Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 15:5 (2024) ► pp.779–799

Exploring lexical associations in English as a Lingua Franca interactions

Taking verbs of perception as an example

ORCID logo | Donghua University
The current research draws on the pragmatic approach to ELF initiated by Kecskes (2019), who proposes that temporary norms and routines are created during intercultural encounters and interactions. Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of collocate tokens that are strongly associated with the verb phrases of see, look, hear, listen, watch, and feel, retrieved from Asian and European ELF corpora, this study demonstrates the tendency to use similar lexical associative patterns among ELF interlocutors despite their distinct linguacultural backgrounds. An analysis of the lexical associations of the verb phrases in ELF and English Native Language (ENL) corpora further confirms that ELF speakers do not conform to ENL conventions; instead, they start to develop their own norms that are characterized by specific lexical associations and formulaic expressions.
Keywords: English as a Lingua Franca, pragmatic account, construction, lexical association, verbs of perception, intercultural communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Corpora and methodology
  • 4.Corpus findings and discussion
    • 4.1Comparing the lexical associations of Asian ELF interlocutors and ENL speakers
    • 4.2Comparing the lexical associations of Asian and European ELF interlocutors
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.22040.pan
References (50)
References
Bod, Rens, Jennifer Hay and Stefanie Jannedy. 2003. Probabilistic Linguistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan L. 2007. Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Canagarajah, Suresh. 2014. “In search of a new paradigm for teaching English as an international language.” TESOL Journal, 5(4): 767–785. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carter, Ronald. 2004. Language and Creativity: The Art of Common Talk. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Church, Kenneth W. and Patrick Hanks. 1990. “Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography.” Computational Linguistics 161: 22–29.Google Scholar
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). [URL]
Ehrenreich, Susanne. 2018. “Communities of Practice and English as a Lingua Franca”. In The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca, ed. by Jennifer Jenkins, Will Baker and Martin Dewey, 37–50. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick C., Rita Simpson-Vlach and Maynard Carson. 2008. “Formulaic language in native and second language speakers: Psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and TESOL.” TESOL Journal 42(3): 375–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evert, Stefan. 2008. “Corpora and collocations.” In Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook, ed. by Anke Lüdeling and Merja Kytö, 1212–1248. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Fazio, H. Russell. 2001. “On the automatic activation of associated evaluations: An overview.” Cognition and Emotion 151: 115–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Tess and Cristina Izura. 2011. “Word association in L1 and L2: An exploratory study of response types, response times, and interlingual mediation.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 33(3): 373–398. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Giora, Rachel. 2003. On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
House, Juliane. 2002. “Developing pragmatic competence in English as a lingua franca.” In Lingua Franca Communication, ed. by Karlfried Knapp and Christiane Meierkord, 245–267. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
. 2003. “English as a Lingua Franca: A threat to multilingualism?” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 556–578. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, Susan. 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, Jennifer, Alessia Cogo and Martin Dewey. 2011. “Review of developments in research into English as a lingua franca.” Language Teaching 44(3): 281–315. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kaur, Jagdish. 2011. “Intercultural communication in English as a lingua franca: Some sources of misunderstanding.” Intercultural Pragmatics 8(1): 93–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2020. “Other-correction in next position: The case of lexical replacement in ELF interactions in an academic setting.” Journal of Pragmatics 1691: 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kecskes, Istvan. 2007. “Formulaic language in English lingua franca.” In Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects, ed. by Istvan Kecskes and Laurence R. Horn, 191–219. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. “Is the idiom principle blocked in bilingual L2 production?” In Bilingual Figurative Language Processing, ed. by Roberto Heredia and Anna Cieślicka, 28–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. English as a Lingua Franca: The Pragmatic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam. 2005. “Language is never, ever, ever, random.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2): 263–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kruse, Heleen, James Pankhurst and Michael Sharwood Smith. 1987. “A multiple word association probe in second language acquisition research.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 9(2): 141–154. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lin, Shu-Yen, Hsueh-Chih Chen, Tao-Hsing Chang, Wei-En Lee and Yao-Ting Sung. 2019. “CLAD: A corpus-derived Chinese Lexical Association Database.” Behavior Research Methods 51(5): 2310–2336. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lüdeling, Anke and Merja Kytö. 2008. Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manning, Chris and Hinrich Schütze. 1999. Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Masson, Michael. 1995. “A distributed memory model of semantic priming.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 211: 3–23.Google Scholar
Mauranen, Anna. 2003. “The corpus of English as a lingua franca in academic settings.” TESOL Quarterly 37(3): 513–527. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. “Chunking in ELF: Expressions for managing interaction.” Intercultural Pragmatics 6(2): 217–233. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mazzone, Marco. 2018. Cognitive Pragmatics: Mindreading, Inferences, Consciousness. Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milošević, Ivana Trbojević. 2019. “Skidding on common ground: A socio-cognitive approach to problems in intercultural communicative situations.” Journal of Pragmatics 1511: 118–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Paperno, Denis, Marco Marelli, Katya Tentori and Marco Baroni. 2014. “Corpus-based estimates of word association predict biases in judgment of word co-occurrence likelihood.” Cognitive Psychology 741: 66–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pitzl, Marie-Louise. 2009. “We should not wake up any dogs: Idiom and metaphor in ELF.” In English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and Findings, ed. by Anna Mauranen and Elina Ranta, 298–322. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Prodromou, Luke. 2008. English as a Lingua Franca: A Corpus-based Analysis. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Randall, Mick. 1980. “Word association behavior in learners of English as a foreign language.” Polyglot 2(2): B4–D1.Google Scholar
Seidenberg, Mark S., Gloria S. Waters, Michael Sanders and Pearl Langer. 1984. “Pre- and postlexical loci of contextual effects on word recognition.” Memory and Cognition 121: 315–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2009. “Common ground and different realities: World Englishes and English as a lingua franca.” World Englishes 28(2): 236–245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: Oxford University. Press.Google Scholar
Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
The Asian Corpus of English (ACE). Director: Andy Kirkpatrick; Researchers: Wang Lixun, John Patkin, Sophiann Subhan. [URL]
Tseng, Ming-Yu. 2018. “Where cultural references and lexical cohesion meet: Toward a multi-layer framing analysis.” Pragmatics 28(4): 573–598.Google Scholar
Van Putten, Saskia. 2020. “Perception verbs and the conceptualization of the senses: The case of Avatime.” Linguistics 58(2): 425–462. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). [URL]
Widdowson, Henry G. 1997. “EIL, ESL, EFL: global issues and local interests.” World Englishes 16(1): 135–146. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017. “The cultural and creative use of English as a Lingua Franca.” Lingue e Linguaggi 211: 275–281.Google Scholar
2019. “Creativity in English.” World Englishes 38(1–2): 312–318. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2021. “Research perspectives on ELF: Linguistic usage and communicative use.” In ELF Research Methods and Approaches to Data and Analyses: Theoretical and Methodological Underpinnings, ed. by Kumiko Murata, 21–28. Milton Keynes: Taylor and Francis.Google Scholar
Wilks, Clarissa and Paul Meara. 2007. “Implementing graph theory approaches to the exploration of density and structure in L1 and L2 word association networks.” In Modelling and Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge, ed. by Helmut Daller, James Milton and Jeanine Treffers-Daller, 167–181. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolter, Brent. 2001. “Comparing the L1 and L2 mental lexicon: A depth of individual word knowledge model.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23(1): 41–69. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zalaltdinova, Liya. 2018. “Stop doing this at once!: The preferred use of modality for advice-giving by English language learners.” Intercultural Pragmatics 15(3): 349–372. DOI logoGoogle Scholar