TY  - BOOK
AU  - Maria Grazia Guido
PY  - 2013
CY  - Lausanne, Switzerland
PB  - Peter Lang Verlag
SN  - 1424-8689
SN  - 9783035106640
TI  - English as a Lingua Franca in Cross-cultural Immigration Domains
DO  - 10.3726/978-3-0351-0664-0
UR  - https://www.peterlang.com/document/1043780
N2  - This book explores the cognitive and communicative processes involved in the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) within cross-cultural specialized contexts where non-native speakers of English – i.e. Western experts and non-Western migrants – interact. The book argues that the main communicative difficulties in such contexts are due precisely to the use of ELF, since it develops from the non-native speakers’ transfer of their native language structures and socio-cultural schemata into the English they speak. Transfer, in fact, allows non-native speakers to appropriate, or authenticate, those English semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and specialized-discourse structures that are linguistically and conceptually unavailable to them. It follows that there are as many ELF varieties as there are communities of non-native speakers authenticating English.  The research questions justifying the ethnographic case studies detailed in this book are: What kind of cognitive frames and communicative strategies do Western experts activate in order to convey their culturally-marked knowledge of specialized discourse – by using their ELF varieties – to non-Westerners with different linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds? What kind of power asymmetries can be identified when non-Westerners try to communicate their own knowledge by using their respective ELF varieties? Is it possible to ultimately develop a mode of ELF specialized communication that can be shared by both Western experts and non-Western migrants?
KW  - Englisch, Verkehrssprache, Einwanderer, Kulturkontakt, Sprachvariante, Linguistic, Folklore, European Law, Discourse Analysis, Ethnology, Pragmatic, Cultural Ethnology
LA  - English
ER  -