Creativity in English as a Lingua Franca: Idiom and Metaphor 9781501510083, 9781501516887

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Marie-Luise Pitzl Creativity in English as a Lingua Franca

Developments in English as a Lingua Franca

Editors Jennifer Jenkins Will Baker

Volume 2

Marie-Luise Pitzl

Creativity in English as a Lingua Franca Idiom and Metaphor

ISBN 978-1-5015-1688-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1008-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1003-8 ISSN 2192-8177 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939853 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements Since this book is partly based on my PhD thesis, I would like to express my gratitude to Barbara Seidlhofer and Henry Widdowson for intellectual academic and personal encouragement for more than a decade. Their willingness to share thoughts, offer advice, challenge established notions and ponder new ideas is exceptional and I cannot thank them enough for the many hours we spent discussing not only ELF, but linguistics, language use and life in general. Thank you for guidance, freedom and inspiration. Needless to say, this book would not have been possible without VOICE, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, and the people centrally involved in its creation. In addition to project director Barbara Seidlhofer (who boldly applied for funding to build an ELF corpus), I will be forever indebted to my former VOICE colleagues and team mates Angelika Jezek-Breiteneder, Theresa Lehner (née Klimpfinger), Stefan Majewski and Ruth Osimk-Teasdale. Having been part of this wonderful team from 2005 to 2011, I could not have wished for a better way – and for better colleagues and friends – to embark on academic life. Our time working on/for/in VOICE will always be special to me and this book would not exist without you. Concerning the financial side of VOICE, I would like to acknowledge the funding provided by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF – Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung) for two projects that made the creation of VOICE possible: L116 (English als internationale Lingua Franca, May 2005-June 2008) and L448 (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, August 2008September 2013). In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to all the unnamed ELF speakers recorded in VOICE and everyone who helped during data gathering and transcription. Having been an ELFer for quite some time, I have benefited enormously from long and short intellectual (and sometimes critical) exchanges with many researchers inside and outside the academic ELF community, far too numerous to list. Many researchers and colleagues have inspired my thoughts at international conferences and in publication projects as well as at local institutions, in particular at the English Departments at the University of Vienna, the University of Salzburg and TU Dortmund University. I am grateful for the fruitful input and the knowledge that you have provided throughout the years. As this book has been long under way, I would like to thank the DELF series editors Jennifer Jenkins and Will Baker for their incredible patience in waiting for the manuscript and for their continued support and helpful comments in the process. At De Gruyter Mouton, I would like to thank Lara Wysong for answering https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-201

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Acknowledgements

questions and providing assistance during the review process, Stefan Diezmann for managing the production process and typesetting, and Birgit Sievert for initial encouragement. In closing, I would like to thank my parents for raising me to be courageous in pursuing my goals and in ‘trusting my gut’. My thanks also go to my friends for making my life rich and joyful, both inside but especially outside academia. And last, but not least, my dearest thanks are for my fiancée Alina – for lifting me up when doubts take over, for sharing the joy in celebrations and for being not just an expert proofreader, but most of all an amazing person. You have helped me complete this book in more ways than I can describe.

Contents Abbreviations

XI

List of Figures

XII

List of Tables

XIII

Introduction 1 From miscommunication to creativity Scope and organization of this book

1 5

1 1.1 1.1.1 1.1.2 1.1.3 1.2 1.2.1 1.2.2

English as a lingua franca: Why creativity? 8 Characterizing ELF: Initial remarks 10 Early definitions and the role of the *native speaker 11 Multilingual ELF users 12 ELF and the variety issue 15 Engaging with ELF: Facing a paradox 16 ELF is like other *languages: Principles of variation 17 ELF is unlike other *languages: External sociolinguistic conditions 18 1.2.2.1 Communities of Practice (CoPs) 20 1.2.2.2 Transient International Groups (TIGs) 21 1.3 Creativity in language use 25 1.3.1 Approaches to creativity in linguistics 26 1.3.2 Creativity and norms 29 1.3.3 Creativity as potential change: A systems view 30 1.4 Creativity in ELF: Norm-following and norm-transcending 1.5 Summary 37 2 2.1 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.2.3 2.2.4 2.3

33

Creativity, idiom and metaphor 39 Idioms and territoriality 41 Idioms and idiomaticity 43 Idiomatic? Formulaic? Phraseological? Coming to terms with terminology 44 Old (labelling) habits die hard: Idiomatic = nativelike? 46 Idioms vs. idiomatizing: Product and process 48 Conventional variability 49 Metaphor and metaphoricity 50

VIII

2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.3.4 2.4 2.4.1 2.4.2 2.4.3 2.4.4 2.5 3 3.1 3.1.1 3.1.2 3.1.3 3.2 3.2.1 3.2.2 3.3 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.3.3 3.4

Contents

Cognitive aspects: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and ELF 53 Psycholinguistic aspects: Linguistic metaphor and metaphoric potential 57 Semantic aspects: Degrees of metaphoricity 60 Dimensions of metaphor analysis in spoken language 67 An ELF approach to creativity at the level of idioms 69 The chicken or the egg? The diachronic dimension of idiom and metaphor 69 Intrinsic creativity and the myth of non-compositionality 71 Idiom decomposition and figurative compositionality 73 The re-metaphorization of idioms: Metaphor as a shared resource in ELF 76 Summary 77 Describing ELF: Analyzing VOICE 79 The data: The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English 79 Quantitative aspects: Design and structure 81 Qualitative aspects: The ethnographic dimension 83 Corpus texts: Properties of transcripts 86 Research methodology: Identifying instances of linguistic creativity 90 Annotating creative idioms 90 Annotating metaphors and judging metaphoricity 95 Analyzing ELF interactions: Questions of interpretation 97 Forms and functions 98 Corpus evidence, contextual information and insider knowledge 100 Judging understanding and communicative effect(ivenes)s 102 Summary 103

4 Creative idioms in ELF interactions: Exploring forms 105 4.1 Types of idiom variation: Lexical substitution 106 4.1.1 Semantic relationships and fields 106 4.1.1.1 Semantically related words 109 4.1.1.2 Hyponyms and superordinate terms 110 4.1.1.3 Terms of embodiment 112 4.1.1.4 Abstract words and shift in metaphorical resonance 113 4.1.2 Alternative interpretations and theoretical implications 115

Contents

4.1.2.1 4.1.2.2 4.1.2.3 4.2 4.2.1 4.2.2 4.2.2.1 4.2.2.2 4.2.2.3 4.2.3 4.3 5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.3.1 6.3.2 6.3.3 6.3.4 6.4

Identifying corresponding idiom(s) 116 Creative idiom or overt metaphor? 119 Lexical substitution as indicator of metaphor processing? 120 Types of idiom variation: Syntactic and morphosyntactic variation 122 Formal characteristics of syntactic variation 123 Formal characteristics of morphosyntactic variation 126 Pluralization 126 Flexible use of determiners 127 Prepositional variation 129 Creative or conventional use? – Case studies with BNC and COCA 132 Summary 137 Functions of creative idioms and metaphors in ELF interactions 140 Humor and mitigation 140 Talking about abstract concepts, increasing explicitness and projecting stance 143 Re-creating clichés for rapport and comity 146 Solidarity and shared *non-nativeness 149 Emphasizing, summarizing and indicating metaphor awareness 151 The myth of miscommunication 153 Summary: Ideational and interpersonal functions 154 Metaphorical creativity in ELF interactions: Discovering patterns and systematicities 156 Overt metaphors and linguistic creativity 156 Metaphorical patterns and local systematicities 160 Metaphoricity beyond idiomaticity: Embodied experience 167 Feet, toes, shoulders and hands 168 Faces and eyes 171 Head, brain and mind 173 What lies at heart: A case study of metaphorical creativity 180 Summary 187

IX

X

7 7.1 7.1.1 7.1.2 7.2 7.2.1 7.2.2 7.3 7.3.1 7.3.2 7.4 7.5 8 8.1 8.1.1 8.1.2 8.2 8.2.1 8.2.2 8.2.3 8.3 8.3.1 8.3.2

Contents

The multilingual dimension of metaphorical creativity 189 Individual multilingual repertoires and multilingual resource pools in ELF interactions 192 Language contact via ELF 193 ELF as transient language contact: IMR and MRP 194 Multilingual idiom and multilingual metaphor resource pool in ELF interactions 199 ‘Waking up dogs’: Metaphors with corresponding *English and other *language idioms 200 Borrowing images: Non-*English idioms and the metaphor-MRP 204 Idioms as displays of multilingual identity 206 Shared images and metalinguistic comments 206 Cultural stereotypes, humor and wordplay 208 Non-*English idioms and code-switching in ELF interactions 213 Summary 221 Implications of metaphorical creativity 223 Key findings revisited 224 Forms and patterns of creative idioms and metaphors in ELF Functions of creative idioms and metaphors in ELF interactions 226 Theoretical implications 227 Re-metaphorization, metaphor clines and metaphor awareness 228 Creativity, convention, intention and awareness 230 Expanding methodologies for the study of ELF: Context(s), groups and development 233 Pedagogical implications 238 Suggestions for language educators 239 Starting somewhere … 248

Appendix

250

References Index

283

267

224

Abbreviations BELF BNC CA CEFR CMT COCA CoP CP EFL ELF ELT ENL EU IMR IEs L1 LN MRP MWUs PVC SLA TIG VOICE

English as a lingua franca in business contexts British National Corpus Conversation Analysis Common European Framework of Reference Conceptual Metaphor Theory Corpus of Contemporary American English Community of Practice Cooperative Principle English as a foreign language English as a lingua franca English language teaching English as a native language European Union Individual multilingual repertoire Idiomatic Expressions First language Other *language (i.e. not L1) Multilingual resource pool Multi-word units Pronunciation variations and coinages Second language acquisition Transient International Group Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English

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List of Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 2.1 Figure 7.1

Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4 Figure 7.5 Figure 7.6 Figure 7.7

A systems view of creativity (adapted from Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 315) 31 Idiom building and re-metaphorization (Pitzl 2018a: 237) 77 Multilingual Resource Pool (MRP) (adapted from Pitzl 2016b): Three speakers (S1, S2, S3) in hypothetical ELF context 194 Multilingual Resource Pool (MRP): Speakers S1 and S3 actively share linguistic resources 197 ‘What becomes shared’: Gradual expansion of overlap of IMRs in MRP 198 Idiom-MRP (PBmtg3): we should not wake up any dogs 201 Metaphor-MRP (PBmtg3): we should not wake up any dogs 202 Initial shared MRP (LEcon548) (adapted from Pitzl 2018b: 40) 219 Gradual expansion of shared area of MRP through interaction (LEcon548) 220

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List of Tables Table 1.1 Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3

Norm-following and norm-transcending creativity (adapted from Pitzl 2012: 36) 36 Types of metaphors 62 Dimensions of metaphor analysis in spoken language 67 Creative idioms with lexical substitution 107 Realizations of (be in) the public eye in the BNC 133 Realizations of (be in) the public eye in the COCA 135

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Introduction From miscommunication to creativity This book addresses the topic Creativity in English as a lingua franca, which is investigated on the basis of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). Appearing within the DELF series, it is obvious that this book is concerned with English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF), an area of linguistic research that has become increasingly productive throughout the past decade and a half. ELF research has as one of its centrals aims to produce linguistic descriptions of ‘English’1 as it is used in intercultural situations where speakers with different first language (henceforth L1) backgrounds meet and use it as (one of) their common means of communication and as a shared linguistic resource. So why does a study investigate creativity in ELF? What does creativity mean – or what is it taken to mean – in this context? What does this book investigate exactly and how is this done? Before these questions are addressed more extensively, I would like to start with a brief personal account that outlines my motivation for choosing creativity as a research topic for ELF and give some background on how this book came to be. Having gotten involved in ELF research in Vienna in the early days (in the early 2000s), I had first worked on ELF pragmatics focusing on negotiation of meaning and resolving miscommunication and non-understanding in ELF business meetings (Pitzl 2004, 2005, 2010; see also Seidlhofer, Breiteneder & Pitzl 2006; Pitzl 2015; Cogo & Pitzl 2016). When it became clear that I was going to embark on another substantial ELF project (while at the same time working on the compilation of VOICE), I wanted to choose a focus that would allow me to explore both the pragmatics as well as the lexicogrammar of ELF – and, importantly, to consider the interrelation between those two. As a starting point in search for a topic, I identified some instances in ELF conversations in VOICE that struck me as both particularly noticeable and also successful in the very broadest sense. These were conversational episodes where I marveled at what ELF speakers were able to do with and communicate through a language that was in the traditional foreign language view ‘not their own’, in the sense that it was not the first and primary language for most interactants. What also struck me was what I perceived as relative ease and self-confidence with which ELF speakers in the

1 Single quotation marks in the introduction signal critical distance from this term and emphasize that its use does not imply a monolithic understanding of the concept. (See Chapter 1 for the use of *English.) https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-001

2

Introduction

data accomplished fairly complex communicative tasks in many contexts and situations – and how this confident pragmatic use sometimes led to currently unattested lexicogrammatical forms. Going through the ELF business meetings I had collected, transcribed and analyzed for my research on non-understanding and miscommunication, I came across what turned out to be the most salient example for getting the research presented in this book on its way: The expression we should not wake up any dogs (see Chapter 7 and Pitzl 2009), coined in a business meeting among Austrians and Koreans, did not only awaken my interest in creativity but effectively triggered the second focus of this book. That is to say, it prompted me to investigate the role of idioms, metaphor and creativity and the question how these are linked in spoken ELF. As I was noting down more and more examples, I could not really put my finger on how some of them were actually related. And admittedly, there are some that still puzzle me until today. But what often struck me was what one might call the linguistic recklessness with which the ELF speakers used the language in these episodes. As I was working with many different ELF speech events in VOICE intensively at the time, checking and proofreading transcripts, instances in the ELF data were accumulating – and a vague notion of what it was that struck me about them began to emerge: In all cases, speakers were doing something extra, something additional, something more than required, which added humor or emphasis or explicitness or some other layer of evaluation or meaning to the interaction. Whether intentionally or not, the speakers were being creative in the way they adapted the codified system of ‘the English language’ in their respective ELF situations. And these formal linguistic adaptations had a range of communicative effects. This is not to say that the ELF speakers in VOICE were necessarily aware of their creative alterations or that they were intentionally displaying linguistic creativity – but they were doing it nevertheless. When, after these initial observations, I decided to engage with creativity as a topic, one of the first books I turned to was Ron Carter’s (2004) Language and creativity: The art of common talk, which describes creativity in everyday language use of speakers of ‘British English’ in CANCODE, the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English. To my surprise, the story Carter tells in the introduction of his book was very similar to my own experience. Carter (2004: 2) starts his book by stating that he began “increasingly to puzzle over them [i.e. examples he had noticed]”, and “to explore the parallels and points of connection between them”. He continues: I began to ask more questions and, in particular, to search for further instances in the corpus [i.e. CANCODE]. As the corpus grew […], I began to see ever more instances in a wider range of discourse contexts. (Carter 2004: 6)

