an overuse in relation to MT (0.31 percent) (LL=43.92,
p<0.001). I will discuss the two fields (Weak and Affect-Cause/Connected) by
placing them under negatively-inscribed/evoking words and causation,
respectively. The small number of significant semantic fields for Problem
between MB and MT was expected as the comparison was made on the
Problem category for both magazines. However, a significant result was that
when MB and MT were compared with the general reference corpus,
BNCWInf, where results showed thirteen and fifteen semantic categories,
respectively, relating to Problems in the business world (see Tables 2 and 3).
The common key semantic fields in both MB and MT were Ability: Failure,
Negative, Difficult, Evaluation: Bad, Danger, Affect: Cause/Connected and
Violent/Angry. (MT has three categories for Evaluation which refer
consecutively to the basic adjective, its comparative and superlative e.g., bad,
worse, worst.) For analysis, I have categorised the fields into 1) Negation, 2)
Semantic fields of problem in business English 221

Negatively-inscribed or evoking words, and 3) Affect: Cause: Connected.

Each of these will now be analysed in turn.

MB BNCWInf
Semantic field Example LL
(percent) (percent)
failure, fails,
Ability: Failure 0.40 0.04 159.42
unproductive
Negative not, no, n’t 1.23 0.61 73.18

Money: Debts losses, debt(s) 0.49 0.16 65.43

crisis, problem,
Difficult 0.51 0.19 55.62
difficult
Evaluation: Bad bad, flaw, severe 0.24 0.06 51.74

Weak weakness, weak 0.08 0.01 20.46

Danger risk(s) 0.12 0.04 18.77

Affect: due to, reason,
0.78 0.51 17.48
Cause/Connected causes
Money: Poor poor, non-profit 0.08 0.02 13.75
slowdown, slower,
Measurement: Slow 0.08 0.02 13.53
sluggish
Uncertainty doubt 0.11 0.04 10.51

Violent/Angry hit, fallouts 0.27 0.16 10.07

Weakness weakest 0.02 0.00 8.06

Table 2: Thirteen key semantic fields characteristic of Problem clauses in

MB compared with the BNC Sampler Written Informative (BNCWInf)
222 A. Mohamad Ali

MT BNCWInf
Semantic field Example LL
(percent) (percent)

Negative not, n’t, no 1.36 0.61 178.10

Ability: Failure failed, failure, lost 0.28 0.04 147.71

rival(s), competitive,
Competition 0.15 0.03 70.30
adversaries
Difficult problem(s), difficult 0.36 0.19 30.61

Worry, concern stress, worry, trouble 0.20 0.08 28.98

Affect: get, reason, because
0.31 0.51 26.25
Cause/Connected of
Evaluation: Bad serious, doomed 0.14 0.06 21.97
Evaluation: Bad
worse, disastrous 0.04 0.01 18.96
(comparative)
disappointing,
Discontentment 0.06 0.01 18.46
frustrating
Evaluation: Bad
worst 0.04 0.01 16.26
(superlative)
lie, unthinkable,
Evaluation: False 0.08 0.03 13.53
dishonest
Violent/Angry hit, fallout, aggressive 0.25 0.16 11.77
ludicrous,
Foolish 0.04 0.01 10.91
irresponsible
Danger risk(s), gamble 0.08 0.04 9.92

Sad suffer, grief, grim 0.12 0.07 9.07

Table 3: Fifteen key semantic fields characteristic of Problem clauses in

MT compared with the BNC Sampler Written Informative (BNCWInf)
Semantic fields of problem in business English 223

