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Objectives

The focus of this paper is the use of formulaic language in English Lingua Franca (ELF). The conversation in Example 1 demonstrates a frequent problem occurring in lingua franca communication in which the language in use is not the L1 of either speaker:

Example 1:

Chinese student: – I think Peter drank a bit too much at the party yesterday.

Turkish student: – Eh, tell me about it. He always drinks much.

Chinese student: – When we arrived he drank beer. Then Mary brought him some vodka. Later he drank some wine. Oh, too much.

Turkish student: – Why are you telling me this? I was there.

Chinese student: – Yes, but you told me to tell you about it.

One of the nonnative speakers used a formulaic expression in a nativelike way. However, the other nonnative speaker was not familiar with the conventional connotation of the expression. For him the most salient meaning of the formula was its literal meaning, its combinatorial meaning. This discrepancy in processing led to misunderstanding between the speakers.

Recently English Lingua Franca communication has been receiving increasing attention in language research. Globalization has changed the world and the way we use language. With English being the most frequently used lingua franca much communication happens without the participation of native speakers of English. The development and use of English as a lingua franca is probably the most radical and controversial approach to emerge in recent years, as David Graddol (2006) claimed in his book English Next. The book argues that it is an inevitable trend in the use of global English that fewer interactions now involve a native speaker, and that as the English-speaking world becomes less formal, and more democratic, the myth of a standard language becomes more difficult to maintain. Graddol claims that in this new world the presence of native speakers hinders rather than supports communication. In organizations where English has become the corporate language, meetings sometimes go more smoothly when no native speakers are present. Globally, the same kind of thing may be happening on a larger scale. Understanding how non-native speakers use English talking to other non-native speakers has now become an important research area. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) project, led by Barbara Seidlhofer, is creating a computer corpus of lingua franca interactions, which is intended to help linguists understand ELF better. Although several studies have been published on the use of ELF (e.g., House 2002, 2003; Meierkord 1998, 2000; Knapp and Meierkord 2002; Firth 1996; Seidlhofer 2004), our knowledge about this particular variety of English is still quite limited.

What makes lingua franca communication unique is that interlocutors usually speak different first languages and belong to different cultures but use a common language that has its own socio-cultural background and preferred ways of saying things. So it is essential to ask two questions:

1. With no native speakers participating in the language game how much will the players stick to the original rules of the game?

2. Can current pragmatic theories explain this type of communication in which basic concepts such as common ground, mutual knowledge, cooperation, and relevance gain new meaning?

Second language researchers have worked out several different tools and methods to measure language proficiency and fluency. In the center of all these procedures stand grammatical correctness and pragmatic appropriateness. There is no room here to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches. Let’s just say that if we want to learn how much lingua franca speakers stick to the original rules of the language game, we will need to find out something about their thought processes and linguistic conventions as reflected in their language use. What are the possible means for this? First of all, people belonging to a particular speech community have preferred ways of saying things (cf. Wray 2002) and preferred ways of organizing thoughts. Preferred ways of saying things are generally reflected in the use of formulaic language and figurative language while preferred ways of organizing thoughts can be detected through analyzing, for instance, the use of subordinate conjunctions, clauses and discourse markers. This paper will focus on the use of formulaic language in ELF to answer the two questions above.

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