Interactional construction grammar approach to ELF:
The case of I think it is construction
Abstract
Recent discussion in linguistics indicates that English as a lingua franca can be analysed from the perspective of Construction Grammar (CxG). However, research on ELF has not focused on emerging patterns viewed as constructions. Instead, the majority of studies on spoken ELF so far have used Conversational Analysis to examine communication in ELF. Thus, in this paper spoken-language phenomena in ELF are viewed from the perspective of Interactional Construction Grammar (ICxG), which integrates CxG and Conversation Analysis. ICxG has been implemented only in research on conventional languages. The present study suggests that it can also be used in the analysis of spoken phenomena in ELF if we treat a turn as a construction. Therefore, the paper presents the results of a corpus-based study of I think it is construction in spoken ELF, demonstrating that it can be treated as a construction.
Downloads
-
Abstract0
-
PDF0
References
Alptekin, C. (2013). English as a lingua franca through a usage-based perspective: merging the social and the cognitive in language use. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 26(2), 197– 207.
Auer, P. (2006). Construction grammar meets conversation: Einige Überlegungen am Beispiel von ‘so’-Konstruktionen. In S. Günthner & W. Imo (Eds.), Konstruktionen in der Interaktion, (pp. 291– 314). Mouton de Gruyter.
Baker, W. (2015). Culture and identity through English as a Lingua Franca. Mouton De Gruyter.
Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Leech, G. (2002). Longman student grammar of spoken and written English. Pearson Education Limited.
Bierbaumer, L. (2021). A comparison of spoken and signed lingua franca communication: the case of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and International Sign (IS). Journal of English as a Linga Franca, 10(2), 183– 208.
Björkman, B. (2013). English as an academic lingua franca: An investigation of form and communicative effectiveness. Mouton De Gruyter.
Bücker, J. (2014). Und mit der Party, wie wollen wir das organisieren? Tying constructions with the preposition mit in German talk-ininteraction. In R. Boogaarts, T. Collemann & G. Rutten (Eds.), Extending the scope of Construction Grammar (pp. 285-321). Mouton de Gruyter.
Canagarajah, S. (2018). The unit and focus of analysis in lingua franca English interactions: in search of a method. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 21(7), 805– 824.
Cogo, A. (2012). ELF and super-diversity: a case study of ELF multilingual practices from a business context. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 1(2), 287– 313.
Dąbrowska, E. (2012). Different speakers, different grammars. Individual differences in native language attainment. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(3), 219– 253.
Deppermann, A. (2006). Construction Grammar – Eine Grammatik für die Interaktion? In A. Deppermann, R. Fiehler & T. Spranz-Fogasy (Eds.), Grammatik und Interaktion (pp. 43– 65). Verlag für Gesprächsforschung.
Dunn, J., & Madabushi, H.T. (2021). Learned construction grammars converge across registers given increased exposure. In A. Bisazza & O. Abend (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL, City, November 10– 11, 2021 (pp. 268– 278). Association for Computational Linguistics. 10.18653/v1/2021.conll-1.21
Ellis, N. (2013). Construction grammar and second language acquisition. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar (pp. 365– 378). Oxford University Press.
Fischer, K. (2015). Conversation, construction grammar and cognition. Language and Cognition, 7(4), 563– 588.
Fried, M., & Östman, J. 2005. Construction grammar and spoken language: The case of pragmatic particles. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1752– 1778.
Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument sStructure. University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg, A. (2009). The nature of generalization in language. Cognitive Linguistics, 20(1), 93– 127.
Goldberg, A. (2013). Constructionist approaches. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar (pp. 15-32). Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, A. (2019). Explain me this: Creativity, competition, and the partial productivity of constructions. Princeton University Press.
Groom, N. (2019). Construction grammar and the corpus-based analysis of discourses: the case of the WAY IN WHICH construction. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 24(3), 291– 323.
Günthner, S. 2006. Von Konstruktionen zu kommunikativen Gattungen: Die Relevanz sedimentierter Muster für die Ausführung kommunikativer Aufgaben. Deutsche Sprache, 34, 173– 190.
Günthner, S., & Wolfgang, I. (Eds.). (2006). Konstruktionen in der Interaktion. Mouton de Gruyter.
Hall, C. (2018). Cognitive perspectives on English as a lingua franca. In J. Jenkins, W. Baker & M. Dewey M. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English as a Lingua Franca (pp. 74– 84). Routledge.
Hall, C., Joyce, J., & Robson, C. (2017). Investigating the lexico-grammatical resources of a non-native user of English: The case of can and could in email requests. Applied Linguistics Review, 8(1), 35– 59.
Hall, J. (2019). The contributions of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics to a usage-based understanding of language: Expanding the transdisciplinary framework. Modern Language Journal, 103, 80– 94.
Hsieh, F., & Huang, S. (2005). Grammar, construction, and social action: A study of the Qíshí construction. Language and Linguistics, 6(4), 599– 634.
Hsieh, F. & I-Wen Su, L. (2019). Constructions in conversation: An interactional construction grammar approach to the use of xiangshuo ‘think’ in spoken Taiwan Mandarin. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 17(1), 131– 154.
Hsieh, F., & I-Wen Su, L. (2021). An interactional construction grammar approach to the use of xiangshuo ‘think’ in spoken Taiwan Mandarin. In W-L. Lu, N. Kudrnáčová & L. A. Janda (Eds.). Corpus approaches to language, thought and communication (pp. 133– 155). John Benjamins.
