Collocational Patterns of Guru in American Business vs. Spiritual Discourse

Abstract

This study investigates the collocational patterns and semantic prosody of the Indic loanword guru in American English, focusing on its use in business and spiritual or lifestyle discourse. Data were drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, 3,541 tokens) and the News on the Web corpus (NOW, 4,902 tokens). Collocates within a ±4 span were analysed using Mutual Information (MI), Log-Likelihood (LL), and frequency thresholds. Semantic categorisation was conducted through USAS tagging and manual concordance checks, yielding high inter-coder reliability (Cohen’s κ = .88). Prosodic evaluation of 200 concordance lines for positive, neutral, and negative orientation achieved strong agreement (Cohen’s κ = .87). Findings reveal that in business discourse, guru has undergone semantic bleaching and recontextualisation as a metaphor for entrepreneurial expertise and branding (for example, marketing guru, tech guru), with predominantly positive prosody (62%). In spiritual and lifestyle discourse, the term displays greater hybridity, combining reverential references (such as Sikh gurus, Indian saints) with commodified lifestyle extensions (fitness gurus, beauty gurus). This register shows evaluative ambivalence, with 34 percent neutral and 17 percent negative uses, reflecting public scepticism toward commodified authority. The study conceptualises guru as a floating signifier whose meaning oscillates between authenticity and commodification, illustrating how sacred vocabulary is repurposed within global English. It contributes to theories of register variation, transcultural flow, and lexical change, while offering practical implications for lexicography, media discourse analysis, branding ethics, and language education