Abstract
Building on the theoretical insights into the socio-cognitive approach to the study of interactions in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF)), this paper reports on the idiosyncratic phenomenon that ELF speakers do not adhere to the norms of native speakers, but instead create their own particular word associations during the course of the interaction. Taking the verbs of speech talk, say, speak, and tell as examples, this study compares word associations from three corpora of native and non-native speakers. The findings of this study reveal that similar word associative patterns are produced and shared by ELF speech communities from different sociocultural backgrounds, and these differ substantially from those used by native English speakers. Idiom-like constructions such as say like, how to say, and speakin are developed and utilized by Asian and European ELF speakers. Based on these findings, this paper concludes that ELF speakers use the prefabricated expressions in the target language system only as references, and try to develop their own word associative patterns in ELF interactions. Moreover, the analysis of the non-literalness/metaphorical word associations of the verbs of speech in the Asian ELF corpus suggests that ELF speakers dynamically co-construct their shared common ground to derive non-literal/metaphorical meaning in actual situational context.
Funding source: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Funding source: Fulbright Research Visiting Scholar (VRS) Program
About the author
Yang Pang is an Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages, Donghua University, China. E-mail: estelle@dhu.edu.cn She was a Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar at the State University of New York at Albany. Her research interest lies in the semantics-pragmatics interface, cognitive sciences and intercultural communication.
Acknowledgments
I am really grateful to the reviewers for their comments and efforts on improving this paper. Moreover, I cannot express enough thanks to Professor Yuchen Yang, Judith Heaney, and Professor Shaojie Zhang for their help with proofreading this paper and continued support. This article is part of the research project “A Study of the Construction of Lexical Synonymy from a Cognitive and Pragmatic Perspective” (16CYY061) funded by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and the 2019-2020 Fulbright Research Visiting Scholar (VRS) Program.
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