A corpus-informed study of corporate jargon trends (2016–2024) and pedagogical implications for teaching corporate English in ESP contexts

english

2026

volume 23, issue 1

business English   buzzwords   corporate discourse   plain language

Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

This paper examines whether corporate English became more buzzword-heavy between 2016 and 2024 and how the findings can inform university ESP courses, especially Business English. Using a fully public corpus of annual report shareholder letters and regulatory filings from the time frame of 2016–2024, the study applies corpus-assisted close reading to track recurring buzzword packages, lexical bundles, collocational patterns, and shifts in abstraction and agency. The results show that investor-facing narrative sections increasingly rely on era-framing labels and layered noun phrases that compress meaning and promote strategic alignment, while regulatory disclosures remain more operationally concrete but still admit selective buzzword insertion. Pedagogically, the patterns support teaching corporate phraseology (terminology) through concordance-style noticing, collocation mapping, genre-sensitive rewriting, and unbundling tasks that convert abstract bundles into accountable, reader-oriented plain language.

20.10.2026