Semantic Ambiguity of High-Frequency Polysemous Verbs in Business English

A Corpus-Based Investigation

Abstract

In ESP, interpreting contractual language depends on distinguishing polysemous items, yet corpus-based research on how to discriminate between high-frequency polysemous verbs in business and everyday English remains scarce. Using a closed sense inventory built from the Oxford Learner’s and Cambridge dictionaries, two trained coders classified 36,219 KWIC instances of “run,” “execute,” “bear,” and “discharge” drawn from the Business and General sub-corpora of COCA (15,841 Business; 20,378 General), reaching an inter-coder Cohen’s kappa of .87. The Business set comprises business and finance texts including trade journalism, corporate reporting, and contractual prose while the General set draws proportionally from fiction, magazine, newspaper, and spoken material. Collocates were extracted across an L3 to R3 window and assessed with Pearson chi-square tests under Bonferroni correction and with pointwise mutual information. Sixteen tests returned significant results at p < .001, with Cramér’s V ranging from .11 to .61. The contractual senses of “bear,” “discharge,” and “execute” arise through register narrowing, whereas the dominant business sense of “run” develops through metonymic transfer. Right-adjacent collocates carry more disambiguating information than left-adjacent ones, and the resulting positional rules are transferable to other polysemous verbs. The findings support sense-aware ESP vocabulary instruction and offer lexicographers an evidence base for ordering senses by register.