From miscommunication to creativity

3

Although my take on creativity, though inspired by Carter’s work initially, has since developed and is different from Carter’s in several respects, his statement adequately captures how my own interest in creativity in spoken ELF evolved and how it expanded during my work on compiling VOICE. What intrigued me particularly about creativity as a research focus for ELF was that it ‘stood on its head’ (cf. the German idiom etwas auf den Kopf stellen) the notion of error, a category which seems neither necessary nor appropriate for a sociolinguistic description of naturally-occurring spoken ELF. One of the repeated objections that was put forward, especially in the early years of ELF research, is that ELF is simply English as a foreign language (EFL), a foreign language use like any other foreign language use. Although it has been extensively discussed by Seidlhofer, Jenkins, Mauranen and others that ELF is not the same as EFL, proponents of the ELF=EFL view, like Swan (2012), tend to emphasize that ELF=EFL is essentially an accumulation of learner language output. Deviations from the so-called ‘target’ are regarded as mistakes that, depending on context, may be tolerated or stand in need of being corrected or improved in order to get closer to the ‘target’, i.e. the foreign language as used by L1 speakers. Although Swan (2012: 380–381) concedes that the question of error/ mistake is an immensely tricky one, he concludes that practically ELF is the same as EFL and that “confusion may be nourished by a false opposition between ‘ELF’ and ‘EFL’” (Swan 2012: 388). Yet, within a framework that considers and describes ELF not as a language, but as a language use in its own right, i.e. a language use that is subject to and indicative of sociolinguistic variation just like any other language use outside the classroom, the notion of error seems out of place. As Ferguson (2009: 123–126) persuasively argues, “it is difficult to justify treating attested ELF features […] as they occur in informal spoken discourse, as errors” (Ferguson 2009: 126, emphasis mine). One of the arguments that Ferguson (2009: 125–126) puts forward in this respect is that notions of “linguistic correctness” (Ferguson 2009: 125), and hence of error, tend to be accompanied by an (implicit) “standard language ideology” (Ferguson 2009: 125, referring to Milroy & Milroy 1998, Milroy 2001). Such an ideology is difficult to maintain with regard to spoken language in general, also for L1 use: When can or should we speak of an error in the context of a so-called ‘non-standard’ L1 dialect? (Ferguson 2009: 125–126). With regard to an independent sociolinguistic description of naturally-occurring spoken language, the notion of error seems to be neither particularly useful nor particularly relevant a category – and this holds true especially for naturally-occurring spoken ELF. Putting aside the category of error, which is essentially what this book on creativity in spoken ELF does, however, is not the same as postulating that ELF interactions should be conceived as ideal or noise-free communication devoid of

4

Introduction

any instances of miscommunication. In other words, it is not my intention to ‘reify’ ELF as an ‘object’ of linguistic description (cf. criticism of the “reification” of ELF by Swan (2012: 385) and Mortensen (2013: 30–35), for example) or as ‘perfect’ communication. Investigating creativity in ELF interactions is not meant to suggest that ELF is ‘perfect’. ELF users are not hyperaware multilingual Übercommunicators. They will sometimes struggle to get their meanings across or retrospectively realize that they have (been) misunderstood. But this holds true for all language use and all language users, including L1 users of any language (cf. Pitzl 2015: 111). There are times and occasions at which each of us struggles with language (or with others through language) also in our so-called mother tongues. Any notion of perfect communication devoid of miscommunication is essentially a (sometimes convenient) myth (cf. Pitzl 2004: 18, 2010: 18, 2017), or an idealized abstraction at best – for ELF, but also for all L1 use. Thus, focusing on linguistic creativity in naturally-occurring spoken ELF does not posit that communication via ELF is ‘perfect’; just as it does not posit that linguistic creativity necessarily needs to be deliberate and intentional (see Chapter 1). When we talk about communicative success or successful communication in ELF (or any other kind of language use), this cannot – and should not – be equated with an absence of miscommunication (see Pitzl 2015: 119, 2017). Misunderstanding, non-understanding and negotiation of meaning are part of any communication. The assumption that ‘miscommunication is bad’ is oversimplistic and ignores the general sociolinguistic principle that “conversation proceeds on the assumption that a certain vagueness is normal” (Wardhaugh 1998: 252). If we accept that all “language use and communication are in fact pervasively and even intrinsically flawed, partial, and problematic” (Coupland, Wiemann & Giles 1991: 3), as many sociolinguists have done for decades, there is no need to argue that ELF is devoid of miscommunication. Yet, there also is no need to construe ELF as (more) ‘problematic’ than other kinds of language use and communication, because it happens in an intercultural setting among multilingual speakers or because it exhibits a relatively high degree of linguistic variation. The last point, i.e. linguistic variation, brings us back to creativity and the focus of this book. Reviewing theoretical and descriptive research on creativity in linguistics and related disciplines such as psychology, it is apparent that creativity is a popular but elusive topic that poses challenges in conceptualization. Particularly studies about creativity in spoken language sometimes lack a clear frame of reference for what it is that researchers consider creative or interpret as evidence of creativity in interaction. Linguistic forms? Or speakers’ pragmatic use and interactional strategies? Or certain communicative effects? (cf. Pitzl 2007).

Scope and organization of this book

5

There seemed to be a gap in research since there was no theoretical framework for linguistic creativity that could be applied to an analysis of spoken (ELF) data. The recognition of this gap triggered the need to try and establish such a frame of reference for creativity in spoken language in order to arrive at a conceptualization of creativity that could be applied to and be meaningful for ELF and that could also be operationalized for descriptive research on a corpus of naturally-occurring spoken ELF such as VOICE.

Scope and organization of this book So the main objective of this book is to describe linguistic creativity in spoken ELF, focusing in particular on the relationship of idiom and metaphor. Building on previous ELF research and findings, a main general assumption of this book is that ELF is not a reduced language system which impairs or handicaps speakers, but that ELF is simply part of the (diachronic) development of language around the world. Although ELF does not fit the traditional ‘variety’ label (see Chapter 1), it is a natural linguistic development that is bound to be as vital and as creative as any other language use – or possibly even more creative in terms of the degree of linguistic variation and multilingualism it involves. Since I am suggesting that creativity may serve as a fundamental category in conceptualizing the variation that seems to be central to ELF communication, the book combines different perspectives in its approach. It seeks to reconcile a descriptive and theoretical lexicogrammatical perspective concerned with language variation and an interactional pragmatics perspective concerned with interpersonal spoken communication. It also includes a cognitive-psycholinguistic perspective concerned with individuals’ (multilingual) linguistic repertoires and the role of metaphor in relation to idiom processing and idiom variation. These three perspectives will have different degrees of salience in different sections of the book. They will, however, not be kept rigidly apart in terms of how the content of this book is organized; rather they will be highlighted at different points throughout the discussion. In doing so, the research theorizes, operationalizes and describes linguistic creativity in the use of idioms and metaphorical expressions in VOICE and it probes implications of its findings for theoretical concepts in linguistics and for practical concerns in English Language Teaching (ELT). In its descriptive analysis, the book is concerned with both the formal characteristics of linguistic creativity at the level of idioms as well as with the communicative functions fulfilled by creative idioms and metaphorical expressions in ELF interactions. But it also moves beyond the categories of forms and

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Introduction

functions by tracing patterns of metaphorical creativity, both in interactions as well as across languages. A question that underlies the research presented in this book is why so many creative, i.e. formally varied, idioms seem to be intelligible and effective in ELF conversations, although they depart from their conventional (codified) forms. Approaching this question from a theoretical and descriptive angle, the book suggests that metaphor is a central mechanism that makes the creative and flexible use of idioms possible – which is why the study considers both idiom and metaphor in relation to each other, rather than just idioms. The content of the book is organized in eight chapters that address the concerns as outlined above. Chapter 1 discusses relevant terminology and explores why ELF may be considered a complex form of hybrid language use that is, at the same time, like and unlike other languages – but not itself a language. It proposes a (postmodern) framework for creativity as a window on language variation and change as a means for investigating and describing ELF. Chapter 2 puts the focus on idiom and metaphor. It provides theoretical background on idioms and idiomaticity, introduces approaches to metaphor and metaphoricity and identifies parameters for distinguishing different types of metaphors. While the emphasis in much (L1) idiom research tends to be on typological questions concerning the identification of distinct categories (e.g. idioms vs. formulae vs. proverbs etc.), the discussion in this chapter highlights the importance of dynamic processes such as idiomatizing and re-metaphorization and emphasizes the synchronic-diachronic link between idioms and metaphors. Key aspects of research methodology and of VOICE are introduced in Chapter 3. Particular attention is paid to those properties of VOICE that are unique or rarely found in other (non-ELF) corpora, such as the ethnographic dimension of data collection and the conversation analytic detail of transcripts. The chapter also discusses the nature of qualitative corpus linguistics and addresses relevant aspects of data analysis and interpretation. Chapters 4 to 7 then provide an extensive qualitative analysis of creative idioms and instances of metaphorical creativity in VOICE. The chapters illustrate a range of different phenomena that are observable in ELF interactions. While Chapter 4 discusses forms of creative idioms and presents different types of idiom variation, Chapter 5 provides examples of different functions that linguistic creativity on the level of idioms fulfills in ELF contexts. Subsequently, Chapters 6 and 7 expand the scope of analysis by going beyond the traditional categories of form and function. They increasingly abandon the dichotomous distinction ‘idiom vs. metaphor’ and move away from talking about creativity only within a single language. Chapter 6 focuses on the role of metaphoricity and identifies different types of metaphors, describing patterns of metaphorical creativity in

Scope and organization of this book

7

ELF interactions. Chapter 7 examines metaphorical creativity from a multilingual perspective and takes into account expressions brought about through (explicit or implicit) influence from languages other than ‘English’. In conclusion, Chapter 8 turns to implications of metaphorical creativity. It revisits the key findings of the previous chapters and points out a number of theoretical implications of the research, for example concerning metaphor awareness and future directions in ELF research. The book ends with pedagogical implications of the findings and provides a number of concrete suggestions for language educators.

1 English as a lingua franca: Why creativity? Whether we like it or not, we live in a world characterized by globalization in which people need to rely on a shared language for the purposes of international communication in many public and private, professional, educational and informal situations. At present time, the *language chosen most often in these manifold international contexts is indubitably *English. To emphasize that English is not a homogeneous or clearly bounded linguistic entity or object (cf. Ritt’s 2016 reflections on the problems of language labels in linguistics), I will move beyond the use of single quotation marks for indicating critical distance in this book and instead refer to *English instead. (Direct quotations that refer to English will remain unchanged, so will set terms like English language teaching or names like Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English.) Conceptually, the same non-boundedness applies to all labels used to refer to individual languages (like *Mandarin or *Spanish) and also to notions of language/variety as countable, i.e. a/the *language (and the plural *languages) and a/the *variety (and the plural *varieties). Therefore, the *representation is also used for these. Some of the reasons for *English – and not *French, *German, *Spanish, *Arabic, *Mandarin or any other *language – having become the world *language of our time are largely historical in origin (Crystal 2003: 29–70). Yet, the current position of *English at the top of the global language hierarchy has also been aided by world-political, economic and technological developments of the past decades. Global trends such as international mobility, increasing migration and the rapid expansion of international media and communication platforms on the World Wide Web have promoted the need for a global *language. These latest developments have thus reinforced the *language already in power at the time and they continue to do so. Although we witness vital efforts to promote the learning of other *languages, the “snow-ball effect” favors *English as the *language people learn: “The more people learn a language, the more useful it becomes, and the more useful it is, the more people want to learn it” (Myers-Scotton 2002: 80). The much quoted and much discussed “spread of English” (e.g. Deneire & Goethals 1997; Truchot 1997; Widdowson 1997) has thus long gone beyond the former colonial territories affected by the “first diaspora” and “second diaspora” of *English (Kachru 1992; Jenkins 2009: 5–9). Over the past decades, *English has firmly made its way into the countries of Kachru’s (1992: 356) Expanding circle, i.e. countries where *English has no socio-political or colonial history but has gained importance through being taught as a foreign language in schools. While the Kachruvian circles date back to the 1980’s and, being based on history and https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-002

1 English as a lingua franca: Why creativity?

9

geography, clearly have their shortcomings (see e.g. Jenkins 2009, Seidlhofer 2011), the labels Inner, Outer and Expanding circle will occasionally be used in this book because they constitute widely established points of reference. They continue to be used by many ELF and World Englishes scholars and have also made their way to more practical discussions in some ELT textbooks (e.g. Harmer 2007: 17–18; Siemund, Davydova & Maier 2012). Almost 20 years into the new millennium, the presence of *English in the expanding circle is unquestionable. *English is the most commonly taught and learned foreign language in virtually all members of the European Economic Area (i.e. EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) and in Turkey (Eurostat 2008: 11, 2011). It is omnipresent in many domains of public and private life in Europe (see e.g. Mollin 2006b: 53–87; Seidlhofer, Breiteneder & Pitzl 2006: 36; Seidlhofer 2010b) but also on other continents. For instance, *English is the sole working *language of ASEAN, i.e. the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Kirkpatrick 2008: 27–28). Two billion people were estimated to be learning *English world-wide in 2010 (Graddol 2006: 98–99). Although it seems virtually impossible to give exact numbers, we can concur with Crystal in assuming that roughly a third of the world’s population currently speaks *English (Crystal 2008: 6). The global presence of *English is therefore a reality that can neither be denied nor ignored nor argued away, regardless of whether we consider it desirable or not. On the ground, the use of *English is in many situational contexts essentially a bottom-up development. It is, in most contexts, a practical choice in order to allow for maximum participation and minimal exclusion of people in an international setting, a scenario that philosopher and sociologist van Parijs (2004: 115) refers to as “maximin communication”. Unless there is an explicit language policy that specifies another course of action (such as the use of translation or receptive multilingualism), there is a gravitation towards relying on *English in many international contexts. Crucially, however, it is not any particular L1 variety of *English that is used in these settings, but ELF. Since this book is concerned with ELF, the research presented in it is in many ways a direct consequence of the global social and communicative developments of the first, second and third dispersal. Yet, it is important to note that this does not mean a promotion of *English above the rest. ELF research is not an endorsement of all trends connected to the global spread of *English, just like research on computer-mediated communication is not a celebration of all linguistic and societal consequences of new communication technologies. In many ways, the opposite is true. Most ELF researchers, including myself, strongly object to an ‘*English only’ view and have done so for many years (e.g. Hülmbauer, Böhringer & Seidlhofer 2008; Seidlhofer 2011; Cogo 2012;

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Hülmbauer & Seidlhofer 2013; Jenkins 2015 and many others). Taking ELF speakers and their language use seriously means taking seriously the reality of a world in which multilingual speakers are actually the norm, not the exception (cf. e.g. Busch 2012). Accordingly, multilingualism, multi/transcultural identities, continuous intercultural negotiation and the mixing and meshing of languages in use are not the exception but actually ‘normal’ in many situations. In recent years, we seem to be witnessing a multilingual turn in applied linguistics and also ELF research (see e.g. Hülmbauer, Böhringer & Seidlhofer 2008; Cogo 2012; Hülmbauer & Seidlhofer 2013; Jenkins 2015), with researchers increasingly highlighting that ELF as a research paradigm is very compatible with a multilingual postmodern perspective on language (see below). Yet, the challenges that come with this changed perspective in favor of individual and societal multilingualism are considerable.

1.1 Characterizing ELF: Initial remarks Hoping to have clarified in the previous section that ELF research is not to be equated with the promotion of (global) *English at the expense of other *languages, we will now move on to initial remarks on terminology. This task proves to be rather tricky for anyone concerned with researching ELF. Throughout the past two decades, many articles and book chapters have been written on what ELF is – or is not – both by ELF scholars, as well as by researchers critical of those researching ELF. Debates circling around the question ‘What is ELF?’ took place especially from the mid-2000’s onwards, when ELF research began to attract more attention. Prominent examples of such debates include the exchanges between between Jenkins (2006a) and Prodromou (2007a), Saraceni (2008) and Cogo (2008), and between Seidlhofer (2006) and World Englishes scholars like Berns (2009) and Pakir (2009). A more recent example is O’Regan’s (2014) so-called critique of ELF, responded to by Baker and Jenkins (2015), Baker, Jenkins and Baird (2015) and Widdowson (2015a). The body of publications that has accumulated in this respect is substantial, so the list provided here is necessarily non-exhaustive. One of the key challenges in ‘defining’ ELF lies in the fact that the ‘beast’ to be defined is also the ‘beast’ to be described and researched. A book about ELF needs to contain some notes on terminology and provide some conceptual framework early on. Yet, the research itself is likely to influence, refine, and potentially alter our understanding of ELF (as well as my understanding of creativity and of creativity within and through ELF). So defining, or rather

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“characterizing” (cf. e.g Baker 2015b: 17), ELF is necessarily a multi-step process that goes beyond this chapter and beyond this book. In this section, I will start to outline my take on ELF by teasing out a number of salient perspectives and terminological issues.

