Chapters 2 and 3 have shown how business meetings are made up of various stages, how different practices can be inferred by looking at the language that is found in such stages, and how certain language items seem to play a particularly important role in meetings as they unfold. Chapters 4 and 5 involve something of a step backwards, in that step 2 of the methodology outlined in Chapter 2 will be activated – that is, to pinpoint and categorize potentially important linguistic features, such as lexico-grammatical items in the form of single words and clusters. However, as discussed in Chapter 2, this is only a preliminary step, and these items need to be explored in more specific contexts to unearth and infer their reflexive practices.

Two programs were used for accessing and compiling the data lists: WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1999) and CIC Tools (the software package developed by Cambridge University Press). The former allows for a top-down method of analysis, whereby the software runs frequency counts and keyword searches of groups of texts or single texts, whereas the latter allows for a more bottom-up approach, where a particular lexical item can be examined as it occurs in different contexts (for example, according to the relationship of speakers, the meeting topic or the nationality of the speaker). Using both programs therefore permits an understanding of frequent and key items in the corpus and allows for insights into the effect of context on their distribution.