5.1.1 Negation

In the Problem clauses, negation or negated sentences can be seen as an

evoking signal. There is higher occurrence of this field (Z6) in the Problem
clauses in MT (1.36 percent) compared to the BNCWInf (LL>15.13, p<0.001).
Similarly, MB (1.23 percent) shows a significant difference compared to the
BNCWInf (LL>15.13, p<0.001). The top three types of negation for this
semantic field are not, its contracted form n’t and no negation. Quirk et al.
(1994) state that not negation is mainly used in formal English rather than its
contracted form n’t, which is used more in informal English. Based on the
results for negatives, not negation seemed to be the dominant form in MB and
MT. However, its contracted form n’t appeared to have a higher frequency in
MT (173 times) than in MB (150 times). This suggests that MT has a more
informal style than MB, and shows the Malaysian magazine’s preference for a
formal, journalistic style. 7 No negation was found to be considerably rarer than
not negation in both MB and MT, and this echoes other corpus-based studies
on negation (see Wilson, 1991; Tottie, 1991, 1987; Nelson, 2000). Negation in
Problem clauses from MB and MT is mainly concerned with a deficiency or a
lack of resources, solutions or expertise in dealing with a Problem, the failure
of certain individuals, plans and actions to succeed or follow through, and also
evaluation of the state of business companies.
There are several dominant negation structures signalling a Problem in
MB and MT which may also contain negative evoking noun or verb phrases
(underlined) as in the following.

(i) not + verb in a cause and consequence/effect structure:

Managers who do not continue to learn and widen their

knowledge and expertise will, thus, lose their
credibility with regard to their leadership.
An official contacted at PNHB says the conditional offer
was deemed unfair and did not follow government
directives, leading to the rejection.

7
Contractions are one of the markers for an informal writing style. The overall results
for contractions show a significant difference that MT (0.39 percent) is higher than MB
(0.10 percent) (LL = 135.73, p<0.001). According to Rayson and Garside (2000), the
log-likelihood is a reliable statistical test to compare corpora that are not balanced in
terms of their size. The reliability of the corpus comparison is strengthened by taking
into account the representativeness, homogeneity and comparability of the two
compared corpora.
224 A. Mohamad Ali

(ii) not + verb + adverb

This negation structure is used to evaluate a failure of a certain business

practice (underlined noun phrases), for instance:
A spate of unfavourable corporate manoeuvering and the
de-privatisation of several entities do not augur well
for the already weak stock market.
…they are still holding back on R&D expenditure and this
does not bode well for our future competitiveness.

(iii) not + main verb + noun

A Problem may also be an absence of essential facilities or resources. The

example below shows the negation or non-existence of ‘computer facilities’ in
schools which is an obstacle in achieving an IT (information technology)
literate population:

…a total of 5,010 or 69.5 per cent of primary and 758 or

46.2 per cent of secondary schools do not have computer
facilities.

(iv) not + adverb + adjective

A similar problem signalled by negation is seen in the cause and consequence

construction below, where there is a lack of certain traits in people, countries,
business plans, services, products or certain principles or regulations not being
followed, for example, sentences with this structure:

…Malaysians are not very conversant with the trends in

the tech industry, especially those related to the dotcom
business.
The countries were not politically and socially cohesive
and so were vulnerable to external intervention.
As long as corporate decisions are not adequately
transparent and corporate governance not adhered to,
small investors would eventually end up taking higher
risks relative to their returns.

(v) not + (be) + (ART) + adjective + noun

A Problem may also be a negative evaluation of the state of a business:

Semantic fields of problem in business English 225
There is a lot of uncertainty involved and Utama is not
an easy party to deal with.
Time dotCom Bhd is not a great stock.
By all accounts, they are not good statistics for an
industry used to double-digit growth in the boom years of
the 1990s.
Since its inception in 1991, THUB, then known as
Pembinaan Seleksi Sdn Bhd, had not been seeing a rosy
bottomline.

The negated sentences contain mostly negative evoking nouns and verb phrases
(underlined) indicating a Problem and the negation further helps to strengthen
this notion. However, the negated sentences also appear in the cause and effect
(consequence) structure which Crombie (1985) identifies as a signal of a
Problem.

5.1.2 Negatively-inscribed and evoking words

Comparing the results between MB and MT from Tables 2 and 3, we can see
that both contain more negative semantic fields than the BNCWInf. The fields
include: Ability: Failure (X9.2-), Competition (S7.3-), Difficult (A12-),
Evaluation: Bad (A5.1-, A5.1--, A5.1---), Weakness (S1.2.5-), Danger (A15-),
Worry, concern (E6-), Discontentment (E4.2-), Fear/shock (E5-), Foolish
(S1.2.6-), Evaluation: False (A5.2-), Uncertainty (A7-), and Violent/Angry
(E3-). 8 However, due to space limitations, I will discuss only some of the
fields previously mentioned with concordanced examples.
Failure: This is the most significant semantic field in that the
percentage in MB (0.40 percent) is higher compared with the BNCWInf (0.04
percent; LL=159.42, p<0.001). Similarly, there was an overuse of this field in
MT (0.28 percent) in relation to the BNCWInf (0.04 percent; LL=147.71,
p<0.001). The most frequent word in this field was the negative evaluative
noun failure(s). It appeared most dominant in MB while the verb failed was
top in MT. In MB, the key words used were inscribed ones, consisting mainly
of failure(s), failed, fails, its near-synonym floundered and the negative input
of a word signalled by the prefix in– or un–, (unproductive, unsuccessful). The

