BELF is (the) Gateway to Blockchain, No? – A Morphosyntactic corpus Analysis of BELF in Business Setting

The need for a corpus linguistics approach to the description of ELF (Cogo Dewey, 2011; Önen, 2016) is felt as a result of globalization and spread of English, affecting the use and teaching of the language in diverse ways. Now, number of the non- natives is more than that of natives, requiring special kind of attention to the use of English as the `vehicular language. It needs to be well described and investigated, re- defining of related teaching methods and pedagogy. Despite such an important necessity, not enough empirical research has been done at least in Asia, including Iran. This study focuses on investigation of spoken Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) from lexico-grammatical point of view. It is in fact replication of the findings of Barbara Seidlhofer (2004, p. 240). The findings suggest crucial role of English in business communication.