1.1.1 Early definitions and the role of the *native speaker With interest in international communication via *English at the end of the twentieth century came the first definitions of ELF. One of the very prominent and often quoted ones comes from Firth, who defines English “used as a ‘lingua franca’” as “a ‘contact language’ between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication” (Firth 1996: 240, italics in original). What is prominent in Firth’s definition, and has been taken up by many scholars subsequently, is the idea that ELF is a ‘contact language’. Leaving aside the issue of ELF being/not being ‘a language’ for the moment (see Section 1.2), a notion that has been, and continues to be, central to conceptualizing ELF is the notion of contact. Cogo and Dewey (2012: 12) for example, define an ELF setting as “any language contact setting in which English is spoken as the primary medium of communication” (see also e.g. Mauranen 2012, 2018; Pitzl 2016b). A point to be raised in this respect is the question of whether or not such a language contact setting of ELF can include *native speakers1 of *English or not. Firth (1996: 240) in his early publication refers to ELF as a “foreign” language, thus making its foreignness an essential condition for lingua franca use and thereby excluding *native speakers (cf. also House 1999: 74). This “strict sense” (Seidlhofer 2001: 146) of the term was also present in an early (much quoted) definition by Seidlhofer where she refers to a lingua franca as an additionally acquired language system that serves as a means of communication between speakers of different first languages, or a language by means of which the members of different speech communities can communicate with each other but which is not the native language of either – a language which has no native speakers. (Seidlhofer 2001: 146)

Seidlhofer used this ‘strict’ definition of a lingua franca to describe what kind of data might be collected for a pilot phase of an ELF corpus. The data eventually recorded for VOICE also include L1 *English speakers (see Chapter 3), as was in

1 The term *native speaker(s) is mostly avoided in this book (see below).

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line with emerging ELF thinking. ELF scholars developed their position, so “most scholars actively engaged in ELF research today would probably agree that this [i.e. ELF] can involve speakers from all of Kachru’s three circles, including speakers of inner circle Englishes” (Cogo & Dewey 2012: 12; cf. also Seidlhofer 2004: 210; Jenkins 2007). ELF research has definitely moved away from the strict sense of a lingua franca throughout the years. ELF settings are clearly understood to include situations where some of the interactants may have *English as their first language (L1). Concerning terminology, in writing this book, I will refrain from using the loaded terms *native speaker and *non-native speaker. These terms will only be used if they occur in direct quotations or are in need of critical discussion (see Chapter 2). Throughout the book, I will use the terms L1 *Language X speaker2 when it is necessary to refer to a speaker’s first language, for example in the analysis of VOICE data. Persons who have grown up acquiring two (or more) languages from an early age on will be referred to as having two (or more) L1s. Crucially, as will be discussed in the next section, the position taken in this book is that speakers do not need to have grown up acquiring two (or more) L1s to be considered bi- or multilingual. Rather, individuals will be considered multilingual if they have the ability to communicate (more or less extensively) in more than one language, which brings us to the topic of multilingualism in relation to ELF.

1.1.2 Multilingual ELF users Most ELF scholars, including myself, do not regard ELF and multilingualism as incompatible or opposites, but in fact as closely corresponding (e.g. House 2003; Hülmbauer, Böhringer & Seidlhofer 2008; Cogo 2012; Hülmbauer & Seidlhofer 2013; Jenkins 2015). ELF in this book is therefore seen as intricately linked to a framework of multilingualism and as compatible with a multilingual perspective on language. One important ideological and symbolic aspect of this is reversing the hierarchy of who we consider to be our main reference point in linguistic description. Engaging with ELF in this way draws our attention to the fact that multilingual speakers are the prototypical case, whereas ‘monolingual’ speakers – if 2 I have been pondering whether or not to use the * representation for terms like L1 *Maltese speaker or L1 *German speaker. After going back and forth on this issue during the phase of completing the manuscript, I have decided to use the * representation also for these terms (see comment at the beginning of Chapter 4).

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we believe these exist at all – are the “marked” case (cf. Jenkins 2015: 78). As Jenkins (2015) points out, this symbolic shift should also be reflected in the terminology we use to refer to speakers: It follows from this that instead of talking about ELF users, or more specifically NNES/NES ELF users, we can talk about ‘ELF-using multilinguals’ and ‘ELF-using monolinguals’, or ‘Multilingual ELF users’ and ‘Monolingual ELF users’. The first has the advantage of using ELF as the modifier, while the second has the advantage of highlighting multi- and monolingualism by putting them first. (Jenkins 2015: 74)

My own preference lies with the second option. The speakers whose language use is captured in VOICE and whose interactions are analyzed in this book I consider to be multilingual ELF users – and this is the term I will use to refer to them. For these multilingual ELF users, *English is just one of the *languages they have in their individual multilingual repertoires (IMRs, see Chapter 7). As Jenkins (2015: 74) argues, in taking the category of the multilingual ELF user as central, we will no longer be emphasizing the distinction between L1 and non-L1 speakers of *English when investigating ELF. Instead, we will focus on the multilingual nature of the speakers involved in ELF interactions. The category of multilingual ELF users therefore comprises participants in ELF interactions with all kinds of different L1s. It includes L1 *English speakers who are multilingual, in the sense that they know at least ‘bits and pieces’ (cf. also Canagarajah 2018: 36) of one (or more) other *language(s). Crucially, L1 *English speakers are not singled out, they are simply part of the category of multilingual ELF users. By focusing on ELF’s shared multilingualness, the issue of when and how different multilingual ELF users have acquired their individual multilingual repertoires becomes less relevant for this overall category. This is to not say that everyone is the same or that differences between individuals are generally irrelevant. On the contrary, engaging with ELF speakers’ individual multilingual repertoires and finding ways of modeling and representing the shared multilingual resource pools that emerge in particular ELF contexts I take to be one of the major challenges for ELF researchers to address in the next few years (see Chapter 7 and Pitzl 2016b, 2018b). The crucial point to be made here, however, is that in describing these differences, all multilingual ELF users are regarded as part of the same category, without pre-imposing a dichotomy of L1 *English vs. non-L1 *English users from the beginning. As Jenkins (2015: 74) remarks, if any distinction is to be made between speakers, this would be to differentiate between multilingual ELF users and monolingual ELF users. Yet, as has been mentioned above, it is worth questioning whether any one speaker can and, in fact, should be seen as entirely monolingual (see e.g. Canagarajah 2013: 8; Canagarajah & Kimura 2018: 296). Even seemingly

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monolingual speakers who have had no formal foreign language education or extensive contact with a *language other than their L1 might have picked up at least some traces of other *languages in the course of their biography. One might argue that multilingual and ELF user are thus partly redundant and that the adjective multilingual in front of the noun ELF user might be dispensed with because of this redundancy (Gilner 2017, p.c.). While I see the merits of this position, I will stay with the collocation multilingual ELF users in this book, mainly for two reasons. The first reason is that the foregrounding of multilingualism and of multilingual individuals as ‘normal’ is important to shifting symbolic power away from the old ideal of the *native speaker to a potential new ideal of a multilingual speaker. For the time being, I believe that this foregrounding needs to be done explicitly, i.e. it needs to be expressed in language, not just implied. The second reason is that it would not seem prudent to exclude the possibility of a monolingual ELF user too hastily, without having engaged with this issue more thoroughly than the present chapter allows. Whether we will want to keep the category of monolingual ELF user in the long run will depend on how we define monolingualism and monolingual speakers – which is an issue that, to my knowledge, has not been given much attention in ELF literature thus far. For the time being, I would argue that it is, at least theoretically, possible to imagine an L1 *English speaker whose linguistic repertoire includes almost no traces of other *languages and who might therefore be seen as ‘monolingual’. In keeping the category of multilingual ELF user as central, we are therefore also allowing for the marginal case of a monolingual ELF user. In addition to its symbolic nature, the terminology of multilingual ELF users and monolingual ELF users has two other key advantages. The first relates to the terms being malleable concerning their definition. The second is the terms’ changing status in the course of a person’s life. With regard to malleability, it should be obvious that the boundary between mono- and multilingualism in fact depends on how we define the two. The distinction is therefore much less static than the boundary between a *native and *non-native speaker of a language, which is rather fixed. With regard to the second aspect, i.e. speakers’ biographies, it is possible – and in fact common – for individuals to become multilingual individuals in the course of their lifetime. Except for those individuals who grow up acquiring two (or more) L1s from birth and therefore start out as bi/ multilingual, people do not need to start out as multilingual in order to become multilingual. Crucially, this transition from monolingual to multilingual can happen at any point in a person’s life, by means of a whole range of situational circumstances, irrespective of whether they involve formal ‘foreign’ language instruction or long-term migration. In fact, we could even imagine that a

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monolingual ELF user might become a multilingual ELF user through engaging (repeatedly) in ELF interactions with multilingual ELF users who will draw on their individual multilingual repertoires (see Chapter 7). The category of multilingual ELF users is thus much more inclusive and open. Many initial monolinguals become multilinguals, whereas a *non-native speaker can never become a *native speaker.

1.1.3 ELF and the variety issue Another point that follows from the previous discussion is the issue of ELF not being a *variety. The ‘variety question’ in relation to ELF is one that has preoccupied a number of scholars, especially in the earlier years of ELF research (e.g. Mollin 2006a, 2006b; Modiano 2007; Prodromou 2007a, 2007c; Rosenberger 2009). While some World Englishes scholars have argued that “establishing clearly whether ELF refers to one international variety or to many local varieties is of fundamental importance if one is expected to understand and appreciate the concept and nature of ELF” (Saraceni 2008: 24), the majority of present ELF research clearly has moved beyond this issue. More recent ELF definitions refer to ELF as “any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option” (Seidlhofer 2011: 7) or the “use of English in a lingua franca language scenario” (Mortensen 2013: 36). As Björkman (2013: 172) puts it, ELF usage is not a variety nor does it need to be a variety to be studied separately from World Englishes, creoles and learner languages. It is the largest use of the English language today by legitimate discourse communities, and that fact on its own suffices for ELF settings to be investigated thoroughly.

ELF researchers have gradually emphasized the conceptualization of ELF as a flexible, variable and creative language use. What ELF actually looks like has become more and more empirically tangible and attested through the linguistic descriptions produced in the past decade, for example on the basis of VOICE and other ELF corpora. This has led to general agreement among most ELF researchers that describing ELF is not a matter of identifying (or even looking for) features in order to document a potential *variety (e.g. Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey 2011; Seidlhofer 2009b, 2011). Rather, ELF is essentially characterized by its variability, flexibility, and linguistic creativity (see e.g. Dewey 2009; Pitzl 2012: 38–41; Widdowson 2015b). It has become one of the main aims of ELF research to document and analyze the processes and linguistic outcomes of the variation

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ELF exhibits – and to find ways of adapting existing sociolinguistic concepts in light of ELF descriptions. Hence the analysis of idioms and metaphorical expressions in this book is conducted with this aim in mind. It seeks to identify, describe and systematize the processes that bring about linguistic creativity in spoken ELF in relation to idioms. It does so by observing functions as well as linguistic forms (cf. Seidlhofer 2009b) in Chapters 4 and 5. But it also moves beyond the dichotomy of forms and functions in Chapters 6 and 7. Crucially, linguistic forms are not analyzed in order to give an inventory of ELF idioms or to provide a list of typical lexicogrammatical features of ELF. Rather, the linguistic forms of creative idioms and metaphors in VOICE are taken as indicators of the creative psycholinguistic and cognitive as well as sociolinguistic and pragmatic processes that influence and lead to the creation of new and appropriate – i.e. intelligible and functional – expressions in ELF. Importantly, these processes are not monolingual, i.e. they are not ‘*English-only’. They are both multilingual as well as multidimensional. They involve creativity and variation and rely on both categories, i.e. idiom and metaphor, not on either idiom or metaphor (see Chapter 2).

1.2 Engaging with ELF: Facing a paradox Building on the assumption that ELF is not a *variety, this very fact (i.e. that ELF is not a *language or a *variety) and the fact that ‘it’ is characterized by variability and variation makes ‘it’ notoriously difficult to define. There is something that is somehow unique and somehow common to the diversity that we find within ELF contexts – which is partly why ELF research has evolved as a linguistic subdiscipline. The past two decades have led to a thorough and continuing engagement in linguistics with ‘the beast called ELF’. What we can say thus far is that, when applying traditional criteria, this beast is not a new ‘species’: ELF is not a new *variety of *English. But what we can also say, as Björkman’s (2013) quote above demonstrates, is that ‘the beast’ is well worth engaging with, maybe even precisely because it defies the traditional categories that we have. The ‘beast called ELF’ does not merit the status of a new species, not because it is simply a subspecies of an already existing and catalogued species. The ‘beast called ELF’ does not fit, because it is something other than what we traditionally consider to be ‘a species’, i.e. a *variety. It is something that we currently lack an adequate category for, because it defies the traditional sociolinguistic categories. We currently simply have no adequate category for what ELF ‘is’.

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Before I move on to introduce the approach to creativity in ELF adopted in this book (Sections 1.3 and 1.4), I would like to engage with this paradox that is inherent in the ‘hybrid’ nature of ELF. House (2003: 573), among others, conceptualizes ELF as “hybrid language”: Rather than measuring ELF talk against an English L1 norm, one might openly regard ELF as a hybrid language – hybrid in the sense of Latin hibrida as anything derived from heterogeneous sources. (House 2003: 573, italics in original)

Although my use of hybrid is inspired by House (2003), I am using the notion of hybrid with a different conceptualization here. My use of ‘hybrid’ here is not in the sense of linguistic hybridity referring to the merging elements of different languages, since I concur with (Hülmbauer 2013: 27) that with regard to multilingualism and ELF “notions of hybridisation […] are not particularly productive […] because these notions are based on an understanding of linguistic bordercrossing: thereby they reinforce these very borders.” A hybrid here I take to refer to something being the product or offspring of parents from two different species. In the case of ELF, I take this to mean that ELF is the result of two dichotomous – and seemingly incompatible – forces. One the one hand, ELF is unique: in terms of its number of speakers, in terms of its international global scale, in terms of its frequency of use, in terms of its channels through new means of virtual communication across the globe, and also in terms of the linguistic and ‘cultural’ diversity of its speakers. But at the same time, ELF is also very much not unique (see e.g. Seidlhofer 2011: xii), since it exhibits commonalities and parallels to the catalogue of existing ‘species’, i.e. *languages and *varieties. The argument put forward in this section is that ELF is so extraordinarily difficult to grasp, conceptualize and describe, because it is, in its very essence, ‘a hybrid beast’, in the sense that without being a *language or *variety it is at the same time like and unlike other *languages. The following subsections explore this paradox and also provide an entry point for the subsequent discussion of creativity, which may be one of the few descriptive categories flexible and yet powerful enough to make sense of the hybrid nature of ELF in descriptive research.

1.2.1 ELF is like other *languages: Principles of variation Let us begin with the similarities. How ELF develops and continues to emerge is not different from any other *language: ELF is being adapted in different situational contexts for different purposes of use. It is being created and

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constantly re-created by its speakers in different contexts, it is put to pragmatic use as the speakers see fit on every occasion. It will therefore, naturally, be subject to the same mechanisms of adaptation, variation and change that affect all language use at all time. As Widdowson (1997: 140) pointed out two decades ago, the *English that has and continues to spread around the globe is not “a stabilized and standardized code leased out on a global scale”. *English in its global shapes (in many contexts: ELF), like any other *language, gets “adapted” and “actualized in diverse ways” (Widdowson 1997: 140) through its use in different contexts. Pointing out that ELF is no different from other *languages and claiming authority for ELF users as “agents of language change” (Seidlhofer 2001: 138; referring to Brutt-Griffler 1998: 387) has been one of the major achievements of ELF research in the past two decades. The significance of this is considerable. The initial call to overcome the (explicit or implicit) assumption that ELF could possibly be a globally distributed, franchised copy of ENL [English as a native language], and take on board the notion that it is being spread, developed independently, with a great deal of variation but enough stability to be viable for lingua franca communication (Seidlhofer 2001: 138)

is now partly obsolete. It seems that, in many contexts, we have overcome this assumption of ELF being “a franchised copy of ENL” and the substantial body of empirical studies and descriptions of ELF that exist today bear witness to this. ELF is a logical continuation of the process of language spread, language use and thus of language variation and change. So in this sense, ELF is very much like other *languages – although it is not a *language or a *variety itself.