8
The semantic tags show semantic fields which group together word senses that are
related by virtue of their being connected at some level of generality with the same
mental concept. The semantic tags were developed by Lancaster University Computer
Corpus Research Group, (UCREL). A tag that begins with A refers to general and
abstract terms, X refers to psychological states, actions and processes, S refers to social
actions, states and processes, E refers to emotion.
226 A. Mohamad Ali

noun failure in MB mainly occurred in premodified noun phrases preceded by

nouns, e.g., corporate, bank and others, and fell under the cause-effect category
of problem signal (Crombie, 1985) as shown in the concordance below:

misadventures and bad management that results in failure .

Unlike the consequences of
The downstream consequences of a major corporate failure can
bring unproportionate hardship and
uncommon factor cited by many corporates for their failure .
It is true that the crisis had adversely
true that the main cause of many a corporate failure was bad
management . In many cases
business of underwriting risks . Bank failure is not
something new .

Compared with MB, MT used a wider range of negatively-inscribed

lexis indicating the field of Failure which, unlike MB, included colloquial
words like screw up, make a hash of, mess up and cropper. This reflects the
informal style of MT compared to MB.
Difficulty: For this field, MB (0.51 percent) displayed an overuse in
relation to the BNCWInf (0.19 percent; LL=55.62, p<0.001). Similarly, MT
(0.36 percent) had a higher occurrence compared to the BNCWInf (0.19
percent; LL=30.61, p<0.001). I have chosen to look at the top three words for
this semantic category, i.e., the inscribed nouns problem(s) and crisis, and the
evaluative adjective difficult. The most dominant word for this semantic field
in MB is the noun crisis, as can be seen in the examples below:

is but lo and behold , the moment one uninvited crisis rolls

in , the normally cool manager becomes
epreciated ringgit . Just before the crisis of 1997 , there
was a tapering of exports in the
market meltdown in the aftermath of the economic crisis that
afflicted the region in mid 1997 . d higher
an economy , after a brief recovery from the 1997 crisis ,
is now staring again at a slowdown or even
their failure . It is true that the crisis had adversely
affected the performance of all

Most of the negatively-inscribed signals were premodified noun

phrases with modifying adjectives economic, uninvited or the determiner the
preceding the nouns which mainly referred to one particular event or cause,
e.g., ‘the 1997 economic crisis’. However, the word crisis in MT was used
without referring to a particular event but to a condition or consequence, e.g.,
Semantic fields of problem in business English 227

‘drama into a crisis, it is now in a state of crisis and was set to herald a real
crisis’.
The main signal for a problem is indicated by the inscribed noun
problem, mainly in premodified noun phrases. In MT it was the most dominant
word for this semantic field (Difficult) e.g., their worst problem, age problem,
a trivial problem, the physical problem of screen size. When premodified by
evaluative adjectives, problem may be cataphoric and anaphoric; for example,
the problem in this sentence refers forward to the reason: ‘But there was a
problem: the cabin audio equipment wasn’t working and no one on board was
qualified to repair it’.
Apart from problem(s), another signal was the evaluative adjective
difficult + [to + verb] which was the third most used in MB but came in second
in MT. It is used for negative evaluation of a proposition (i.e., plan, deal,
feedback), for example in the concordance below from MB:

already in ‘ tuition fees to the market ’ . It can be

difficult estimating how cash-rich a company is.
, although there was a hotline , it was quite difficult to
get a response or to get the right person to a
hiking prices continuously will be increasingly difficult to
execute , ’ says Malaysia Street .
‘ The ruling in some ways made it difficult for us to
proceed with the whole deal .
and merchant bankers feel it will be increasingly difficult
for the company to secure a rescuer .

