English As a Lingua Franca

Bol Partner

The series attracts single or co-authored volumes from authors researching at the cutting edge of this dynamic field of interdisciplinary enquiry. The titles range from books that make such developments accessible to the non-specialist reader to those which explore in depth their relevance for the way language is to be conceived as a subject, and how courses and classroom activities are to be designed. As such, these books not only extend the field of applied linguistics itself and lend an additional significance to its enquiries, but also provide an indispensable professional foundation for language pedagogy and its practice. The scope of the series includes: second language acquisition bilingualism and multi/plurilingualism language pedagogy and teacher education testing and assessment language planning and policy language internationalization technology-mediated communication discourse-, conversation-, and contrastive-analysis pragmatics stylistics lexicography translation

Bol

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is a term used to describe the use of English as a common language for communication between speakers whose first language is not English. Providing a unique and original perspective on this subject, Istvan Kecskes explains the language behaviour of ELF speakers, through the lens of Gricean pragmatics. This study successfully brings together the main viewpoints of the Gricean paradigm into ELF research, to discuss and better understand the nature of ELF interactions, as well as explaining how Gricean pragmatics can benefit from investigating and analysing ELF. Each chapter presents intriguing ideas that put existing knowledge into a new perspective, such as interactional competence, intention, implicatures, the semantics-pragmatics interface, and modality. New terms and viewpoints such as language use mode, deliberate creativity, temporary extension of the system, emergent common ground and modality continuum are introduced into the ELF debate.