Creativity and emergent multilingual practices in ELF interactions: Transient International Groups (TIGs) in VOICE

PD Dr. Marie-Luise Pitzl (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien)

Whenever groups of speakers meet for the first time or are inherently fluctuating, linguistic practices and pragmatic conventions cannot simply be taken for granted. This observation holds true for English as a lingua franca (ELF) situations, but also for many other contexts. Over the past two decades, descriptive studies on ELF communication have demonstrated that the specific linguistic forms that ELF use takes are influenced by what Hülmbauer (2009) has called the situationality factor: ELF use tends to be shaped by the context of an interaction and the multilingual repertoires of the speakers. At the same time, core processes like accommodative convergence and multilingual elements recur in many ELF settings. Although these processes manifest in the majority of ELF encounters, they do so in different ways and by means of different linguistic forms.

This talk draws on data from VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English) in order to examine creativity (Pitzl 2018a) and emergent multilingual practices (e.g. Pitzl 2021) in ELF encounters. The talk will highlight the connection between the two topics – creativity and multilingual practices – and examine their relationship with regard to the notion of Transient International Groups (TIGs) (Pitzl 2018b). In providing empirical descriptions that illustrate the emergence of group-specific multilingual practices in different TIGs in VOICE, the talk will introduce some of the basic principles of adopting a micro-diachronic approach to the analysis of spoken interaction (see Pitzl in press).

If you would like to listen to this guest lecture, please contact Prof. Miriam Locher to obtain the necessary Zoom link.