The knowledge economy highlights opinions on economics, management, law, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science. However, these opinions exclude language and linguistics which are the foundations for any knowledge. Meaning remains pivotal and fundamental in issues of language and communication hence the need to situate a robust study in semantics. In the area of global business, periodic revisions made on the international commercial terms (INCOTERMS) lead to misconceptions, vagueness and misunderstanding of terms in international trade. Moreover, it appears that training in entrepreneur development studies in our higher education lacks sufficient modules of language studies; therefore, the need to examine the import of meaning in the knowledge economy. This situation justifies the need for this study. Data was elicited from concepts in certain sectors of global trade, where one hundred lexical items were presented to 20 graduate students and 30 undergraduate students in the Entrepreneurial Development Studies (EDS) class of Covenant University. The use of a questionnaire to elicit the respondents’ semantic understanding of key concepts in business enabled the use of qualitative and quantitative approaches of analysis. The methodological framework is the Business Semantics Management by Pieter De Leenheer (2009) that organises business stakeholders to fashion out meaning.
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