Evaluation – Bad: In MB, this field was found to be significant with a

frequency of 0.24 percent compared with the BNCWInf (0.06 percent;
LL=51.74, p<0.001). However, for MT there were three significant fields for
this category (A5.1---, A5.1--, A5.1-) (p<0.001), which refer to the comparison
of adjectives, e.g., the superlative worst, comparative worse and basic adjective
bad. This may reveal that MT is more descriptive and uses a variety of words
to evaluate negatively the problems. For the semantic field A5.1--- the
superlative worst, is used as an evaluative adjective mostly in premodified
noun phrases with negative evoking words – worst excesses, worst recession,
worst nightmare, worst culprits and inscribed noun e.g., worst problem. Other
near synonyms denoting the quality ‘Bad’ are adjectives and adverbs
negatively evaluating causes and effects of business conditions, products and
information, e.g., bad, flaw, severe, poor, dire and detrimental:

, is because KTMB ’s own locomotives are in bad shape and

the cost of maintaining the fleet is high
228 A. Mohamad Ali

stand that Shrewsbury and his wife had long been in bad
financial shape . Dabasir had fallen int
it is the combination of business misadventures and bad
management that results in failure .
the main cause of many corporate failure was bad management
. In many cases , badly managed
dampened . Lower consumer spending means bad news for
companies like Jaya Jusco Stores Bhd

Debts: In MB, this semantic field appeared significant (0.49 percent)

compared to the BNCWInf (0.16 percent; LL=65.43, p<0.001). Words like
losses, debts, spending, overheads and bankrupt are evoking signals of
problems in the business field, e.g., ‘During the recession almost all private
property developers and construction companies suffered losses’. This field,
however, does not appear significant in MT.
Weakness: The Weakness domain (semantic field S1.2.5-), as opposed
to Toughness, appeared significant in MB (0.08 percent) compared with the
BNCWInf (0.01 percent; LL=20.46, p<0.001). The words making up this
category mainly consisted of inscribed nouns, verbs and adjectives. For
example, the top word in this category was the adjective weak in premodified
noun phrases and the evaluative noun weaknesses:

took the financial crisis of 1997 to lay bare the weaknesses

of the economy . But since late last
to avoid responsibilities or to cover up their weaknesses .
Thus we see leaders who change the
Nathan admits that the company still has many weaknesses . ‘
There is absolutely no doubt

Danger: One of the practices in business is assessing probable risks or

dangers and avoiding them. The results showed that MB had a slightly higher
percentage of these (0.12 percent) in relation to the BNCWInf (0.04 percent;
LL=18.77, p<0.001). This field was also overused in MT (0.08 percent)
compared to the BNCWInf (0.04 percent; LL=9.92, p<0.01). It revolved
around risky and dangerous situations where the top two words used in MB and
MT were inscribed words, e.g., noun/verb risk(s) and the noun danger.
However, MT used a more varied lexis for this field, e.g., jeopardy and
gamble. For example, the concordance below from MB shows the various
occurrence of risk as a noun in premodified noun phrases:

be expected to absorb some exposure to currency risk that

Proton has to deal with from time to time As als of savings
deposits are withdrawn , the liquidity risk increases
rapidly . Similarly , losses
Semantic fields of problem in business English 229

postmodified noun phrases:

ood times were not proportionately balanced by the risk they

undertook in periods of turmoil .
P 50 ) Often , they are incapable of assessing the risk of
their investments . EVA P 51 ) Equally , the
non-participating shareholders do not realise the risk of
their investments until the debt bubble bursts .
ities in banks erode stockholders funds and pose a risk to
depositors on the safety of their savings .

and also as a verb:

wiped out . A large number of employees risk the prospect of

being laid off from work .

