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11 - Exploring the Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca Communication

Multimodal and Multilingual Practices

from Part II - Zooming in on ELF

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2020

Anna Mauranen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
Svetlana Vetchinnikova
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki
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Summary

On the basis of an interdisciplinary approach informed by ethnographic methods, and computer-mediated discourse analysis, this paper sets out to explore the relationship between multimodal and multilingual practices in Computer-Mediated English as a Lingua Franca (CMELF) communication on Facebook. As the analysis of some naturally occurring interactions shows, CMELF users exploit multimodal resources in novel ways to achieve mutual understanding in intercultural communication. For instance, when a target term in English is unknown to the subject utterer, a corresponding picture can be searched for on the Internet in their own L1, to be then embedded in the CMELF utterance and fill the lexical gap. Multimodal resources, however, can also be employed as part of pragmatic strategies to proactively avoid misunderstanding: emojis, for example, can be used to flag words which are infrequent and therefore potentially problematic for the intended multicultural audience, while pictures can gloss these visually, thus enhancing utterance clarity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Language Change
The Impact of English as a Lingua Franca
, pp. 291 - 310
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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