1.2.2 ELF is unlike other *languages: External sociolinguistic conditions At the same time, ELF is actually also unique. The external sociolinguistic factors that accompany the use of ELF are unlike those of other *languages, including *varieties in postcolonial settings (see Pitzl 2016b). ELF is unprecedented in terms of its number of speakers, in terms of its international global scale, in terms of its frequency of use. It is facilitated, for example, through new means of technology that allow virtual long-distance communication across the globe (see Vettorel 2014). It is also unique in terms of the multilingual and multicultural diversity of its speakers. The overall category of multilingual ELF users, as introduced above, functions as an umbrella term that might be applied to more than two billion, possibly three billion, people across the globe. Needless to say,

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the diversity of individuals that are multilingual ELF users practically exceeds our imagination. As we have said above, ELF exhibits variability of linguistic forms to a degree that cannot commonly be observed in other *varieties of *English. We see all kinds of formal features in ELF, such as zero realization of 3rd person –s marking (e.g. Seidlhofer 2004, 2011; Dewey 2007b; Breiteneder 2009; Cogo & Dewey 2012), pluralization of uncountable nouns (e.g. Seidlhofer 2011; Vettorel 2014), flexible use of determiners (e.g. Dewey 2007b), extended uses of the progressive (e.g. Ranta 2006; Dorn 2011), flexible use of prepositions (e.g. Dewey 2007b; Seidlhofer 2011; Vettorel 2014), morpho-syntactic features (e.g. Björkman 2008; Pitzl, Breiteneder & Klimpfinger 2008; Seidlhofer 2011) and many others. While these individual features of the linguistic mosaic are, of course, typical also of various Inner and Outer Circle *varieties, the flexibility and variability with which these forms occur – but also do not occur – is characteristic of ELF. Processes like accommodative convergence (e.g. Jenkins 2000; Cogo & Dewey 2006, 2012; Cogo 2009; Seidlhofer 2009a) and repetition (e.g. Lichtkoppler 2007; Kaur 2011, 2012) make these forms salient to different degrees in different ELF contexts. Importantly, we generally do not see one form taking over and replacing the established conventional form entirely across all ELF contexts. We continue to see variability of forms in different ELF contexts, across different speaker constellations and also within the same speaker(s). There is a high degree of situational adaptability of ELF that leads to its linguistic forms being locally (re)coined and (re)adapted in a sequence of individual encounters and speech events. The extent to which this happens makes ELF rather different from other kinds of language use (especially among L1 speakers). This situational adaptability is, among other things, a direct result of the sociolinguistic conditions in which ELF takes place. A “situationality factor which determines every lingua franca interaction anew and on its own” (Hülmbauer 2009: 324, italics in original) seems to have a strong influence on what ELF actually looks like at a particular occasion. An essential characteristic of these sociolinguistic conditions is the fact that ELF does not take place within a traditional speech community, which makes ELF unlike ‘traditional’ *languages: For unlike the speakers of Inner Circle and nativized Outer Circle Englishes, ELF speakers usually do not live in immediate physical proximity with each other and do not constitute a speech community in this sense. The social conditions and relationships between language and society out of which the notions community and variety developed have undergone radical change in recent decades. They are themselves, therefore, in need of quite radical reconsideration. (Seidlhofer 2011: 83, italics in original)

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Alerting us to the different social conditions of ELF as opposed to other *languages, Seidlhofer is certainly one of the scholars who has been extremely influential in emphasizing the need of “[r]ethinking the concept of community” (Seidlhofer 2011: 81).

1.2.2.1 Communities of Practice (CoPs) A concept that has been of major influence in ELF research in this respect is the notion of Community of Practice (CoP), based on Wenger (1998). This concept was mentioned in relation to ELF briefly by House (2003) and developed further and fleshed out as a conceptual category by Seidlhofer (2007). It has since gained widespread currency in ELF research and usually goes hand in hand with a rejection of the traditional notion of speech community for ELF contexts. It has been mentioned in passing in many ELF studies in the past decade, far too numerous to count or cite here. There are, of course, a number of ELF scholars who have worked with the CoP concept more intensively (e.g. Ehrenreich 2009, 2010, 2018; Kalocsai 2009, 2014; Smit 2009, 2010; Vettorel 2014; Cogo 2016a to name a few). Most of these note that the concept should not be applied simplistically without further theorization (see also Dewey 2009: 74–78; Seidlhofer 2011: 85–88). In fact, as Baker points out, most scholars who have engaged with the CoP concept more thoroughly “add the caveat that communities of practice need to be treated as more fluid than originally envisaged” (Baker 2015b: 92). So most of the scholars listed above acknowledge the limitations of the CoP concept, for example when it comes to applying it to the entire range of ELF contexts, not just some specific business or educational contexts. Thus, in present ELF research, many researchers would probably agree that “groupings of ELF users are not necessarily ‘communities’ in Wenger’s sense, […] and do not necessarily engage in ‘shared practices’” (Jenkins 2015: 61–62) and that “the CoP framework, as currently theorized, does not account well for the kinds of transient and ad hoc encounters that are arguably equally (or more?) common in ELF communication” (Jenkins 2015: 66). Complementing the notion of CoP, I would therefore like to give an initial sketch of a concept that has been in my thinking for a number of years (at least since 2011 when I first used the term in my PhD research). This is the idea that ELF takes place in Transient International Groups (TIGs) (see Pitzl 2016b, 2018a, 2018b and Chapters 6 and 7; cf. also Mortensen & Fabricius 2014; Mortensen & Hazel 2017 on Transient Multilingual Communities). This notion explores the more open and fluid premise of ELF speakers being primarily organized in groups, and not necessarily in communities of any kind. This is not to suggest that ELF

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speakers cannot evolve to become communities of practice (CoPs). In contexts where groups of ELF speakers exist long enough in a stable fashion to develop a “shared repertoire” through “mutual engagement” in a “joint enterprise” (Wenger 1998: 73), they may very well form ELF-Communities of Practice (ELF-CoPs). My crucial point is: they need not. ELF does not require for interactants to be part of a CoP in a particular context to be active agents of language variation in an ELF interaction. The proposed notion of Transient International Groups (TIGs) is therefore not intended to replace the notion of CoP. Rather, it is an attempt to complement it by beginning to think about a concept that might be applicable to those ELF contexts where some of the criteria of a community of practice do not apply.

1.2.2.2 Transient International Groups (TIGs) ELF prototypically happens in international groups of speakers who meet at least once during a (usually limited) period of time. Such a period of time can be the study abroad period for exchange students and the many international encounters that happen during these months. It can be the time of conducting business with a particular company or working in a multinational team and all the communicative events that take place within this time. It can be the duration of an international conference, the length of a panel discussion, a lunch conversation or a brief service encounter.3 As we can see from these examples, and many more that could be given, the duration, the relative stability of groups of ELF speakers and the frequency of interaction among the same individuals varies considerably. So do factors like the size of the group, the number of languages, and the typological differences/ similarities of languages brought into contact through multilingual ELF users’ individual multilingual repertoires (Pitzl 2016b: 295, see also Chapter 7). In many recent publications, ELF scholars explicitly emphasize the diversity, enormous complexity and potentially fleeting character of different ELF contexts (e.g. Seidlhofer 2011; Mauranen 2012, 2018; Mortensen 2013; Baker 2015b; Jenkins 2015; Gilner 2016). I propose that we might conceive of ELF as often happening in Transient International Groups (TIGs), i.e. groups comprised of multilingual ELF users who interact for a particular purpose at a particular location for a certain amount of time. These groups are transient in the sense that a group forms, speakers negotiate and interact, and then the group dissolves again. Each TIG is therefore temporary. Multilingual ELF users forming a TIG will oftentimes be 3 Parts of this section also appear in Pitzl (2018b).

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aware of the transient nature of the group during its existence (though they need not be). TIGs are inter-national in the sense that the individual multilingual ELF users who form a group will in most contexts ‘come from’ at least two different countries. The phrase ‘come from’ is intentionally vague here since I do not wish to imply that nationality is a category that can only be determined by looking at a person’s passport. Without going into further detail here, the notion of ‘coming from’ a country thus seems more appropriate and less deterministic (see Dorn et al. 2014). Depending on the size and the particular constellation of the multilingual ELF users forming the group, the spectrum of TIGs will range from highly international groups involving large numbers of speakers from diverse regions of the world, countries and/or L1s to TIGs that are bilateral in the sense that they involve individuals from only two countries and/or with only two L1s (see Pitzl 2016b, Chapter 7). Of course, it needs to be borne in mind that L1 and nationality do not always correspond, so I do not wish to imply that L1 and nation are always linked to each other. A TIG may be bilateral concerning speakers’ nationalities, but not concerning speakers’ L1s, or vice versa (see Pitzl 2018b). Most TIGs will be inter-national, and literally between nations, also in the sense that multilingual ELF users forming a TIG are unlikely to develop a new sense of national identity in their group. It is possible to imagine scenarios where a TIG would involve multilingual ELF users from just one country, so this possibility should not be ruled out completely. Nevertheless, an international speaker constellation is likely to be more frequent in ELF contexts, which is why the label international seems fitting. Thus, TIGs may well form a sense of group identity but this is unlikely to be linked to a national category. Following a poststructuralist approach to language and communication and to the study of ELF, I would assume that most TIGs will not be just intercultural, i.e. happening ‘between cultures’, but are in fact likely to be transcultural in the way Baker (2018) describes: Most recently, given the dynamic and flexible characterisations of language, communication, identity and culture found in ELF research, it can be argued that intercultural communication is no longer an appropriate term in all instances, since it may not always be clear what cultures participants are in-between or ‘inter’ in intercultural communication. Indeed, I think ‘trans’, as in ‘transcultural communication’, provides a better metaphor with its association of across and through rather than between and the suggestion of transgressing borders. (Baker 2018: 26, italics in original)

Of course, in how far and to what degree a particular TIG is in fact transcultural is a matter of empirical enquiry. So my proposition here is a tentative one, since

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inter- vs. transculturality depends on the particular TIG constellation and interaction in this TIG. Nevertheless, in contrast to nationality (or rather: coming from somewhere), which is not likely to be altered radically in the course of a TIG, many other cultural4 identities and categories are likely to be affected and negotiated in a TIG. Drawing on very basic principles of group dynamics as proposed by Tuckman (1965; Tuckman & Jensen 1977), we can assume that each Transient International Group (TIG) goes through a number of developmental phases. The phases proposed by Tuckman, and widely adopted in studies on and models of group development, are “forming, storming, norming and performing, and adjourning” (Tuckman & Jensen 1977: 426). Needless to say, in Tuckman’s work in psychology, these phrases relate to the social and psychological dimension of group development, not to the development of language use or conversation within a group. Yet, I would argue that conceiving of ELF as happening primarily in Transient International Groups, we can attempt to transfer these general ideas of group development to the study of ELF interactions. Adapting Tuckman’s terminology to a more linguistic focus, one might propose that a TIG, even if very short-lived, is likely to undergo phases of formation, negotiation, interaction, and dissolution. In the formation phase, multilingual ELF speakers are brought in contact with each other through the circumstances of a particular situation. The individuals might be declared as being ‘a group’ by some outside authority, for example a person or an institution. Alternatively, a TIG might form without any institutional pressure or outside authority, just through situational circumstances. In both cases, the speakers forming a TIG might (implicitly or explicitly) see themselves as being in the process of forming a group; or they might be unaware that they are currently engaged in group formation in an ELF context. In this formation stage, multilingual ELF speakers are likely to rely heavily on individual background knowledge that precedes the current/ongoing process of group formation. In doing so, they will make assumptions about other group members (for example, concerning cultural memberships, personal characteristics, linguistic repertoires) and about the rules of appropriateness within the particular situation (for example, concerning genre conventions or degree of formality). Based on their previous experience and knowledge, multilingual ELF speakers will make use of their individual multilingual repertoires (see 4 When I refer to ‘culture’ throughout this book, I take this term to indicate small cultures in the sense of Holliday (1999), i.e. thus including categories such as profession, institution, age, and gender. When referring to ‘large cultures’ (Holliday 1999), I will use the term regio-culture/regiocultural from hereon.

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Chapter 7). They will act and interact, in one way or another, and thereby produce instances of linguistic and social behavior. Since experiences and assumptions that individual multilingual ELF users act upon will never be completely identical to each other, we can assume that the phase of formation will gradually morph into a negotiation phase. In this negotiation phase, the members of a TIG will propose, accept and/or challenge and implicitly (or explicitly) co-decide individual instances of linguistic and social practices in their particular TIG. Once some linguistic and social practices have been identified and negotiated by the members of the TIG, these practices can be productively put to use in what we might call an interaction phase. This interaction phase would allow TIGs to consolidate and perform (cf. Tuckman 1965) their shared practices. If a TIG is very short-lived, this interaction phase might be extremely short or largely invisible. Also, any shared practices that emerge may not yet have stabilized enough to be regarded as (implicit or explicit) norms by the participants, though this will be an interesting object of investigation in the years to come (see Section 1.3.2). Crucially, although the negotiation would need to precede the interaction phase, these loosely sketched phases of negotiation and interaction may be cyclical (cf. Bonebright 2010: 115–116), since linguistic and social practices can, of course, be challenged and questioned again. Interaction can thus trigger negotiation again. Eventually, the TIG will come to an end, which will be preceded by a more or less discernible and more or less extensive dissolution phase. In this phase, the multilingual ELF users will anticipate and potentially reference the end and finiteness of their TIG. In their most stable and longitudinal form, some TIGs may eventually become ELF-CoPs within certain local (Kalocsai 2009, 2014) or institutional/ professional (Ehrenreich 2009; Smit 2009) contexts. Similarly, it is also possible to imagine that clusters of several related or interlinked long-term TIGs may lead to the formation of a more stable and bigger ELF-CoP. Alternatively, individual TIGs might also form in relation to a pre-existing bigger (ELF-)CoP that constitutes a reference point for some multilingual ELF users forming a new TIG. The proposed notion of Transient International Group is thus intended to complement the notion of Community of Practice. The crucial point is that not every group of multilingual ELF users will be long-lived enough to become a CoP. Many ELF groups will remain transient and temporary and will never develop shared, endonormative communicative group practices that go beyond a single speech event. Even in TIGs that meet more than once or repeatedly, i.e. what we might call long-term TIGs (for example, during a stay abroad or a business operation), interactions will involve some fluctuation. That is to say, individual interactions will involve different people. Not everyone will be there every time,

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some speech events might feature guests or newcomers, thus making individual interactions within long-term TIGs inherently diverse. The outline provided here is a rough initial sketch. The full development of this framework will need more elaborate theoretical and descriptive engagement in the years to come. As part of this book, some aspects of the multilingual nature of ELF-TIGs are discussed in Chapter 7 and some pattern of metaphorical creativity found in TIGs included in VOICE are examined in Chapter 6. The main reason for including this concept here is to underline that the particular sociolinguistic circumstances in which ELF interactions takes place are unlike those of other *languages. Multilingual ELF users form TIGs through engaging in inter/transcultural communication in which they draw on their individual multilingual repertoires and thereby gradually expand the shared multilingual resource pool available in a particular situation/TIG (see Pitzl 2016b and Chapter 7). These multilingual ELF users will have different multilingual and regio-cultural backgrounds as well as different degrees of previous experience in TIGs in different contexts. They will have different levels of familiarity with each other as well as with particular speech event types or situational contexts. As diverse as the two to three billion multilingual ELF users are individually, as diverse will be the TIGs that they form in different contexts and for different purposes across the globe. In all this diversity, multilingual ELF users forming TIGs are nevertheless likely to share some sense of multilingual-ness5, i.e. a certain self-perception and perception of others as being multilingual and possibly inter- or multi- or transcultural.

