Exploring Phraseological Patterns in Business English Non-Finite Clauses

The increasing availability of large-scale corpora and advanced data-processing tools has enhanced the analysis of phraseological units. This study investigates the phraseology of English non-finite clauses – specifically to-infinitive, -ing, and past participle clauses –headed by adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and pronouns. It explores the phraseological patterns of these structures and their semantic extensions within a specialized corpus of business English. The corpus comprises academic and journalistic registers, with the academic register including research articles from four leading journals and graduate theses from Tunisian institutions, while the news register features business articles from The Economist and Financial Times. The study identifies lexico-grammatical patterns forming various phraseologies of non-finite clauses and categorizes these patterns into semantic sets based on the degree of fixedness. Findings reveal differences in the frequency of non-finite phraseologies across the academic and news register, and similarities in the degree of fixedness and functions of the most frequent patterns. The study offers a corpus-based account of how non-finite clause constructions are used across business registers, contributing to a broader understanding of register variation, discourse organization, and phraseological conventions in business discourse.