A Study On The Discrimination Of Business English Synonyms In MNC Annual Reports

With the extensive development of international business,Business English vocabulary is used more and more frequently in business context.The study of Business English synonyms is a topic worthy of further study.Through the research,it is found that the research on Business English synonyms is less,the aspects involved are relatively narrow,and the business texts related to multinational corporations are less involved.This research analyzes four pairs of synonyms--business and trade,income and revenue,financial and economic,offer and provide--in Apple and Alibaba 2019 annual reports based on the collocation theory proposed by the father of collocation Firth(1957),through a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches from the aspects of colligation,collocation,semantic preference and semantic prosody,so as to summarize the features of Business English synonyms,improve the accuracy of the use of Business English synonyms,and provide reference for Business English learners.The results of the study are as follows:(1)Business has nine colligations which are N+N1,PRON+N,ADJ+N,N1+N,PREP+N,N+PREP,CONJ+N,V+N,N+V,whereas trade has all the above colligations except for V+N and N+V.Income has seven colligations which are N+N1,ADJ+N,N1+N,N+PREP,PREP+N,PRON+N,N+V and revenue has all of them besides V+N.Financial has five colligations which are ADJ+N,ADJ+ADJ,PREP+ADJ,CONJ+ADJ,PRON+ADJ,whereas economic shares these colligations except for PRON+ADJ.Offer contains six colligations: V+N,ADV+V,V+PREP,N+V,CONJ+V,PRON+V and provide shares all these colligations besides PREP+V.(2)Business and trade have two types of shared collocations.Income and revenue have two types of shared collocations.Financial and economic have one type of shared collocation and offer and provide have six types of collocations.(3)Business has three categories of semantic preferences while trade has two categories of semantic preferences.Income has three categories of semantic preferences while revenue has four.Both financial and economic have two categories of semantic preferences and offer and provide have four categories of semantic preferences.(4)Business has neutral semantic prosody while trade has neutral and negative semantic prosody.Income and revenue have mixed semantic prosody.Financial and economic have mixed semantic prosody.Offer and provide have both neutral and positive semantic prosody.The study will help Business English learners further understand Business English vocabulary,provide useful reference for the discrimination of Business English synonyms and also offer assistance to people engaged in business activities in the use of words.