1.3 Creativity in language use All these observations in which ELF is like, but also unlike, other *languages have a bearing on why creativity is an essential conceptual category for the description of ELF. And they also have an effect on how creativity can be conceptualized in the context of ELF. Thus, instead of focusing on a potentially, and in fact most likely, incompletely acquired ‘target language’ *English that falls short of the monolingual *English L1 ideal (like a traditional SLA approach might), it makes much more sense to focus on the rich multilingual and virtual resource pool that is shared, but yet constantly changing and in flux, in various ELF contexts (see Chapter 7). 5 Hülmbauer (2009: 328) refers to the notion of “shared non-nativeness” (see Chapter 5) as being characteristic of ELF, which I take to be an important stepping stone for the idea of multilingual-ness proposed here.

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With regard to a psychological – or possibly psycholinguistic – dimension of creativity, this aspect of ELF speakers being prototypically at least bi- or multilingual is important. Thus, just like children may be less inhibited by conventions and norms and may be “more willing to follow their sensory imagination and to throw caution to the winds” (Gardner et al. 1975, quoted in Crystal 1998: 193), multilingual ELF speakers may be less inhibited by socially sanctioned norms and conventions, also because they are aware of the fact that there is more than just one set of such norms. Therefore, the same statement Crystal makes with regard to adults may be true also with regard to L1 *English contexts: Older subjects [cf. L1 *English speakers interacting with each other], in other words, increasingly learn [i.e. have internalized] conventional means of expression, become less willing to be creative, to break the rules. In short, they conform. (Crystal 1998: 193)

Seen in this light, ELF contexts harbor an enormous potential for creativity and greater freedom of expression. The question remains how creativity can be defined and conceptualized – and also operationalized – within the context of ELF research and for the linguistic description of spoken ELF corpus data. The next sections will therefore turn to this question in more detail and shed light on different approaches to creativity before proposing a conceptual and operational definition of creativity for this study in Section 1.4. A theme that will be a red thread in this respect is the notion of norms. Creativity in language use (and other domains) always relies on norms and conventions. As will become apparent below, creativity needs norms, since without them, any attempt at creativity would be inappropriate, meaningless and unintelligible – and thus useless, instead of creative (see Pitzl 2013: 5–7). A crucial aspect of conceptualizing (linguistic) creativity therefore rests in the role we attribute to these norms and conventions as well as which norms and conventions we regard as central.

1.3.1 Approaches to creativity in linguistics Creativity is a phenomenon that psychologists often see as a precursor (or even prerequisite) for innovation and change in a particular domain (e.g. Csikszentmihalyi 1999). Fields of science or art or technology are usually seen as such domains, but so is language (cf. e.g. Carter 2004; Pope 2005; Pitzl 2012, 2013). It is therefore not surprising that creativity is generally viewed as one of the key properties of human language (e.g. Pope 2005). Humans’ ability to coin new words, build novel sentences, write new texts is

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something that many linguists and non-linguists call creative. Within linguistics, there have been different strands of research that have intensively engaged with creativity over the years. Generative approaches, for example, tend to operate with a notion of “[i]nfinite rule-governed linguistic creativity”, a label proposed by Joseph (2003: 126) for Chomsky’s take on creativity.6 Building on and expanding the theoretical implications of his model of a generative grammar, Chomsky (1972: 100) essentially conceptualized creativity as the general capacity of human beings to apply their knowledge of a grammatical system, i.e. the rules of a generative grammar, to produce an infinite number of novel but nevertheless intelligible sentences. This led Chomsky (1972: 100) to conclude that “[t]he normal use of language is, in this sense, a creative activity”. While it may seem that generative approaches are rather remote from the topic at hand, i.e. the investigation and description of spoken ELF, Chomsky’s broad conceptualization of language use being per se “a creative activity” is certainly a notion that is widely held and is not limited to generative accounts. Hence it can be found in introductory linguistic textbooks (e.g. Fromkin & Rodman 1998; Yule 2016), just like it is mentioned in general discussions of creativity (e.g. Pope 2005). A similar process of combining existing rules with different building blocks to produce creative outcomes can also be observed on the level of lexis itself. Coining new words is a linguistic activity that is referred to as creative by many researchers (e.g. Carter & McCarthy 1995: 309–312; Crystal 1998: 30–36; Carter 2004: 97–100). Another notion of creativity can therefore be found in the realm of word-formation. At the level of lexis, it is the application of word-formation rules and the combination of different free and bound morphemes that has the potential to bring about new lexical elements. As far as the application of these rules is concerned, some of the theoretical debates in word-formation research concern the distinction between creativity and productivity (Bauer 2001: 62– 70). In these discussions, productivity tends to be understood as rule-governed, while creativity is conceived as “any deviation from the productive rules” (Štekauer 2005: 224) and points towards “less automatic creations […] which are clearly deliberate and independent of the system” (Bauer 2005: 329). With regard to these deliberate creative uses, Bauer (2005) mentions the language of poetry as an example. This brings us to another prominent take on creativity, namely the notion of literary language as a prime example of creative language use.

6 Parts of this section are based on Pitzl (2012).

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Creativity in language use often tends to be associated with the creative writing of literature (cf. e.g. Carter & McCarthy 1995; Goodman & O’Halloran 2006). The past years have seen an increasing number of publications on what is referred to as everyday creativity (e.g. Maybin & Swann 2007) with a number of researchers focusing specifically on creativity in spoken language, often among L1 speakers (e.g. Carter 2004; Holmes 2007). Drawing on earlier conversation and interactional discourse analytic approaches, such as the works of Tannen (1989) and Cook (2000), discussions of everyday creativity indicate a trend towards investigating creativity as a normal phenomenon in L1 use. That is to say, research investigating everyday creativity establishes an important link between creativity as a somewhat elusive quality of literature and the pragmatic use of naturally-occurring language in everyday, i.e. nonliterary, situations. At the same time, this strand of creativity research in linguistics is closely informed by concepts associated with literariness, such as Jakobson’s (1960) poetic function of language (cf. e.g. Maybin & Swann 2007; Widdowson 2008, 2016b). It seems that researchers concerned with everyday creativity are often looking for the literary in the ordinary, so to speak. What remains somewhat unanswered is the question whether it is the occurrence of certain linguistic (literary) forms and figures of speech that makes an interaction or a particular use of language creative or whether it is these forms being “used for what can be considered to be creative purposes” (Carter 2004: 90) that constitutes the creative aspect (see also Pitzl 2007). The latter, of course, immediately triggers the tricky question of speaker intentions: Does a speaker need to intend to be linguistically creative in order for a particular linguistic form to be considered creative? Or is creative intention simply assumed in some contexts? And if creative intention were a prerequisite: How would one be able to obtain linguistic evidence for a speaker’s creative intent? In the context of lexical creativity, the lines between intentional and unintentional creativity are also somewhat blurred. Since new words are usually coined to fill permanent or momentary “lexical gaps” (Clark 1994: 785), researchers in the line of everyday creativity remark that a new coinage may often simply serve as “a kind of survival mechanism to ensure that the [L1] conversation continues to flow” (Carter 2004: 98). The notion of a survival mechanism would appear to presuppose no creative (literary) intent on the part of the speaker. Rather, it seems to indicate that linguistic creativity can often be prompted by speakers’ momentary needs. If such an allowance is made for L1 contexts, the same should hold true also for ELF contexts. This would entail that lexical (and other types of linguistic) creativity is not necessarily the result of creative intent on the part of a speaker, irrespective of whether speakers are using their L1 or not.

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Another factor that is also mentioned in relation to lexical creativity is the (potentially) fleeting nature of linguistic creativity. Clark, for example, remarks that most coinages are probably nonce uses which are coined only to serve a particular purpose at a particular occasion and are then forgotten (Clark 1994: 785; cf. also Crystal 1998: 31–32). Yet, Clark also points out that some coinages are, of course, picked up by other speakers, spread and have the potential to become established in a speech community (Clark 1994: 785). So lexical creativity may be ad hoc and interim, often borne out of momentary need, but it may also in some cases have long lasting effects that alter the lexicon. This fact is reflected in the discussion about creativity and productivity in word-formation research already mentioned above. The same is by extension, of course, also true for metaphorical expressions. Metaphors may be coined ad hoc for a particular purpose and then be forgotten. But they may also, in some instances, develop into conventional idioms (see e.g. Seidlhofer & Widdowson 2007 and Chapter 2). One last aspect that needs to be mentioned is the fact that lexical creativity, of course, is not limited to the coining of new words, but also relates to semantic shifts in meaning. It is, in this way, closely linked to the potential for semantic change in words and phrases. Creativity can therefore also be seen as “the ability to give new meanings to words beyond their literal use” (Bouillon & Busa 2001: xiii). This includes figurative meaning extensions like metaphor. The kind of semantic creativity involved in metaphorical extension is not only closely linked to literary language, but also has a firm place in historical linguistics as a wellestablished mechanism of language change (see e.g. McMahon 1994: 256–257; Schendl 2001: 30). So the link between creativity and metaphoricity in terms of language variation and change seems to be one particularly promising line of research in relation to ELF.

1.3.2 Creativity and norms If we try to look at the various approaches to creativity in linguistics, we can see that they have in common a more or less explicit orientation to norms. They are different, however, with regard to which norms they focus on centrally in defining creativity. Chomsky’s creativity relies on the generative norms of syntax and is an essentially rule-governed account of creativity in which the regular application of norms leads to new linguistic products (see Pitzl 2013: 5). While the generative position is certainly an extreme one, more moderate but also normfollowing positions can be found in word-formation research, where the productive norms of morphology lead to lexical creativity. Nevertheless, linguistic

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creativity has also been conceived as going beyond this rule-generated nature, subverting existing ‘laws’ and conventions (Ricoeur 2000 [1981]: 344). Like the first kind, this second kind of creativity necessarily also involves the recognition of and reliance on existing norms. Crucially, it is not just generated by these norms; it tests their boundaries and expands them. This notion of creativity breaking norms can be found in conceptualizations of creativity in relation to literary language, but also accounts of everyday creativity in spoken language (see Pitzl 2013: 8–20). Two general conceptualizations of creativity are mirrored also in approaches to creativity in psychology, such as Boden’s (1999) distinction between combinational and exploratory-transformational creativity. Here, combinational creativity refers to the “unusual combination of, or association between, familiar ideas” (Boden 1999: 352). As examples of this, Boden mentions metaphor, analogy and poetic imagery. In contrast to this, exploratorytransformational creativity constitutes an alteration of the accepted style of thinking in a particular domain (Boden 1999: 352). Scientific discoveries, artistic breakthroughs and technological inventions would probably be good examples of this second type of creativity. With regard to creativity in relation to language use, we might say that this conceptualization draws attention to the psycholinguistic dimension of creativity (i.e. the cognitive processes of language users) as well as to a descriptive form-focused dimension of creativity (i.e. its linguistic products). In addition, it relates to the social communicative dimension of creativity, for example the idea of language use within a speech community or a group of speakers that has producers as well as receivers of creativity. Most importantly, Boden’s terminology suggests a type of creativity that is spontaneous and fleeting (i.e. combinational) as well as a type of creativity that has long-lasting effects (i.e. exploratory-transformational). The former can be seen to correspond loosely to ad hoc linguistic variation, whereas the latter constitutes the origin of social and thus also linguistic change (see Section 1.4). It thus seems that creativity is a phenomenon that is often seen as a precursor, or even prerequisite, for innovation and change in a particular domain.

1.3.3 Creativity as potential change: A systems view The interrelation between the different dimensions of creativity, i.e. individual mind, creative product and social system, is also what is at the heart of the systems approach to creativity proposed by the Russian psychologist Mihaly

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Culture

DOMAIN

Society FIELD (for whom) audience

(what) creativity INDIVIDUAL (who)

Figure 1.1: A systems view of creativity (adapted from Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 315).

Csikszentmihalyi (1999). Like most approaches to creativity in psychology, Csikszentmihalyi’s model is in many ways still based on the assumption that creativity is primarily the product of a single individual, i.e. a creative genius (cf. Carter 2004: 39). But importantly, Csikszentmihalyi’s work centrally argues that creativity is constructed through the interaction between producer and audience and stresses the importance of judgments made by the social system about individuals’ creative products. At the core of Csikszentmihalyi’s systems approach is the intersection between individual, domain and field, and it is at this intersection where creativity is seen to take place, as shown in Figure 1.1. In the systems model, the concept of domain refers to any particular sphere of ‘culture’ (in the very loosest sense of the word). This can be, for example, a scientific discipline that is governed by a currently accepted set of norms and conventions. The field represents the social aspect in the systems model and comprises the individuals who practice a particular domain and consequently – at least theoretically – have the power to change it (Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 321). These individuals, i.e. the field, are the gatekeepers who can influence whether a change is adopted and becomes part of the respective domain, or not (Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 315). Creativity in the systems model is thus seen to occur “when a person makes a change in a domain […] that will be transmitted through time” (Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 315). In other words, in order for this transmission to happen, the change needs to be sanctioned and evaluated positively by the field. The scholar summarizes this in the following way:

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The underlying assumption is that an objective quality called ‘creativity’ is revealed in the products [i.e. what in Figure 1.1], and that judges and raters [i.e. for whom in Figure 1.1] can recognize it. But we know that expert judges do not possess an external, objective standard by which to evaluate ‘creative’ responses. Their judgments rely on past experience, training, cultural biases, current trends, personal values, idiosyncratic preferences. Thus, whether an idea or product is creative or not does not depend on its own qualities, but on the effect it is able to produce in others who are exposed to it. Therefore it follows that what we call creativity is a phenomenon that is constructed through an interaction between producer and audience [i.e. who and for whom in relation to a particular domain in Figure 1.1]. Creativity is not the product of single individuals, but of social systems making judgments about individuals’ products. (Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 314, italics in original)

Csikszentmihalyi’s systems approach, thus, opens up several questions worth exploring with regard to defining creativity in relation to language, and also in ELF. Even though the model was proposed within psychology, the three pillars of this systems view of creativity (domain, field and individual) give rise to important points when transferred to linguistic variation and change. A domain is defined as a particular sphere of ‘culture’ that is governed by a currently accepted set of rules and norms in the systems model. While Csikszentmihalyi relates this notion of domain to scientific disciplines or ‘cultural segments’ such as visual art, we, as linguists, tend to view language – or a *language – as such a domain. What is noteworthy in this respect is the importance of rules and norms within the domain without which creativity is impossible: The domain is a necessary component of creativity because it is impossible to introduce a variation without reference to an existing pattern. ‘New’ is meaningful only in reference to the ‘old’. […] Without rules there cannot be exceptions, and without tradition there cannot be novelty. (Csikszentmihalyi 1999: 314–315)

Once again, creativity is seen as essentially relying on pre-existing and currently accepted norms, while, at the same time, potentially expanding and subverting them. But without these, we would not be able to make sense of an innovation. The same point is made by Seidlhofer (2011: 97) about language when she says that “creativity presupposes the existence of conventional norms against which its non-conformity can be measured”. Creativity in the systems model is initiated by an individual (who), happens in a particular domain, but is sanctioned and accepted by the field, i.e. some kind of audience for whom something counts as creative. As has been mentioned above, for Csikszentmihalyi (1999: 315) a change needs to be “transmitted through time” in order to count as creativity. This is similar to Boden’s (1999) exploratorytransformational creativity. As linguists, we tend to regard language – or certain

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subsystems of (a) *language – as a domain. Creativity that is “transmitted through time” would thus refer to linguistic changes that get conventionalized. Yet, as we have seen above (Figure 1.1), the transmission of a change and its conventionalization depend on acceptance and social judgments by the field. There is an extremely curious situation with regard to creativity and language then. Everyone who speaks a *language practices language use in this domain. Thus, everyone who uses a particular *language is an individual who can potentially bring forth “creative products” (Pitzl 2013: 7). At the same time, everyone who interacts with others in a *language is also potentially part of the field (for whom), i.e. a member of the audience who might (implicitly or explicitly) pass judgments on whether a linguistic product is creative in the sense of being novel, appropriate and useful (cf. Sternberg & Lubart 1999: 3, discussed in Pitzl 2012: 34, 2013: 5–7). As we have seen from the discussion of approaches to creativity above, researchers in different areas of linguistics also tend to pass judgment on what ‘counts’ as creativity in language use. In this sense, linguists are a particular example of field or gatekeepers in relation to language use; in being considered experts in this domain, linguists tend to have a certain degree of power to sanction and/or evaluate language use. So do language teachers (see Chapter 8). The focus on creativity in linguistics started with new grammatical sentences produced by Chomsky’s ideal-speaker listener in a homogeneous speech community. It has since moved to areas like wordformation and spontaneous casual conversation in more recent years. Yet, the emphasis in much of this research remains on (monolingual) L1 speakers as sanctioned producers of linguistic creativity. Taking linguistic creativity from the domain of L1 language use and transferring it to the domain of ELF constitutes an intentional change in the domain of linguistics as an academic discipline. By talking about creativity in relation to ELF, we sanction and validate multilingual ELF users as ratified producers of linguistic creativity.

