book notice: English as a Lingua Franca in Cross-cultural Immigration Domains: Guido

[Harold Schiffman]

English as a Lingua Franca in Cross-cultural Immigration Domains: Guido

English as a Lingua Franca in Cross-cultural Immigration Domains:
Linguistic Insights. Studies in Language and Communication. Vol. 84
Published: 2008
Publisher: Peter Lang AG
                http://www.peterlang.com

Book URL: http://www.peterlang.com/Index.cfm?vLang=E&vSiteID=4&vSiteName=BookDetail%2Ecfm&VID=11689

Author: Maria Grazia Guido

Abstract:

This book explores the cognitive and communicative processes involved in
the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) within cross-cultural
specialized contexts where non-native speakers of English - i.e. Western
experts and non-Western migrants - interact. The book argues that the main
communicative difficulties in such contexts are due precisely to the use of
ELF, since it develops from the non-native speakers' transfer of their
native language structures and socio-cultural schemata into the English
they speak. Transfer, in fact, allows non-native speakers to appropriate,
or authenticate, those English semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and
specialized-discourse structures that are linguistically and conceptually
unavailable to them. It follows that there are as many ELF varieties as
there are communities of non-native speakers authenticating English.

The research questions justifying the ethnographic case studies detailed in
this book are: What kind of cognitive frames and communicative strategies
do Western experts activate in order to convey their culturally-marked
knowledge of specialized discourse - by using their ELF varieties - to
non-Westerners with different linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds?
What kind of power asymmetries can be identified when non-Westerners try to
communicate their own knowledge by using their respective ELF varieties? Is
it possible to ultimately develop a mode of ELF specialized communication
that can be shared by both Western experts and non-Western migrants?


Contents:

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) - A Cognitive Model of L1-Transfer as ELF
Authentication - Ergativity in Journey Reports by West-African Immigrants -
Inferring Material Actions from Mental Processes in Cross-cultural Welfare
Interviews - An Ethnopoetic Approach to Forensic Entextualization -
Narrative Representations in Transcultural Psychiatry - Schema Conflicts in
ELF-mediated Legal Interactions - Cross-cultural Pragmatic Markedness in
Legal and Medical Encounters - ELF Modality in Community-marked Production
of Specialized Discourse - Problem-oriented Tagging for Intercultural
Corpus Analysis - Reformulation Processes in Community-biased Popular
Translations - Developing Accessibility and Cooperation Parameters in the
ELF Drafting of EU Immigration Laws.

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