Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2026
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Semantic Ambiguity of High-Frequency Polysemous Verbs in Business English: A Corpus-Based Investigation
Pham Nguyen Anh Huy, Nguyen Cong Lai, Le Hoang Thuy Tien
ABSTRACT:
In English for Specific Purposes, the interpretation of contractual language depends on the capacity of readers to distinguish polysemous lexical items, and divergent interpretation of a contract clause by contracting parties has long been theorized as a structural source of contractual disputes. Nonetheless, there is still a lack of systematic corpus-based evidence to determine the meaning of high-frequency polysemous verbs in business versus everyday English, and to identify which accompanying phrases help to pinpoint their precise meaning. Hence, this research investigates four verbs, namely “run,” “execute,” “bear,” and “discharge,” by analyzing 36,219 KWIC instances taken from authentic Business and General English sub-corpora on COCA, comprising 15,841 instances (43.7 percent) in the Business sub-corpus and 20,378 instances (56.3 percent) in the General sub-corpus. Concordance lines were extracted using AntConc with a collocational window from L3 to R3. Sense coding followed a positionally weighted rule-based procedure with cue inventories derived from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge Business English Dictionary, and inter-coder agreement computed on a randomly selected ten percent subsample reached Cohen’s kappa of .87, indicating substantial reliability. Pearson chi-square tests with Bonferroni correction yielded sixteen significant results (p < .001), with Cramér’s V values ranging from .11 to .61. Effects at R1 were consistently larger than at L1, indicating that right-adjacent collocates carry stronger disambiguating information than left-adjacent collocates. Register narrowing accounts for the contractual senses of bear, discharge, and execute, while metonymic transfer predominates for run. The study provides statistically grounded disambiguation rules whose positional cue-weighting framework is transferable to other high-frequency polysemous verbs in Business English, with direct implications for ESP vocabulary instruction and for the lexicographic treatment of polysemous verbs in Business English reference works.
Keywords: Business English; collocational analysis; corpus linguistics; ESP; polysemy