Findings and developments in ELF pragmatics research:An introduction

Abstract

For me, pragmatics in English in a lingua franca (ELF) is epitomised by a record­ing in the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) of three female students chatting in a college dormitory (MS_ED_con_6): two Malaysians who speak Malay, Canton­ese and English, and one Chinese woman who speaks Mandarin and English. They are hilarious to listen to. Their talk bounces from topic to topic, they tease and josh each other relentlessly, and they laugh constantly. I mention them here because their talk exemplifies some prominent characteristics of pragmatics in English as a lingua franca. To set the scene for this volume, I briefly sketch some pragmatic features of the women’s discourse, before moving on to a more system­atic description of ELF pragmatics in Section 2.