Abstract
Idiomatic expressions have long been viewed as a potential trigger of misunderstanding in intercultural communication. This leads to a popular belief that communication in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is less idiomatic than that in English as a Native Language (ENL). However, empirical ELF studies have provided mixed findings partly because researchers have often focused on different and non-explicit operationalisations of idiomaticity. Adopting a corpus-based approach and focusing on verb object combinations, the present study explores the role of idiomaticity in spoken ELF interactions and makes comparisons with ENL corpus data. It was found that the ELF and ENL interactions are not significantly different in the percentage of idiomatic combinations used. However, the former is characterised by repetitions of a smaller range of relatively frequent idiomatic combinations. The corpus findings are explained in terms of pragmatic strategies that speakers adopt in contact situations to enhance communicative success.
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Notes
- 1.
Erman and Warren (2000) included in their frequency count a wide array of expressions, from lexical collocations (e.g. break a rule, the answer to the question) to grammatical items (e.g. a few, for instance, be going to, have got to, there is, used to), and to pragmatic markers (e.g. and then, thank you, yeah quite).
- 2.
Idiomatic expressions included in Kecskes (2007) are: grammatical units (be going to, have to), fixed semantic units (for the time being, once a month), phrasal verbs (worry about, take care of), speech formulas (that’s why, I mean), situation-bound utterances (How are you? That’s fine), and idioms (give me a ride, that makes sense).
- 3.
VOICE (2013). The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version 2.0 XML). Director: Barbara Seidlhofer; Researchers: Angelika Breiteneder, Theresa Klimpfinger, Stefan Majewski, Ruth Osimk-Teasdale, Marie-Luise Pitzl, Michael Radeka.
- 4.
ICE-GB: The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). (2007). Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium.
- 5.
As before, morphological variation in the noun, but not in the verb, was taken into account when identifying repetitions. This means both modified and strictly verbatim repetitions are included.
- 6.
With the main verb have, the search includes the contracted form ’ve. ’s and ’d could not have been included because of their ambiguity.
- 7.
For frequent but nonidiomatic expressions, the percentages are equally high: 68.7% and 54.3% (repetitions included); 60.8% and 43.2% (repetitions in the same text excluded).
- 8.
L2 speaker’s high sensitivity to frequency is supported by psycholinguistic evidence. For instance, a series of experiments conducted by Ellis et al. (2008) shows that the processing of idiomatic expressions by L2 speakers is predominantly affected by their frequency, whereas for L1 speakers it is predominantly affected by their MI scores.
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Yao, X. (2020). Idiomaticity in Intercultural Communication in English as Lingua Franca: A Corpus-based Study of Verb-Object Combinations. In: Yang, B., Li, W. (eds) Corpus-based Approaches to Grammar, Media and Health Discourses. The M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4771-3_4
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