Hülmbauer, C. (2009). “We don’t take the right way. We just take the way that we think you will understand”: the shifting relationship between correctness and effectiveness in ELF communication. In A. Mauranen & E. Ranta (Eds.), English as a lingua franca: Studies and findings (pp. 323–347). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Imo. W. (2014). Appositions in monologue, increments in dialogue? On appositions and apposition-like patterns in spoken German and their status as constructions. In R. Boogaarts, T. Collemann, & G. Rutten (Eds.), Extending the scope of Construction Grammar (pp. 321– 351). Mouton de Gruyter.
Imo, W. (2015). Interactional Construction Grammar. Linguistics Vanguard, 1(1), 69– 77.
Jenkins, J., Cogo, A., & Dewey, M. (2011). Review of developments in research into English as a Lingua Franca. Language Teaching, 44(3), 281– 315.
Jenkins, J. (2014). English as a Lingua Franca in the International University: The politics of academic English language policy. Routledge.
Kaneyasu, M. (2021). Expectations for ‘natural’ ways of talking: A context-dependent perspective on fixedness in conversation. Discourse Studies, 23(1), 28– 45.
Langacker, R.W. (2008). Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford University Press.
Laury, R., Etelämäki, M., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2014). Introduction. Pragmatics, 24(3), 435– 452.
Linell, P. (2009). Grammatical constructions in dialogue. In A. Bergs & G. Diewald (Eds.), Contexts and Constructions (pp. 97– 110). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
MacKenzie I. (2014). English as a Lingua Franca: Theorizing and teaching English. Routledge.
MacKenzie, I. (2016). Multi-competence and English as a lingua franca. In V. Cook & L. Wei (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multi-competence (pp. 478– 501). Cambridge University Press.
Matsumoto, Y. (2021). Flexibility and fluidity of grammar: Grammatical constructions in discourse and sociocultural context. Journal of Pragmatics, 172, 105– 118.
Mauranen, A. (2012). Exploring ELF: academic English shaped by non-native speakers. Cambridge University Press.
Murata, K. (Ed.). (2016). Exploring ELF in Japanese academic and business contexts: Conceptualization, research and pedagogic implications. Routledge.
Nikiforidou, K. (2021). Grammatical variability and the grammar of genre: Constructions, conventionality, and motivation in ‘stage directions’. Journal of Pragmatics, 173, 189– 199.
Pekarek Doehler, S. (2021). How grammar grows out of social interaction: From multi-unit to single-unit question. Open Linguistics, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0150
Pirc, A. M. (2013). Construction grammar and non-native discourse. Theory & practice in English studies, 6(1), 55– 73.
Pitzl, M.-L. (2016). World Englishes and creative idioms in English as a lingua franca. World Englishes, 35(2), 293– 309.
Põldvere, N. & Paradis, C. (2019). “What and then a little robot brings it to you?” The reactive what-x construction in spoken dialogue. English Language and Linguistics, 24(2), 307– 332.
Schegloff, E. (1996). Turn-organization: One intersection of grammar and interaction. In E. Ochs, E. Schegloff, & S. A. Thompson. (Eds.), Interaction and grammar (pp. 52– 133). Cambridge University Press.
Seidlhofer, B. (2001). Closing a conceptual gap: The case for a description of English as a Lingua Franca. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 133– 158.
Seidlhofer, B. (2018). Standard English and the dynamics of ELF variation. In J. Jenkins, W. Baker & M. Dewey M. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English as a Lingua Franca (pp. 85– 100). Routledge.
Shohamy, E. (2018). ELF and critical language testing. In J. Jenkins, W. Baker & M. Dewey M. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English as a Lingua Franca (pp. 583– 593). Routledge.
Ungerer, T., & Hartmann, S. (2023). Constructionist approaches: Past, present, future. Cambridge University Press.
VOICE. (2021). The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version VOICE 3.0 Online). http://voice3.acdh.oeaw.ac.at
Watkowska, D. (2020). A corpus-based study on question tags in ELF. An attempt to determine an emergent construction. Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies, 29(2), 135– 150.
Weissweiler, L., Hofmann, V., Köksal, A & Schütze, H. (2023). Explaining pretrained language models' understanding of linguistic structures using construction grammar. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 6, 1– 16.
Wide, C. (2014). Constructions as resources in interaction: Syntactically unintegrated at that-clauses in spoken Swedish. In R. Boogaarts, T. Collemann & G. Rutten (Eds.), Extending the scope of construction grammar (pp. 353– 380). Mouton de Gruyter.
Yilmaz, S. (2020). A constructional analysis of written academic English as a Lingua Franca: The case of unedited and edited research writing. [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Georgia State University].
Yilmaz, S. & Römer, U. 2020. A corpus-based exploration of constructions in written academic English as a lingua franca. In U. Römer, V. Cortes & E. Friginal (Eds.), Advances in corpus-based research on academic writing: Effects of discipline, register, and writer expertise (pp. 59– 88). John Benjamins.
Zima, E. & Brône, G. (2011). Ad-hoc-Konstruktionen in der Interaktion: eine korpusbasierte Studie dialogischer Resonanzerzeugung. In A. Lasch & A. Ziem (Eds.), Konstruktionsgrammatik III (pp. 155– 174). Stauffenburg.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The works published in this journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publications Services at the University of Murcia (the publisher) retains the property rights (copyright) of published works, and encourages and enables the reuse of the same under the license specified in item 2.
2. The works are published in the electronic edition of the magazine under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 4.0.
3.Conditions of self-archiving. Authors are encouraged to disseminate pre-print (draft papers prior to being assessed) and/or post-print versions (those reviewed and accepted for publication) of their papers before publication, because it encourages distribution earlier and thus leads to a possible increase in citations and circulation among the academic community.
RoMEO color: green