1.4 Creativity in ELF: Norm-following and norm-transcending As we have seen above, descriptive studies have brought to light variability and situational adaptability as a central characteristic of ELF (see e.g. Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey 2011; Seidlhofer 2011; Cogo & Dewey 2012; Björkman 2013; Vettorel 2014 and many others). The specific forms that ELF takes are, to some extent, different in each context of use. They are influenced by situationality (cf. Hülmbauer 2009) and by the transient nature of ELF groups (cf. Pitzl 2016b, 2018b). Yet, certain

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processes of variation as well as certain functional motivations recur across the multiplicity of ELF contexts. Bearing in mind the paradox of ELF being like and unlike other *languages and the concepts of creativity discussed above, this book argues that creativity can help us make sense of the variability that is characteristic of ELF while, at the same time, providing a link to potential changes that are triggered by this variability. In this way, it offers a synchronic pragmatic window on developments and instances of language use that may (or may not) have more long-term diachronic effects. If we delineate the concept of creativity more concisely in relation to variability as a key characteristic of ELF interaction, we might define linguistic creativity as “the creation of new (i.e. non-codified) linguistic forms and expressions in ongoing interaction/discourse or the use of existing forms and expressions in a non-conventional way” (Pitzl 2012: 37). Defined in this way, linguistic creativity includes new forms as well as new meanings ascribed to conventional forms. This definition is admittedly form-focused, in the sense that it puts the emphasis on the creative product (what), i.e. on attested instances of language use. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the who and the what are always closely related in the process of identifying creativity: [T]he audience might arrive at the decision of who/what is creative in two ways: Either there is a product (=what) that is considered novel and appropriate, hence the producer (=who) must be creative, we assume. Or there is a person (=who) who is considered exceptional and ‘extraordinary’ (Pope 2005: 53) – often in a particular discipline (e.g., a writer, an artist, a scientist) – and hence the work (=what) they produce must be creative, we assume. (Pitzl 2013: 5–6, italics in original)

Since the present study analyzes ELF speakers’ language use in corpus data (i.e. in VOICE), this emphasis on creative products in attested language use seems necessary; actual language use is what we can, in fact, analyze and observe in a corpus. The definition of linguistic creativity being the creation of new linguistic forms and expressions or the use of existing forms and expressions in a nonconventional way could be applied to all kinds of language data. By applying it to an ELF corpus, the present book expands the Who dimension of creativity to multilingual ELF users. As a researcher, I am thereby ‘allowing’ for multilingual ELF users’ speech to be considered creative. The process of implicitly (or explicitly) ‘sanctioning’ the language use of a particular group of language users as creative is common to all approaches to creativity in linguistics reviewed above.

1.4 Creativity in ELF: Norm-following and norm-transcending

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Crucially, defining linguistic creativity in this way does not imply intentional creation or even necessarily open-choice processing of expressions (see e.g. Sinclair 1991; Erman & Warren 2000; see also Chapter 2). It only describes the occurrence of forms or meanings that we might call creative. Whether these forms are brought about consciously by (ELF) speakers or not is a different matter. Disregarding creative intent as a prerequisite for creativity seems justified, since even the seemingly most intentional ‘acts’ of creativity might in fact not necessarily be intentionally creative. Theoretical physicist David Bohm (1998: 44), for example, describes Newton’s discovery of the difference between heavenly and earthly matter as an example of “imaginative insight” triggered by a sudden “flash of understanding”. In other words, a scientist does not need to intend to be creative in order to bring about a creative product. Analogically, a language user does not need to intend to be creative in order to produce a creative linguistic form (see Chapter 8). Building on the different approaches to creativity reviewed above, we can distinguish two types of creativity in relation to linguistic creativity as defined in this book. Re-contextualizing and adapting Kachru’s (1992: 356) terminology of different *Englishes being norm-following or norm-developing/norm-providing, we can distinguish between norm-following and norm-transcending creativity7 and group different conceptualizations of creativity accordingly in Table 1.1. Norm-following creativity is rule-generated, combinational, and exonormative (cf. Type-1 creativity in Pitzl 2012). It encompasses the infinite number of ways in which a normative system can be realized, resulting in a potentially infinite number of creative linguistic outcomes. In contrast to this, normtranscending creativity is potentially rule-generating, exploratory-transformational, and endonormative (cf. Type-2 creativity in Pitzl 2012). It goes beyond what the normative system allows at a certain point in time. Variability, as is so characteristic of ELF, occurs as a result of both these types of creativity. But it is the second type of creativity that may prompt (linguistic) change, since it has the potential to transcend the boundaries of current norms and may therefore effect changes in the normative system itself (Pitzl 2012; cf. Larsen-Freeman 2016: 141).

7 I have used the term norm-developing creativity in previous publications (e.g. Pitzl 2012, 2013, 2018a). In contrast to Kachru (1992), my use of ‘norm-developing’ in relation to creativity was never intended to imply *variety emergence. To avoid confusion, I have changed my terminology and will from now on distinguish between norm-following and norm-transcending creativity.

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Table 1.1: Norm-following and norm-transcending creativity (adapted from Pitzl 2012: 36). Norm-following creativity

Norm-transcending creativity

Brings about individual realizations of the normative system Realizations stay within the boundaries of the normative system rule-generated (cf. Chomsky) combinational (cf. Boden) norm-following (cf. Kachru) exonormative Brings about (synchronic linguistic) variation

Brings about individual realizations of the normative system Realizations transcend the boundaries of the normative system rule-generating exploratory-transformational (cf. Boden) norm-developing (cf. Kachru) endonormative Has the potential to bring about (diachronic language) change

A crucial issue that is the subject of ongoing discussion in ELF research (see e.g. Baird, Baker & Kitazawa 2014; Baker 2015a, 2015b; Vetchinnikova 2015; LarsenFreeman 2016, 2018) in this respect concerns the question of what we mean by normative system. At which level are linguistic norms creatively applied and potentially transcended? On the one hand, it is common to conceive of *languages and *varieties as such systems. So one way of transcending conventional boundaries might be to transcend language boundaries. Code-switching, codemixing and multilingual practices might be viewed as examples of this in many contexts (see Chapter 7). Yet, if extensive code-mixing is the common mode of communication in a particular TIG, transcending language boundaries might arguably not be seen as very creative for this group. On the other hand, it is equally commonplace to view different levels within a language as normative systems, such as grammar, lexis, morphology, pronunciation – and also idioms. Each of these levels is governed by norms that are more or less regular (at the level of morphology or grammar, for example) or rather intransparent and somewhat unsystematic (like at the level of idioms). Crucially and somewhat paradoxically, because of these different levels, it is possible for norm-following and norm-transcending creativity to occur simultaneously. So although words like increasement, approvement, or bigness (cf. Pitzl, Breiteneder & Klimpfinger 2008; Seidlhofer 2011: 103–104) are instances of norm-transcending creativity (Type 2) at the level of lexis, they are also normfollowing (Type 1) since they conform to general principles of *English morphology by making use of ‘regular’ suffixation. In fact, words (or expressions) that are norm-transcending at one level can even be norm-reinforcing at another. An example of this is the use of the verb suffix -ate that appears to be relatively productive. In addition to pronunciate (Pitzl, Breiteneder &

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Klimpfinger 2008: 29), conspirating, examinating, financiated (Seidlhofer 2011: 102–103), prolongate and determinate (Vettorel 2014: 217), VOICE includes a range of creative forms with -ate: accreditate, accreditated, combinated, combinates, examinates, fragmentated, identificate, imaginate, improvisate, presentate, registrate, reorientate. At the level of lexis, each individual word is creative and norm-transcending. At the level of morphology and verb suffixation, these forms are potentially not just norm-following; they might be normreinforcing for -ate as a marker of ‘verbness’. It is this tension between conventionality and norm-following creativity at one level and non-conformity and norm-transcending creativity at another level that ensures intelligibility and functionality of many new linguistic expressions. This is also central for the use – and variation – of idioms in ELF interactions. Another crucial issue, once again of particular (but not exclusive) relevance for idioms, is that norms and conventions are always tied to a particular context and point in time. Norms are not norms, once and for all. They are not generalizable across centuries or decades, sometimes not even across years or months. What used to be creative at one point in time, may become ‘normal’ and regular – and thus eventually un-creative. (Or it may not.) So somewhat paradoxically, the most ‘successful’ instances of creativity will, in fact, cease to be creative at a certain point in time.

1.5 Summary This chapter has attempted to show that creativity can be a powerful conceptual category for the analysis and description of language use in ELF interactions. After providing an initial characterization of ELF and discussing some of the terms used in this book, I have argued that ELF is particularly difficult to grasp because when we are engaging with ELF, we are faced with a paradox: ELF is, at the same time, like and unlike other *languages, without being a *language or a *variety itself. A review of linguistic approaches to creativity then highlighted the importance of norms for conceiving of creativity. Building on this theme of creativity and (different kinds of linguistic) norms, the systems view on creativity was introduced to theorize the relationship between producer (who), creative product (what), domain and field. The systems view also offered a perspective linking creativity to (social) change. This relationship of variation, (potential) change and creativity was then explored further in relation to language use and ELF in particular. A form-focused definition of linguistic creativity was proposed, alongside a conceptual distinction between two types of creativity: norm-following and norm-transcending. It was

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argued that linguistic creativity can be regarded as an essential driving force of language change and offers a synchronic pragmatic window on developments that may have more long-term diachronic effects. This synchronic-diachronic dimension of creativity is particularly relevant when we look at the notion of idiom and also metaphor, in the context of ELF, but also in L1 use of any *language.

2 Creativity, idiom and metaphor This chapter explores how linguistic creativity might manifest itself at the level of idioms and how creativity in idiom use might best be conceptualized with regard to spoken ELF. The recurrent patterns of language that are revealed in corpus analyses of L1 use show how the use of idioms and the general notion of idiomaticity contribute to effective communication in more or less homogeneous L1 contexts. Idioms are used purposefully for various reasons in L1 interactions and it would seem that this is because they are conducive to ‘successful’ communication. Since ELF is also naturally-occurring and communicatively successful and in many respects very much like other *languages (cf. Section 1.2.3), one might therefore also expect it to be ‘idiomatic’ and to rely on what Sinclair (1991) has called the idiom principle. A crucial question is, however, what terms like idiomatic, idiom and idiomaticity actually mean. The terminology and corresponding theoretical categories are far from well-defined and clearly delimited even with regard to L1 contexts, a fact which has given rise to many critical discussions in relation to L1 use over the past decades. Thus, it is even less clear what these terms might – or can or should or should not – denote in the context of ELF. And consequently, it is also far from straightforward what the status of idiom(s) and idiomaticity can or might be in relation to naturally-occurring spoken ELF. In order to address the question of which role idioms do – or do not – play in ELF interaction, it therefore seems necessary to first take a closer look at what the category idiom actually denotes. What we have learned from previous research is that ELF is generally successful in spite of the fact that it displays a considerable amount of variability in linguistic forms. In fact, it is because of this heightened variability that linguistic creativity constitutes the focus of this book. In Chapter 1, linguistic creativity has been characterized and defined as a central category for ELF which, it is hoped, allows us to conceptualize what happens in ELF linguistically. Linguistic creativity, that is non-conformity in reference to conventional L1 norms, is regarded as an intrinsic characteristic of ELF which is to be expected, also – or maybe even particularly so – in relation to the use of idioms. Yet, there is a rather curious situation with regard to idiom use and linguistic creativity in ELF. Language use and variability at other levels of language such as grammar, lexis or phonology can be measured against a set of codified norms, which are at least seemingly stable and explicit and can be looked up in dictionaries and grammars. In contrast to this, the implicit conventions that constitute the code of conduct for the conventional and non-creative use of idioms in a https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-003

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given situation are far more elusive and fuzzy than the ostensibly straightforward rules of pronunciation, grammar and morphology that we find explained in reference works. The fuzziness of the category idiom and the rules of thumb for their creative variation are therefore well-acknowledged facts also in relation to L1 use. Why speaker A who produces variant x’ of idiom x in context B among fellow members of speech community C would be interpreted (by members of this community C) to perform the communicative act y or to realize the communicative function z is subject to so many subtleties and unspoken assumptions that it is impossible to abstract any general rules or guidelines for (creative) idiom use that could be put down in writing, let alone be codified for all idioms. In other words, who can – or cannot – do what to which idiom among members of which community in order to achieve which effect is likely to be determined exclusively – or at least extensively – by contextual factors and by shared interpersonal as well as socio-cultural knowledge. And crucially, it also depends on the particular idiom that is being used (and varied), since idioms are a broad category that contains all kinds of expressions with different degrees of fixedness and frequency. Analyses of the everyday creativity of L1 *English speakers observe that “playing and creatively disfiguring the fixed patterns of pre-formulated and formulaic chunks of language constitute[s] a common feature in interaction” (Carter 2004: 128). So for L1 use, creativity in relation to idiom use is generally seen as intentional creativity, linked to instances of word play and punning. But even in these analyses it is extremely difficult to draw the line between the creative and un-creative use of idioms. As has been discussed in more detail in Pitzl (2012, 2013), this is partly because approaches to everyday creativity tend to rely on neither a clearly form-focused nor a clearly function-focused definition of (linguistic) creativity, and thus lack a conceptual framework that differentiates form and function aspects more explicitly. But even when adopting a formfocused definition of linguistic creativity, as is done in this study, the distinction between the creative and un-creative use of idioms also proves difficult: Which formal variations would be considered to fall within the boundaries of conventional (i.e. un-creative) variable idiom use and which variations would be considered striking, irregular and non-conventional (i.e. creative) for a particular expression is a situational judgment. Although there are some implicit conventions that govern the use of idioms in L1 communities and groups – and that therefore might serve to determine the baseline of what one considers creative as opposed to conventional use of a particular idiom in a particular L1 group – these conventions are often largely inaccessible even to other L1 speakers of a different group (for example, speaker of another L1 *variety of *English). In consequence, it is

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obvious that, due to their implicitness, these conventions are likely to be only of limited relevance to ELF interactions and ELF speakers, who form various TIGs in different ELF contexts. As has been outlined in Chapter 1, ELF always happens in situations that involve a linguistically and regio-culturally diverse set of interactants. As a consequence, it is an open question which relevance the implicit conventional norms of L1 idiom use (can) have in ELF. Building on the theoretical account of ELF and linguistic creativity in Chapter 1, this chapter proposes that it is the link between idiom and metaphor, hence between the conventional and the creative, that is central to conceptualizing creativity in ELF idiom use. This chapter begins with exploring the potential functional motivations for the use of idioms in ELF and proposes that these motivations are likely to be different in ELF contexts than they are in L1 contexts. After a brief consideration of the concepts idiom and idiomaticity, the chapter turns its attention to metaphor and metaphoricity. It looks at basic theoretical distinctions between categories such as linguistic, conceptual and conventional metaphors and draws attention to the fact that “metaphoricity is gradable” (to borrow a phrase from Hanks 2006: 17), i.e. expressions do not only have different degrees of conventionality, they also have different degrees of metaphoricity. Section 2.4 then outlines the theoretical framework for the suggested ELF approach to linguistic creativity and idiom use. It provides background on idiom variation and discusses the importance of metaphoricity and related concepts such as idiom decomposition and figurative compositionality, which are of particular salience in cognitive and psycholinguistic investigations of idiom use and variation. In reviewing these concepts, the complex and multidimensional relationship of idiom and metaphor will be explored in relation to linguistic creativity in ELF, introducing the concept of re-metaphorization as one of the central mechanisms that allows for the effective creative use of idioms, in both ELF (and L1) contexts.

