Files
Abstract
This dissertation focuses on twenty-five business terms and the words with which they co-occur within a span of four words to the left of the term and four to the right. Two corpora were utilized in this study: the Tobacco-Documents Corpus, a corpus of over 500,000 words compiled at the University of Georgia from tobacco industry documents, and a reference corpus of general business language, consisting of over one million words and compiled specifically for the study. The strength of attraction between the terms and their primary collocates was analyzed per corpus using the mutual information statistic. The validity of each collocation was measured by means of the t-score. The results indicate that within the span of 4:4, industry and/or company terms will collocate significantly with general business terms. Furthermore, it was shown that while some common terminology will be shared across industries or companies, there are major differences between general business language and that of specific industries or companies.