ELF Interaction

ELF interactions often feature language innovations which would not be considered as correct in an English as a native language context. Pitzl who has investigated the use of idioms and metaphors by ELF speakers, states by paraphrasing Ehrenreich (2009: 140) that even though ELF speakers do not aim for a re-interpretation of English “they will not shy away from doing exactly this when context, communicative need or group appropriateness prompt them to do so”, thus this is representing an integral feature of every ELF interaction (Pitzl 2012: 39). Similarly, Jenkins, Cogo and Dewey (2011: 304) stress how “ELF is a means by which English is continually being re-enacted and reinvigorated through the inventiveness of its speakers as they respond

House, who has analysed the functions of the discourse marker you know in ELF interactions, has found that they are often employed as “an idiomatic chunk or conventionalized routine” and a “speaker strategy” rather than a strategy to support the hearer’s understanding, which was an important point in Schiffrin’s work, because House argues that ELF speakers no longer “aim at native competence” and thus, are predominantly concerned with constructing their utterances (House 2009: 189-190). This is an defining contrast to the previously mentioned approaches which were concerned with L1 speakers. Even though Baumgarten (2010: 1192) found that the discourse marker I think is used in more contexts by ELF than L1 speakers, which confirms Jenkin, Cogo and Dewey’s (2011: 304) claim of “inventiveness” in ELF, Baumgarten (2010: 1196) could not determine a difference between the levels of speaker or hearer orientation of the discourse marker I don’t know. Therefore, it is to be seen if the analysis of the discourse marker actually in this paper can account for a distinctive speaker or hearer orientation. However, these notions will be central to my assumption which guide the analysis of the functions of the discourse marker

Cheng and Warren (2001: 258-263) who have compared the functions of actually amongst L1 and ELF speakers of English in Hong Kong, distinguish between macro and the corresponding subordinate micro functions, which are, as they state by referring to Östman (1981: 17), related to the prototypical meaning of the word. Similarly, Lenk (1998: 156) refers to Quirk et al. (1985: 583) to describe the adverbial meaning of actually as a “common emphasiser” used to express if something said is true or false. Moreover, she states that it is used propositionally if “the verb itself does not adequately express the speaker’s intention” (Lenk 1998: 158). After comparing several works regarding the functions of actually, there seems to be a consensus that the discourse marker actually is, like most other markers, multifunctional. However, an exact meaning might not be identifiable as “it is often difficult to distinguish the discourse [marker] from the adverb” (Aijmer 2002: 253). The pre-definition of broad functions of the discourse marker shall make it easier to find them in VOICE. Furthermore, the discourse markers’ flexibility in regard to their position within an utterance (Ajimer 2003: 256), can help to identify them. Also Degand & Simon-Vandenbergen (2011: 288) found that “they can also be very versatile and occur in medial as well as final position”.