2.1 Idioms and territoriality Idioms have come to be regarded as central building blocks of speech.1 Corpus linguists have shown how the naturally-occurring speech of L1 speakers operates through the idiom principle to a large degree. In its broadest definition, the “principle of idiom” refers to the fact that “a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single

1 This section is based on Pitzl (2009).

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choices” (Sinclair 1991: 110). Thus, in employing the idiom principle, language users do not construct phrases and expressions bottom-up or ‘from scratch’, but they utilize an already existent repertoire of semi-fixed chunks. Sinclair’s broad definition of which items are covered by the idiom principle includes fixed twoword phrases (e.g. of course) and strong collocations (e.g. hard facts) as well as “[i]dioms, proverbs, clichés, technical terms, jargon expressions, phrasal verbs, and the like” (Sinclair 1991: 111). This already indicates the terminological ambiguity and fuzziness that we are facing. For one, Sinclair lists idioms as one category within the principle of idiom, which is bound to make terminology ambiguous (see Section 2.3). Secondly, it is obvious from the short list of examples, that the idiom principle refers to both high-frequency (e.g. strong collocations and fixed two-word phrases like of course) and low-frequency items (e.g. proverbs). The crucial fact that high-frequency and low-frequency expressions are often subsumed under the same idiom headline has serious theoretical and methodological implications (see Chapter 3). Interestingly, this does not mean that the factor of frequency necessarily gets addressed in idiom studies. Considering that modern technology in corpus linguistics has made it possible to study extensively all kinds of lexical patterns subsumed under the idiom principle in L1 *English corpora, it is not surprising that with the availability of ELF corpora from the mid 2000’s onwards researchers also turned their attention to the question of idiomaticity and its relation to ELF. In one of the first ELF publications on the subject, Seidlhofer and Widdowson (2007) look at the idiom principle and its realizations in ELF, suggesting that ELF users probably exhibit a greater reliance on the open-choice principle and “construct what they have to say more atomistically, in a bottom-up fashion” (Seidlhofer & Widdowson 2007: 365). They provide examples of how the idiom principle might be at work in ELF via the online creation of new idioms which are then available for a particular group of speakers at a certain time and in a certain context. Idiom building or “idiomatizing” (Seidlhofer 2009a: 205, 2011: 138), i.e. the creation, repetition and uptake of newly coined expressions by a group of speakers, has to be considered a necessary precondition of the operation of the idiom principle among L1 speakers of any *language. So it is not surprising that we should be able to observe a similar process to be operating in ELF (see Section 6.2). Another important aspect that Seidlhofer and Widdowson (2007: 368) raise is that communication in ELF generally lacks what they call a “territorial imperative”. The territorial imperative can be paraphrased as the need to establish and protect one’s own space either as an individual or as a member of a social group or speech community. And one way of acting on this territorial imperative can be the use of idioms. In L1 contexts, idioms are presumably heavily ‘culturally

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loaded’ for the members of a speech community. They serve as “territorial markers of social identity and group membership” (Seidlhofer & Widdowson 2007: 362). When it comes to ELF, there is no speech community in the traditional sense, since ELF happens primarily in TIGs and CoPs. Multilingual ELF users clearly “are not using the language to qualify for membership of a pre-defined community” (Seidlhofer & Widdowson 2007: 368). Hence we can assume that they do not feel the same pressures of the territorial imperative that is at work for L1 speakers of *English or of any other *language for that matter. In my first publication on the subject of idiom variation and metaphors in ELF (Pitzl 2009), I argued primarily that idioms are not territorial in ELF interactions as compared to potential motivations for their use by L1 English speakers. Engaging with the subject from a more intercultural and multilingual perspective subsequently has made me readjust – or rather refine – my position on this aspect (Pitzl 2016b). The majority of multilingual ELF speakers are not possessive of a particular (L1) *English regio-cultural territory, so in this sense idiom use in ELF is indeed likely to be non-L1-territorial. Crucially, however, multilingual ELF users who are forming a TIG begin a process of establishing and negotiating shared linguistic and transcultural territory which they create through interaction. In this way, idiomatizing as a dynamic process in interaction still has the potential to fulfill a territorial function in ELF, but it will operate with a different concept of territoriality than in L1 communities. If idioms in ELF are being used territorially, we can assume that this does not happen to mark off L1 *English regio-cultural and/or linguistic territory. Rather, the use of non-*English idioms in ELF, for example, can be cooperative and territorial in that it may help build shared transcultural territory in the course of and by means of interaction (see Chapter 7).

2.2 Idioms and idiomaticity As we have seen in the discussion at the beginning of this chapter, the definition and use of the terms idiom and idiomaticity is a complex matter. This is a truism which is mentioned early on in most books and articles written on the subject (see e.g. Jaeger 1999: 13; Langlotz 2006: 2; Moon 1998: 2). Although – or possibly because – the word idiom enjoys widespread currency, it is rather difficult to define precisely. On the one hand, it can be used as a cover term for the whole range of semifixed linguistic multi-word expressions which can be subsumed under Sinclair’s idiom principle, i.e. both high-frequency and low-frequency expressions. In this sense, idiom or ‘idiomatic use’ are also often used in teaching contexts, for

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example, to comment favorably on the use of expressions that are considered particularly ‘authentic’ and/or *native speaker-like (see also Chapter 8). On the other hand, as is evidenced by Sinclair (1991: 110–112) himself, the word idiom may also be used in a more narrow sense and only refer to some linguistic expressions subsumed under the idiom principle. Yet, even within this narrower sense, different scholars propose an abundance of definitions that are often too intertwined to be disentangled. In the following, I will attempt to do mainly two things. I will seek to establish a basic distinction between idiom being used in a broad(er) as well as in a narrow(er) sense. In doing so, I will mention some related terms associated with the broad sense of idiom (such as fixed expressions, phraseological units, prefabs) and I will identify some key aspects of narrow(er) idiom definitions. Subsequently, I will elaborate on the distinction between an idiom as a seemingly static synchronic linguistic product on the one hand and idiomatizing as an ongoing and dynamic process on the other hand and comment briefly on idiomatic variability.

2.2.1 Idiomatic? Formulaic? Phraseological? Coming to terms with terminology Terminology with regard to idiom research has always been complicated and problematic. What Moon pointed out in the introduction of her corpus-based study of Fixed expressions and idioms in English two decades ago still holds true today: There is no generally agreed common vocabulary. Different terms are sometimes used to describe identical or very similar kinds of unit; at the same time, a single term may be used to denote very different phenomena. (Moon 1998: 2)

Thus, Moon herself primarily relies on the term fixed expression which she takes to include “several kinds of phrasal lexeme, phraseological unit, or multi-word lexical item: that is, holistic units of two or more words” (Moon 1998: 2). Within this general category of fixed expressions, Moon lists frozen collocations, grammatically ill-formed collocations, proverbs, routine formulae, sayings, similes, and idioms. The last group, namely idioms, she discusses separately, however. At the same time, she also concedes that the term fixed expression is in fact “unsatisfactory” since “many fixed expressions of these types are not actually fixed” (Moon 1998: 2). With regard to idiom, she distinguishes a general lay use of the term denoting “a particular manner of expressing something in language, music, art, and so on, which characterizes a person or group” (Moon 1998: 3) from the

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presumably more linguistic and language-centered notion of an idiom as “a particular lexical collocation or phrasal lexeme, peculiar to a language” (Moon 1998: 3). With regard to the linguistic notion of idiom, Moon (1998: 4) again differentiates – as do I – between a narrower and a broader meaning of the term. The narrower meaning for her refers to a unit which is “fixed and semantically opaque or metaphorical” (Moon 1998: 4, emphasis mine) while the broader concerns “a general term of many kinds of multi-word item, whether semantically opaque or not” (Moon 1998: 4). In her own study, Moon subsumes the notion of idiom under the category of fixed expressions and idioms for which she uses the acronym FEIs, but uses idiom only “to refer loosely to semitransparent and opaque metaphorical expressions such as spill the beans and burn one’s candle at both ends” (Moon 1998: 5, italics in original), i.e. she gives it a narrow meaning. This brief account of Moon’s (1998) introductory pages can be seen as a good example of the various dilemmas posed by the topic and resolved differently by individual researchers. One of the main problems, also mentioned by Moon (1998: 4), is how to differentiate between whether (and when) terms such as idiom or fixed expression are used as superordinates and when they are used as hyponyms in different studies. Thus, edited collections entitled Phraseology such as Cowie (1998b), Skandera (2007) and Granger and Meunier (2008b) encompass contributions which focus on phenomena like formulaic language, routine phrases, collocations, multi-word units, fixed expressions, greetings, idioms, proverbs and similes. Thus, we might propose that a term like phraseology – and closely related terms such as phraseological units or phrasal lexemes (cf. Cowie 1998a: 1; Moon 1998: 5) or multi-word units (MWUs) (Grant & Bauer 2004; Granger & Meunier 2008a: xix) – can be considered superordinate terms which encompass (more or less) the entire range of expressions identified by Sinclair’s idiom principle. Yet, other terms like fixed expressions (Moon 1998) or prefabs (Erman & Warren 2000) or formulaic language (Wray 2008) are in fact also often used as superordinates, regarded as more or less synonymous to phraseology or multi-word units. Although the term idiom itself is occasionally also used as a superordinate, it seems to be regarded as a more narrowly defined subcategory of the superordinate phraseology/prefab group in most publications. For the purposes of this book, idiom will therefore not be used as a superordinate term, but will be defined in the more narrow sense, following Moon (1998) as semantically opaque or semi-transparent conventionally metaphorical expressions. What is important to note with regard to the superordinate category is that, in contrast to the noun idiom, the adjective idiomatic is generally associated

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with the superordinate group. Seeing that this meaning of idiomatic is very common in lay language as well as in linguistics, this is also how it will be used in this book. Thus, I use the term idiomatic expression(s) (IEs) as common denominator for the broad superordinate phraseology/formulaic/MWU group. This means that idiom(s) and idiomatic expression(s) are not considered synonyms in this book, but rather as superordinate (idiomatic expression) and subordinate term (idiom). Idioms are thus regarded as one type of IEs with low frequency, whereas many other types of IEs (such as collocations, phraseological units or formulaic language) tend to be high in frequency, but low in metaphoricity. These latter groups of high-frequency IEs will not be the focus of this study (but see e.g. Mauranen 2012; Vetchinnikova 2015 for insights on ELF phraseology).

2.2.2 Old (labelling) habits die hard: Idiomatic = nativelike? As I have argued elsewhere (Pitzl 2009: 301–302), some researchers (e.g. Prodromou 2007b, 2008) seem to equate idiomaticity in general with the use of L1 speakers’ IEs. A position like this entails that “[i]diomaticity then implicitly always means L1-idiomaticity, which in turn makes it difficult to see how idiomaticity could possibly exist in or be relevant for ELF at all” (Pitzl 2009: 301–302). In the following, I will comment briefly on why this equation of terms and concepts proves unsatisfactory, with regard to language use in general, but especially with regard to ELF. In corpus studies investigating the realization of Sinclair’s idiom principle in L1 use, one encounters descriptors for the superordinate category prefab (i.e. a term considered more or less synonymous with IE in this study) which define it as “a combination of at least two words favored by native speakers in preference to an alternative combination which could have been equivalent had there been no conventionalization” (Erman & Warren 2000: 31, emphasis mine). The main criterion for assigning prefab status is called “restricted exchangeability” (Erman & Warren 2000: 32) by the authors: There has to be at least one word in the prefab which cannot be replaced by a synonym without this effecting a change in meaning or function or without the resulting IE becoming “marked or unidiomatic” (Erman & Warren 2000: 33, emphasis mine). So what is central to the criterion of restricted exchangeability – and thus for deciding if something is an IE or not – is the notion of the *native speaker. This has the consequence that Erman and Warren’s (2000) fairly context-independent assessment of prefab status is partly circular. On the one hand, it is heavily based on *native speaker intuitions about which alterations would be seen to bring

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about a change in meaning or function or result in an expression being perceived as “unidiomatic”. On the other hand, the authors concede that “there is some indeterminacy among language users [i.e. *native speakers] as to what would be seen as common and acceptable combinations and what would not” (Erman & Warren 2000: 34). So the myth of infallible *native speaker intuitions is both evoked and questioned. While relying on L1 speakers’ intuitive judgments of what constitutes acceptable versus unidiomatic choices, the authors point out that these judgments will not be the same for all members of an L1 speech community (Erman & Warren 2000: 33). An important precursor of this broad sense of particular expressions being regarded as idiomatic is Pawley and Syder’s (1983) notion of “nativelike selection”, which denotes the ability of the native speaker routinely to convey his [sic] meaning by an expression that is not only grammatical but also nativelike; what is puzzling about this is how he [sic] selects a sentence that is natural and idiomatic from among the range of grammatically correct paraphrases, many of which are non-nativelike or highly marked usages. (Pawley & Syder 1983: 191)

Of course, this publication dates back 35 years, before ELF and also World Englishes appeared on the map of sociolinguistics (and when speakers were still commonly referred to only as “he”). So it is not surprising that, for Pawley and Syder (1983), idiomatic meant “nativelike”. What is striking is how little the notion of idiomatic has changed in the past decades. When Pawley and Syder (1983: 191) proposed that “fluent and idiomatic control of a language rests to a considerable extent on knowledge of a body of ‘sentence stems’ which are ‘institutionalized’ or lexicalized’” (emphasis mine) and “whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed”, they intended to describe “nativelike” language use. And they did so explicitly by referring to it as “nativelike” in the title of their chapter. Almost twenty years later in 2001, however, the Council of Europe still essentially used idiomatic with the same meaning in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). Crucially, in the CEFR this is done without being explicit about this link. When the word idiomatic occurs in the CEFR (mostly in C1 and C2 descriptors), it essentially seems to mean ‘what a *native speaker would say/use’. Having presumably become more marked as a term, the word nativelike never occurs in the framework, however. The new CEFR companion volume (Council of Europe 2017) has dropped most instances of referring to *native speakers, but continues to use the term idiomatic (see Chapter 8). In the course of time, idiomatic thus seems to have absorbed the meaning of “nativelike” in many contexts. This makes it extremely difficult to disentangle the two notions and to

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even begin to conceive of idiomatic as a quality that is not exclusively tied to *native speaker use.

2.2.3 Idioms vs. idiomatizing: Product and process This section will briefly explore the terminological and conceptual distinction between idiom as a (more or less) stable linguistic product and idiomatizing (cf. Seidlhofer 2009a, 2011) as an ongoing linguistic process. Similar to Moon (1998) and other scholars afterwards, in their influential article, Pawley and Syder (1983) also already distinguish between idiomatic (i.e. *nativelike) use and what they call true idioms: “[M]ost lexicalized sentence stems are not true idioms, in the sense of having a meaning not predictable from the internal structure. Rather they are literal expressions, in most cases” (Pawley & Syder 1983: 211, emphasis mine). This is in line with the distinction between a wide meaning of idiomatic and the narrow sense of idiom proposed also in this book. In addition, Pawley and Syder’s definition mentions non-literalness as an essential characteristic of true idioms, thus linking idioms to figurative language and metaphorical expressions (more on this below). The emphasis is on idioms (and IEs) as linguistic expressions as the result of *nativelike selection. The communicative processes needed for the actual emergence and conventionalization of such expressions in the first place remain largely in the background. Following the argument presented by Seidlhofer (2011), the position adopted in this study is that idioms and IEs constitute actual linguistic products, i.e. phrases and expressions with a (more or less accessible and transparent) figurative or metaphorical meaning, while idiomatizing refers to the process which leads to the creation, re-creation, interactional uptake, functional (re)use and potential conventionalization or institutionalization of these products: The idiomatizing function as a communicative process is exemplified by the forms of particular idiomatic wordings, but it cannot, of course, be equated with them. The idiomatic patterning that typifies current usage is simply a snapshot, the static representation of a continuing process. Thus what we find described in grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks is just such a snapshot, based on large-scale corpus analysis of current ENL usage and revealing patterns of idiomatic wording attested as having been produced in ENL communities. (Seidlhofer 2011: 130, italics in original)

Thus, idiomatizing as a general process which is characteristic of all natural languages can take place uncoupled and detached from L1 speakers’ conventional and codified IEs.