In MB, danger occurs as a noun, evaluating a Problem (in bold) as dangerous:

macro demand for K-workers in the country and the danger

that brain drain poses to the country 's long-
09 ) There are many more such groups which are in danger of
being sidelined by the K-economy
cent in 2000 . ‘ Repegging or all outright float is a danger
at this point as it could generate a fallout

There was a very strong tendency for the words risk and danger to be
used with pre- and postmodified noun phrases signifying a Problem situated
either to the left or right of the node word. Analysis of these words showed the
potential usefulness of knowing the Problem terminologies associated with
business and can contribute to the Business English classroom.
Worry: Analysis of this field showed a significantly high occurrence in
MT (0.20 percent; LL=28.98, p<0.001), but not in MB. A possible reason for
this may be the formality of MB which avoids matters that deal with emotions.
The top three most dominant words in MT were stress, worry and trouble. A
concordance of the dominant word stress in MT for this field is as follows:

her was an alcoholic . There ’s no doubt the stress can be

very harmful to your life and that of your
that he would alienate the staff and create stress within
the business with his vision of where he ’s
most say they experience above-average stress levels , few
believe they are at the point of burn
way up the greasy career pole , long hours , stress and
corporate entertaining make a healthy diet as
230 A. Mohamad Ali

, relating to exercise and diet . Stress has been called the

plague of modern living

As seen in the concordance above, the noun stress is seen as harmful

and used as a negatively-evoking noun; it functions as both cause and
consequence. It is seen as a Problem that is harmful to health and work life,
and occurs in a sentence which also contains other negative lexical signals,
e.g., harmful, alienate, greasy career pole, long hours and plague. In MT, all
the sentences using stress or other inscribed words in this category, e.g., worry,
trouble (‘get into trouble’, ‘ran into trouble’) collocate with another Problem
signalled by either inscribed or evoked lexis or negation and thus make it easy
to identify it as a Problem:

can not be managed . Many people worry about whether to tell

others about their idea .
they quake . Company bosses also worry about globalisation
and the sheer media maze .
of boss management . Some bosses worry that their staff are
not working hard enough .

Competition: Competition from rivals in the business world can be

considered a threat or an obstacle. According to Nelson (2000), it has negative
connotations based on a study involving the Business English Corpus – the
toughness of the competition – unbridled, fierce and aggressive competition
being examples. This field appeared significant only in MT (0.15 percent)
when compared to the BNCWInf data (0.03 percent; LL=70.30, p<0.001),
where words like rival(s), competitive and adversaries evoke a problem.
Interestingly, sentences like ‘…that Sainsbury’s would soon be swallowed up
by a rival grocer’ and ‘Potential predators include Delhaize of Belgium and
the Dutch chain Ahold’ are metaphorical, where the rivals are portrayed as
predatory animals, 9 and so evoke a negative evaluation.
Discontentment: This field also displayed significantly in MT (0.06
percent) in relation to the BNCWInf (0.01 percent; LL=18.46, p<0.001). This
domain includes words referring to Sadness or Discontentment. Most of the
words in this domain used the negative prefix dis–, consisting mainly of
evaluation using negative adjectives premodifying the nouns, e.g., ‘more
disappointing figures’, ‘towards the disappointing figure of’, ‘a lot of
disappointed people’; and sentiments using single negative adjectives e.g.,
demoralized, fed up or nouns such as customer dissatisfaction and regrets.

9
This confirms the studies done on the growing use of metaphorical expressions using
animal imagery in business and economics discourse (White, 2003; Henderson, 2000;
Fox, 1999).
Semantic fields of problem in business English 231

All in all, the words in the semantic categories discussed above do not
by themselves signal the Problem. Most of the Problem clauses also contain
other signals. Thus, a typical Problem contains multiple items like negation,
and most of the negative words seem to be inscribed which were mainly nouns,
adjectives and verbs. For example, in ‘There is a lot of uncertainty involved
and Utama is not an easy party to deal with’, where the negative inscribed
noun uncertainty and negation help to signal a Problem. As found previously,
the cause and consequence structure is also a signal of a Problem (Crombie,
1985). The field of Cause (A2.2) was found to be significant in both MB and
MT when compared to the BNCWInf. I discuss this in the next section.

