INTRODUCTION

This chapter concerns business meetings conducted in five different types of organisations and intends, within this context, to contribute to a better understanding of this type of communicative event. One reason for the choice of our object is that although an extremely high percentage of business organisations are engaged in, among other things, decision-making meetings, presentation meetings and analysis and/or negotiation of particular issues or documents (Barbara et al. 1996), meetings have received relatively little attention from discourse analysts, perhaps largely due to difficulty of access to this type of confidential data. A second reason is our own special interest in the description of communication in business contexts.

Several previous studies of meetings have focused on cultural mismatches. Garcez (1993) discusses American and Brazilian point-making as revealed at the level of discourse organisation and style; Fant and Grindsted (1995) observe discrepancies between Hispanic and Scandinavian negotiators as a result of different sets of group identity-constitutive values; Fant (1993) concentrates on negotiation moves in the same cross- cultural context; Grindsted (1990a, 1990b, 1994), also within that cross- cultural context, focuses on conversation organisation, argumentative exchange formats and conflict management. A different approach to business meetings includes an analysis of participation structure and topic coherence (Francis 1986) and a discussion of the difference between what meetings are believed to be like (as exemplified in the tapes and films that accompany courses) and what they are really like, at the level of speech functions (Williams 1988). As far as we know, no previous studies have addressed meetings from the point of view of the role of the organisation of lexis in the characterisation of this type of communicative event.

Lexical organisation and its role in establishing textual patterns of coherence and cohesion have been the object of important studies (Halliday and Hasan 1976; Hoey 1991; Sinclair 1991; Sinclair et al. 1970; Jones and Sinclair 1973; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975, to mention just a few). More specific studies about lexical organisation and its relationship to topic have also been conducted previously (Marcuschi 1988,1989,1990; Maynard 1980; Phillips 1983, 1985, 1989; Webb 1966, among others). Most of these studies can be placed within the tradition of approaching lexis and its role in topic formation from the perspective of its sequential organisation.