Term Business - Busy or Concerned with - Assignment Example

s Paper’s Term “business”. Busy or concerned with? There are many words with multiple meaning and sometimes speaker, especially not foreign-speakers can confuse them. For instance word business, in spite of common interpretation of this term can mean many different things, connected semantically, but with various shades. Every word has various connotation and associated meanings, for instance, for many years of oligarchy reign, the word “businessman” is associated with people who are aim oriented, greedy, ambitious, such people can get the benefits from other people forgetting the moral principles, etc. Such associative meaning we call connotation of the word. Generally the word “business” has rather neutral connotation, because we cannot underline any positive or negative signs, regarding this term. This word can be used in different sentences with negative or positive intention, e.g. “It’s the business of all my life” or “mind your business!” All information we gathered is taken from the OED, in this dictionary we can find all probable word meanings, word etymology, word usage in sentence or short phrases. Latter is effective way to learn how the word functions in the language. Language in general and separate language units should be studied within the speech, from pragmatic point of view, that is, “language in use”. Whether it is written or oral speech we can much brightly study the word and its concept through the possible ways of word’s application in speech. And OED provides many examples of any word meaning. Current research dedicated to give definition of some term and we have chosen term “business”. Since it is word with multiple-meanings, we will analyze general meanings of this term and their application in speech. OED gives 5 possible various meanings of the term “business” Let’s analyze the first one. Generally, when someone applies the word “Business” the image of some enterprise instantly appears before his eyes. It means that the main meaning for the most people is activity to provide some services, goods, resources exchanging all these things for money. This word is combination of word “busy” that means to be engaged with something and suffix “-ness” that describe the person’s state of something. For instance “laziness” – from “lazy” and “ness”, seriousness - from “serious” and “-ness”, sadness – from “sad” and “ness”. It can also denote instance of something, e.g. “kindness”. This suffix originated from old Germanic language. Word “busy” refers to ancient word “bisig” that has also foreign origins – word “besig” from Dutch. Origins of Dutch word “besig” is unknown. So, word “business” means person’s state of being busy with something. Further etymology of this word we cannot observe, because even OED cannot give us more information regarding the origins of the term. Therefore, we can say that this word came from the Dutch and Germanic languages and functions together as the adjective busy – to be engaged with something and suffix –ness that denotes state of something or someone. (Oxford Dictionary of English) From this first meaning derives all other meanings of this word. There are many other meanings of word “business”: for instance if someone wants to know some personal information from barely familiar person one can say: “It’s none of your business” or “Mind your own business” bringing a message that one don’t want to share such information. It doesn’t relate to business activity described earlier, because term “business” also means some person’s occupation or concerns. Or considering person’s relation to something, “to be business” means to be serious in/with something. OED gives the first and principle meaning as follows: “a persons regular occupation, profession, or trade experts who typically conduct their business over the Internet”. Therefore, considering this term we should keep in mind that the main semantic of this word is some action or process the person engaged in. Business, being commercial activity also can be considered to be the occupation someone engaged in, because running a business is also kind of process. Therefore, business is every kind of activity that speaker wants to underline, for instance at stage; business is some action instead of dialogue. However by term “Business” one can call some enterprise with all branches and personnel working there. For instance, there is corporate “business” – Coca Cola. Speaking of business in such way, it’s kind of human’s activity that requires person’s efforts, investments, which called “capital” or “assets” and vision to sell, or provide some services or products for getting money. There are many combinations with this word, for instance “doing monkey business” is doing something senseless or even deceitful behavior. All combinations with word “business” involve concept of doing something, or carrying out some sort of activity. And contrast of doing business is term “inactivity” or “inaction” these terms denotes lack of actions of any kind. Drawing contrasts between these two words, we can distinguish the main concept of term “business” – action. It is a state of people during some activity, if it’s applied in figurative meaning, concept of activity is also preserved, because even in the phrase “mind your business” we can observe appeal to mind someone’s own activities, concerns, which we can also denote as certain kind of action. Though there are shades of carrying out actions, e.g. word business can be understood as work or other activity as a part of a job which is carrying out not for pleasure. Such interpretation of this word emphasizes the fact that business is some activity, which is done according to the agreement or obligations of the worker to the manager or other person with power to hire people. We cannot observe the meaning of process connected with work with positive connotation or with pleasure. Therefore, business is certainly unwilling activity, it is done for earning living, consequences of such activity is pleasurable for people, however, the process of working is obligatory within some job. Word “business” can serve as prefix, creating a description for people e.g. “businessman” or “businesswoman”. Such words denote people engaged in the commercial activity connected with selling, providing services or goods for money, as every business institution do. Concluding our research we can say that the term “business” is has multiple-meaning can describe the business as a certain kind of activity, especially commercial activity or even person, institution, group of persons. Figurative meaning of business often used in colloquial speech is used with implied meaning of concern, interest in something or occupation. Generally all meanings correlated with word “business” refer to the state of being busy with something, interested in something. Therefore, using OED we can study any term or even phrase for meaning, implied meaning, that is, functioning of the word in phrase or sentence. Through this study we gathered enough information for proper usage of this word, for better interpretation, for studying the language units in use. Though we studied only one language unit, we can shed light to every word combination used with the word “business”, it means that the results of our research can be used in the further investigation of language units connected with the term “business”. And current research was limited to investigation of one particular term, which we choose according to its multiple probable meaning and broad usage in the modern English. Such words should be studied and analyzed for meaning and probable connotation and other signs peculiar to the certain word. Works cited The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. 2010. Oxford University Press. 26 October 2014 Read More