PERFORMANCE

a) Keyness

The lemma ‘performance’ was the thirty-seventh most significant key word in the BEC corpus.

N	Word	bec freq.	bec.lst %	bnc freq.	bnc.lst %	Keyness	P
37	PERFORMANCE	507	0.05	175	-	455.8	0.000000

b) Semantic Prosody

Left: Three groups identified (negative attributes are mentioned here only in order to highlight the much larger number of positive attributes).

semantic prosody	frequency/ 500 & %	example
money/finance	40 - 8.0%	pay and performance share-price performance profit performance
people/groups of people	22 - 4.4%	a manager’s performance the candidate’s performance
positive	40 - 8.0%	an awesome performance world-beating performance a perfect performance
negative	2 - 0.4%	the dire performance blighted by poor performance

Right: No groups identified but see colligation section below.

c) Three-word clusters

N	cluster	Freq.
1	the performance of	17
2	performance in the	11
3	performance of the	10
4	of the performance	7
5	the performance criteria	7
6	performance appraisal form	6
7	term financial performance	6
8	performance criteria #	5
9	the performance appraisal	5
10	and performance of	4
11	in terms of	4
12	of performance criteria	4
13	performance over the	4
14	performance related bonus	4
15	standards of performance	4
16	the company's performance	4
17	the group's performance	4
18	to improve performance	4

d) Macro-generic distribution

e) Colligation

COBUILD Sense 2 (how successfully something is done)

495 instances - 99.0% of sample

Patterns: Variable noun

Responsibility for improving sales performance across the business

delivering gains due to market trends rather than performance

COBUILD Sense 5 (performance of a task- the action of doing it)

5 instances - 1.0% of sample

Patterns: Singular noun: usually the-noun-of noun

grounds for discontinuing the supply of goods or the performance of work under the contract

They offer all the same choices of performance characteristics as ...

Other patterns:

i) noun phrases including ‘and’

19 instances - 3.8% of sample

handling and performance, pay and performance, reliability and performance, price and performance, innovation and performance, capability and performance

Prepositional usage:

ii) performance + against (showing what the performance is being measured against)

6 instances - 1.2% of sample

comparing performance against other companies can help

iii) performance + in (these often relate either to time or to business areas)

26 instances - 5.2% of sample

performance in the 1995 drought, performance in 1991, performance in our UK distribution business

iv) (the) performance + of (these often refer to products, people or companies)

32 instances - 6.4% of sample

the performance of the big pharmaceutical stocks, performance of the appraisees, performance of a company

f) Associates

N	WORD	NO. OF FILES	AS %
1	PERFORMANCE	14	100.00
2	COMPANIES	6	42.86
3	BUSINESS	6	42.86
4	PROFIT	5	35.71
5	SYSTEMS	5	35.71
6	COMPANY	5	35.71

Comments

1. ‘Performance’ is a thing that affects people on a personal level. Therefore, it can be suggested that it is intrinsically an interesting word for students and useful word combinations can be found in the BEC:

improve performance feedback on performance

motivate performance standards of performance

bottom-line performance a wealth of performance information

level of performance stringent performance targets