5.1.3 Affect: Cause/Connected (Causation)

According to Flowerdew (2003), when an explicit causative verb collocates

with a negatively-inscribed word, the verb has a negative semantic prosody,
that is, it suggests some type of adverse incident. This was also confirmed in
the author’s research e.g., ‘Shipping lines encounter inefficiency at ports and
this causes delay in their daily business’ (MB). The cause is something that
brings about an effect or a result, e.g., ‘Works at the tunnel portal will create a
noise problem’. Verbs like cause, lead to, bring, become, pose, incur and
others signal causality where the Problem is exacerbated.
As seen in Tables 2 and 3, the semantic field Affect: Cause/Connected
(A2.2) appeared underused in MT (0.31 percent) compared with the BNCWInf
(0.51 percent; LL=26.25, p<0.001) with dominant words such as reason and
because of. However, MB has an overuse of this field (0.78 percent) compared
with BNCWInf (0.51 percent; LL=17.48, p<0.001) with words like due to,
reason and causes. Stubbs (1995) has pointed out that the verb cause
collocates with words that indicate undesirable things, such as illnesses and
natural or economic disasters. Following Sinclair (1991) and Louw (1993), he
associates undesirable things with the semantic prosody of the verb cause, and
suggests that a true definition of the word should not be ‘make something
happen’ but ‘make something bad happen’. My findings confirm Stubbs’s
notion where cause collocated with adverse situations, and this was similar for
due to:

ty capital , but end up with a diminished capital due to

mismanagement . A poor performance
go ahead with the privatisation of KTMB , largely due to
concerns over its viability . It is
RB-Hicom failed to come to a mutual agreement due to a price
dispute What could be
232 A. Mohamad Ali

MB Banking Group fell apart at the eleventh hour due to

disagreements over which bank would
ng lines encounter inefficiency at ports and this causes
delay in their daily business . In turn
from the lack of awareness by the public on the causes of
failures . As long as corporate
The erosion of confidence by the public in a bank causes
abnormal withdrawals of savings .
activities . Yet , at times , the causes of major bank
failures have not always been
sulting work , I have found that one of the basic causes for
the failure of change programmes is the

6. Discussion

The comparison of the semantic fields of Problem in MB and MT, in

conjunction with the comparison of the BNCWInf has revealed different
aspects of journalistic style and business English. Based on the analysis, three
main observations can be made, relating to causation, inscribed vs. evoking
items and journalistic style.
The first observation is that most of the Problem clauses use the cause-
consequence pattern, where the cause and consequence are both Problems
signalled mainly by premodified noun phrases with negatively inscribed and
evoked nouns and adjectives, e.g., ‘A poor performance or breach of ethical
practice can result in a great loss of credibility capital for a manager’. This
finding confirms previous studies on Problem structures such as Crombie
(1985) and Flowerdew (2003). In a cause-and-consequence sentence structure,
causative verbs are usually used to indicate the Problem where they collocate
significantly with negative propositions (Flowerdew, 2003). In the Problem
category, the results for Negation revealed that MT has a higher frequency of
the contracted form n’t compared with MB. I found that the negation
structures also consist of other signals of Problem, e.g., cause and effect
structures (Crombie, 1985) and negatively-evoking or inscribed words
(Flowerdew, 2003; Hoey, 2001). Causation signals were found to be more
frequent in MB compared to MT.
Secondly, based on the words signalling a Problem in the semantic
fields, there were more negatively inscribed words for both magazines than
evoking ones. Inscribed words are those that have explicit meaning where the
writer inscribes the evaluation (Martin, 2000). This confirms the fact that a
Problem is a negative evaluation of a proposition (Hoey, 1983). Therefore, the
negative evaluation is given by the writer by the use of evaluative words which
evoke a negative or positive evaluation in the reader’s mind. It is reasonable,
Semantic fields of problem in business English 233

as pointed out by Hoey (2001) and Flowerdew (2003), that evaluation is

evident in most parts of the text. From the study’s data, inscribed words like
failure, crisis, problem, difficult, trouble, disappointing, dissatisfaction,
discontented, fear, terrified, worst, bad, poor, weakness, ludicrous, suffer,
risk(s), danger, uncertainty, turmoil and mismanagement have a clear negative
sense in the reader’s mind. These words consisted mostly of nouns and
adjectives which confirm Flowerdew’s (2003) findings that nouns and
adjectives make up the inscribed signals for Problems. On the other hand, the
study found that evoking signals for Problem are small in number, e.g., stress,
competition, losses, debts, tussle and attacks.
The third observation is related to the journalistic style of the two
magazines. I found that MT is more informal and descriptive in presenting the
Problems. This can be seen in the use of contracted forms of negation, e.g., n’t,
negative semantic fields like ‘Discontentment’, ‘Foolish’, ‘Sad’,
‘Violent/Angry’, ‘Worry’, ‘Danger’, ‘Fear’ and ‘Uncertainty’, and the use of
colloquial words in the semantic field of Failure. By contrast, MB has a more
formal style and is concerned with less emotive semantic fields like ‘Debts’,
‘Weakness’, ‘Money: Poor’ and ‘Movement: Slow’. This formality in MB is
supported by Nelson’s (2000) view that the lexis of Business English is, to a
large extent, formed from a limited number of semantic groups that create a
‘meaning world’ for business. This world is populated by business people,
companies, institutions, hierarchy, money, business events and places of
business, and is marked by its dynamic and non-emotive lexis. Colloquial
words were also found in the semantic fields in MT’s Problems, signalling an
informal style compared to MB.
There are several possible explanations for the results. First, the
differences between MB and MT may be due to differing house styles as
practised by both magazines. These house styles may influence the magazine
writers’ way of writing and how it is presented to the expected audience. In
addition, the differences between MB and MT may reflect the wider usage of
English in both cultures where the process of ‘informalisation’ (Fairclough,
1994) has penetrated written discourse, mainly in MT. Conversational and
informal styles are infused in the professional domain. Fairclough (1994: 7)
states that, ‘the engineering of informality, friendship and even intimacy entails
a crossing of borders between the public and the private, the commercial and
the domestic, which is partly constituted by a simulation of the discursive
practices of everyday life, conversational discourse’. A possible explanation
for informalisation is that it is deliberately used to make writing (or speech)
more accessible to an audience and also to maintain solidarity (Goodman,
1996).
Secondly, the different style may reflect socio-cultural differences
between Malaysia and Britain where a conversational approach to conveying
234 A. Mohamad Ali

information about business in MT compared to the straightforward and formal

style in MB implies that the UK is more socially relaxed than Malaysia. This
may also suggest the influence of Malaysia’s society in that its bureaucracy
maintains official and formal language use in its professional discourses. This
gives the impression that Malaysia, having been colonised by Britain in the
past, prefers to use formal English in order to project a professional and
scholarly image through its discourses.

7. Conclusion

This study has contributed to the ESP field in several ways. First, it
investigates Business English – specifically the Problem element of Hoey’s
Problem-Solution rhetorical pattern, which has not been explored by corpus
linguistics methodologies in this ESP domain. It also introduces readers to a
very useful semantic tagger in Wmatrix for identifying semantic fields.
Moreover, it has heeded the notion of contrastive analysis as stressed by
Hartmann (1980). A cross-cultural LSP/ESP text analysis can reveal culture-
bound communication differences in written texts. For instance, even though
business is purely a serious and professional matter, and readers would expect
this in a business text, a specialised business magazine like MT can appear
more informal than MB. The formality maintained in MB seems to be
essential in projecting a professional and scholarly image. A problem arises
when a student reads a magazine like MB or MT, and decides to follow the
writing style of MT. Since formality seems to be the norm in journalistic
writing in Malaysia, the student’s writing style might be discredited. This
relates to the issue of incorporating L2 pragmatic norms and cultural values in
an L1 environment (Li, 1998). Clyne (1981: 65) states that, ‘if culture-specific
discourse structures really play an important role, they should occupy a
prominent place in teaching programs’, especially languages for special
purposes. Business journalism in magazines or newspapers can efficiently
meet learners’ needs in that they can familiarise themselves with the field of
study, such as marketing, economics, accounting and business management
(see Boyle, 1981). The ‘polished and highly idiomatic language of business
reporting, as well as the political background vital for understanding business
writing’ can serve as a motivating factor, which strikes interest in learners
(Navarat, 1989: 35). This research will add substantially to a growing body of
literature on professional genres of Business English, mainly from L2 business
registers, and will help to counter the problem of the loss of professional
registers in non-native discourse communities as claimed by Swales (2000),
Louhiala-Salminen (1996) and Nickerson (2005). Furthermore, it will be an
Semantic fields of problem in business English 235

addition to the wealth of research pertaining to cross-cultural rhetoric, corpus-

based research and text linguistics.

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