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2.2.4 Conventional variability One crucial aspect of comments concerning the variability of idioms is the problem of authors evoking and simultaneously questioning the notion of single choice. Following the notion of Sinclair’s (1991) idiom principle, Erman and Warren (2000: 48) stipulate, for example, that prefabs generally involve a single choice by a speaker (or writer) in which a multi-word phrase is retrieved from the mental lexicon. But at the same time, they concede that certain prefabs also involve additional choices, since they allow for the substitution of semantically related or even contrastive words or syntactic variations in phrases like for some / a short / long while and she stands / will stand up to him (Erman & Warren 2000: 48–49). In relation to ELF, one crucial aspect in which things have certainly moved forward in the past three decades is how idiom variation is evaluated: [E]ach such sentence stem has a more or less unique grammar; each one is subject to a somewhat different range of phrase structure and transformational restrictions. It is a characteristic error of the language learner to assume that an element in the expression may be varied according to a phrase structure or transformational rule of some generality, when in fact the variation (if any) allowed in nativelike usage is much more restricted. The result, very often, is an utterance that is grammatical but unidiomatic e.g. You are pulling my legs (in the sense of deceiving me). (Pawley & Syder 1983: 214–215, italics in original)

As will have become apparent in the discussion of ELF and linguistic creativity, the theoretical approach adopted towards idiom variation in this study is clearly different from Pawley and Syder’s view of “errors of the language learner”. Nevertheless, the first sentence of the above quotation still holds true: Each idiom is “unique” in that it exhibits a particular internal lexical, syntactic and semantic structure which restricts its conventional variability, i.e. the boundaries of changes and adaptations that would be considered ‘normal’ and unmarked. As a result of this uniqueness of the internal structure of each idiom, the restrictions on what we might call the conventional variability of idioms cannot be generalized. We have finally arrived at the narrower sense of idioms as “complex bits of frozen syntax, whose meaning cannot be derived from the meaning of their constituents, that is, whose meanings are more than simply the sum of their individual parts” (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992: 33). But yet again, we are faced with the problem that (idiom) dictionaries, glossaries and typologies vary widely in their exact definitions and in regard to which (sub)categories they distinguish from each other or include within the class of idioms (cf. Jaeger 1999: 19). Thus, IEs like proverbs and sayings, which are listed alongside idioms by Moon (1998: 2) and are excluded from the taxonomy of idioms by Jaeger (1999: 36–37), are often mentioned as prime examples of idioms in dictionaries.

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Different idiom definitions, discussions and typologies suggest different solutions and boundaries between idiom and related categories. Yet, there are some concepts that are used recurrently, albeit partly applied differently, in many of these accounts. One of the most prominent and prototypical concepts, evidenced also in Nattinger and DeCarrico’s (1992: 33) definition, is the notion of non-compositionality, i.e. of idioms being regarded as “more than simply the sum of their individual parts”. Other recurring concepts are the idea of the conventionalization, conventionality or institutionalization of idioms (within a particular L1 speech community at any point in time), the notion of relative lexicalization and/or lexicogrammatical fixedness of idioms, and finally also the characteristics of non-literalness, figurativeness and metaphoricity. The relevance of these different concepts for the ELF approach to linguistic creativity in idiom use proposed in this study will be discussed below. It is suggested that the concepts of metaphor and metaphoricity merit special attention in relation to idiom use and especially idiom variation in ELF. It is argued that providing a precise and narrow definition of idiom is considerably less important for ELF than exploring how the metaphoricity and figurativeness inherent in many idioms affect their (creative) use in ELF contexts. Consequently, it is proposed that the focus of analysis needs to shift away from judging the correct vs. erroneous use of idioms (or idiomatic use) in ELF contexts. What we need to do is focus on idioms’ communicative usefulness and effectiveness in ELF settings, and potentially to seek explanations for the functional as well as structural processes that are involved in idiom (re-)creation and idiom interpretation in spoken ELF interactions. As we will see, metaphor has a special role to play in these processes. Before elaborating on the importance of the intricate idiom-metaphor-relationship, the next sections will explore the notions of metaphor and metaphoricity in more detail and provide some core definitions and conceptual distinctions adopted in this book.

2.3 Metaphor and metaphoricity At the most general level, a metaphor can be conceived of as “a device for seeing something in terms of something else” (Burke 1945: 503, quoted in Cameron 1999b: 3). However, as Cameron points out immediately after this statement, unfortunately this is already as far as the commonly accepted understanding of metaphor goes: “Once past this level of generality, disagreement develops in a mire of conglomerated detail, and intending researchers may find themselves reeling as they approach the published literature in order to select an appropriate theoretical and analytic framework for a study” (Cameron 1999b: 3). There is

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simply an abundance of literature on metaphor in linguistics which relates to and builds upon a range of different, often interrelated, yet also partly rather divergent, theoretical approaches. In a general non-linguistic context, a metaphor is usually first and foremost considered a figure of speech, namely “a word or phrase used to describe somebody/something else, in a way that is different from its normal use, in order to show that the two things have the same qualities and to make the description more powerful” (OALD 9: s.v. metaphor). Thus, a metaphor is not only a way of “seeing something in terms of something else”, but also a way of relating two words/things/concepts which are actually unrelated. It is this manner of relating two unrelated concepts which is essential to the phenomenon of metaphor and which therefore makes metaphor an inherently creative (linguistic) device that has the potential to bring forth novel associations and/or meanings. Metaphor is mentioned as an example of Boden’s (1999) combinational creativity and therefore constitutes a phenomenon which would be considered an instance of normfollowing creativity (see Chapter 1). Though, under some circumstances, it might also have the potential for norm-transcending creativity. This traditional semantic approach to metaphor as a figure of speech is not only relevant for a general understanding and conceptualization of metaphor, but it is also present in linguistics where many studies, at least partly, follow the semantic approach to metaphor as a compositional linguistic construction or device. Additionally, researchers in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics tend to regard metaphor more essentially as a phenomenon of thought than as a matter of language. Thus, many cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of metaphor are more or less closely associated with the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), which has its origin in the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) and will be briefly sketched and put in relation to ELF below. Within the CMT framework, metaphor is not primarily regarded as a linguistic phenomenon, but mainly denotes “a general pattern in which one domain is systematically conceived and spoken of in terms of another” (Matthews 2007: s.v. metaphor). In other words, metaphor is regarded as a core component of the way people’s thoughts are structured and thus it is considered central to how people perceive and also talk about the world around them. The general distinction often encountered in the literature on metaphor as a phenomenon of thought (i.e. metaphor as structuring thought) via-à-vis metaphor as a phenomenon of language (i.e. metaphors as figures of speech brought about by thought) already hints at the intricacies of the topic. Yet, even though metaphor is notoriously difficult to define, it is relatively “easy to point to examples of text fragments that almost everyone agrees are metaphorical” (Hanks 2006: 18). So the complexity lies in the question of what the statement

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that a stretch of language is metaphorical really entails; or rather, what this statement can or might or should entail in a particular research context. Because “[o]perationalising metaphor for a research study requires the researcher to establish appropriate theoretical frameworks that define and categorise the phenomena of concern, and that, having constrained what is counted as evidence, further constrain how that data can be analysed” (Cameron 1999b: 7). Thus, a researcher needs to decide whether the focus in a given study is primarily on metaphor as a linguistic and semantic phenomenon or as a mechanism structuring cognitive processes or on a combination of both, and should be aware of the consequences of each of these theoretical positions (Cameron 1999b: 8). As has been mentioned, what is particularly important with regard to this decision is the research context, i.e. the nature of the data available for analysis and the main purpose of a study. Thus, any theoretical framework which makes use of, and hence needs to operationalize, metaphor needs to be sensitive to the context of both, the type of data which is being analyzed as well as to the kind of research being conducted (cf. Cameron 1999b: 25). In the Introduction and in Chapter 1 I have already given some indication of what the research context, i.e. the data and main purpose, of the present study is: the description of spoken ELF as represented in VOICE. It makes sense to revisit these characteristics briefly (for more details see Chapter 3) in order to put them in relation to the operationalization of metaphor in the subsequent sections. In relation to the first aspect, i.e. the nature of the data, it has already been mentioned that this study draws on a corpus of transcribed naturally-occurring spoken ELF interactions. Thus, like many other studies about idioms and/or metaphors, my study relies on “third person observed data” (Widdowson 2000: 6) (from the interactions in a corpus) and does not, for example, incorporate first person evidence (e.g. introspection or think aloud protocols) or second person elicited evidence (such as appropriacy judgments or intelligibility ratings. In addition to this general characteristic of being third person observed evidence, the data are also naturally-occurring, i.e. “spontaneous” in Penke and Rosenbach’s (2007: 10–12) terminology: The interactions in VOICE were audiorecorded and subsequently transcribed according to a fairly detailed set of conventions informed by the conversation analytic tradition. Finally, the data are different in kind from the data found in other studies, because they are ELF data (see Chapter 3). All these aspects will have to have some bearing on how metaphor is to be conceptualized and operationalized in this book. With regard to the second aspect, the purpose of this study is to investigate linguistic creativity in terms of forms as well as discourse functions in ELF, placing particular emphasis on linguistic creativity in the use of idioms. In this

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respect, it is clear that the study at hand follows neither a cognitive nor a psycholinguistic (experimental) approach, but is essentially descriptive in nature. Nevertheless, because of the nature of the phenomenon under investigation, it also integrates some insights and findings from cognitive and psycholinguistic studies that suggest a strong link between idiom and metaphor on the one hand and that hint at the potentially universal nature of metaphor on the other hand. What will be shown in this study is that, to a large extent, the creation, interpretation and processing of metaphors is a capacity which is likely to be largely independent from a speaker’s L1 background and can be regarded as a general ability that is likely to be common to and shared by everyone (regardless of their L1). For example within historical linguistics (not just in relation to *English), metaphor is considered a well-established general mechanism of semantic change that brings about new meanings through metaphorical extension (cf. e.g. McMahon 1994: 256–257; Schendl 2001: 30). At this possibly universal level, metaphor is thus an intriguing phenomenon that has enormous potential in the research context of (spoken) ELF because it may function as a shared resource and mechanisms of linguistic creativity in ELF. The following subsections will introduce cognitive and psycholinguistic concepts of metaphor relevant to the study of ELF, before I focus on the more traditional semantic approach in Section 2.3.3. With regard to the general semantic quality of metaphor, I will introduce distinctions between dynamic vs. conventional, overt vs. covert, live vs. dead, and deliberate vs. opaque metaphors in order to map out the conceptual space for the analysis of metaphor and metaphoricity in Chapters 4 to 7. Seeing that the bigger research context of my study is linguistic creativity (in relation to idioms) in naturallyoccurring spoken ELF, the overview of the literature on metaphor which is provided here is necessarily selective and should not be seen as comprehensive. It draws only on those concepts found to be of immediate relevance to establishing a theoretical framework for the analysis of linguistic creativity in ELF idiom use.

2.3.1 Cognitive aspects: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and ELF As has been mentioned above, the most influential approach to metaphor in cognitive linguistics dates back almost 40 years to the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and their book Metaphors we live by (1980). What was noteworthy about Lakoff and Johnson’s work and what continues to influence scholars

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working on metaphor in cognitive and/or psycholinguistic paradigms until today is their proposition that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system. Therefore, whenever in this book we speak of metaphors, such as ARGUMENT IS WAR, it should be understood that metaphor means metaphorical concept (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 6, italics in original).

So Lakoff and Johnson’s main argument is that cognitive concepts are “metaphorically structured” and that this is why language and linguistic output are “metaphorically structured”. Lakoff and Johnson argue for the importance of what they call conceptual metaphors, such as the above mentioned example of ARGUMENT IS WAR or other metaphorical concepts like LOVE IS A JOURNEY.2 These conceptual metaphors are seen to structure human thought systems and hence have a bearing on how we talk about the world. Formulations like She shot down my argument or I attacked his position (my examples) would thus be seen as individual actualizations and linguistic realizations of the underlying ‘conceptual metaphor’ ARGUMENT IS WAR. With regard to terminology, I would like to point out that conceptual metaphors are also occasionally referred to as “conventional metaphors” by Lakoff and Johnson (e.g. 1980: 152), which has led to some terminological ambiguity (and potential synonymy) between the two terms. This is evidenced in the following statement by Gibbs, for example, who contrasts “conventional metaphors” (= conceptual metaphors) and “historical metaphors”: “This position fails to distinguish between conventional metaphors, which are part of our live conceptual system (e.g., LOVE IS A NUTRIENT), and historical metaphors that have long since died out” (Gibbs 1993: 60, emphasis mine). In the framework of the present study, the terms conceptual metaphor and conventional metaphor are not used synonymously but are taken to denote different concepts. While the former (conceptual metaphor) is used to refer to the traditional Lakoff and Johnson notion of metaphorical concepts like ARGUMENT IS WAR, the latter (conventional metaphor) denotes something similar to Gibbs’ notion of historical metaphor, namely expressions or words that have conventional, codified institutionalized metaphorical meanings.

2 As is common practice, conceptual metaphors are indicated via capital letters (i.e. ARGUMENT IS WAR) in this book.

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While metaphorical concepts like ARGUMENT IS WAR can be regarded as prototypical examples of conceptual metaphors, CMT also proposes that there are more basic or simple metaphors which, according to Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 66), are necessary in order to arrive at the more complex conceptual metaphors. Prime examples of such simple metaphors are orientational and ontological metaphors rooted in people’s physical experience. While orientational metaphors may, for example, be spatialization metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 16), ontological metaphors relate to experiences with physical objects. These experiences “provide the basis for an extraordinarily wide variety of […] ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc. as entities and substances” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 25). Some of the most salient subcategories of ontological metaphors are personification, i.e. objects, activities or emotions being conceived of as persons and being attributed human characteristics (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 33), and container metaphors, which map the in-out orientation of the human embodied experience onto physical objects, abstract entities and concepts (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 29). The reason why I am drawing attention to this distinction between structural conceptual metaphors on the one hand and more simple ontological and orientational metaphors proposed in CMT on the other hand, is that these two dimensions of cognitive metaphorical structuring have different levels of (regio-cultural) entrenchment. That is to say, orientational and ontological metaphors are so natural and pervasive in human thought that they are hardly noticed as being metaphorical (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 28). Relating this assumption to ELF, we might add that this is largely the case because these more basic metaphors are fairly independent of regio-cultural contexts. Rather than being shaped by a speaker’s regio-cultural background, they are grounded in people’s immediate physical experience. So although there may be regiocultural – and hence linguistic – differences as to which aspects of physical and embodied experience are central in the metaphorical structuring of thought, the general repertoire or range of ontological metaphors can be considered fairly universal and thus presumably shared by all human beings regardless of their L1 and regio-cultural background – and thus by all participants in an ELF interaction. In contrast to basic ontological and orientational metaphors, more complex prototypical structural conceptual metaphors like ARGUMENT IS WAR or TIME IS A RESOURCE are very much ‘culture’-specific and grounded in (regio-)cultural realities. They tend to represent cultural values (or value systems) and social practices of a particular group of people. As an illustration, Lakoff and Johnson themselves give the following example:

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LABOR IS A RESOURCE and TIME IS A RESOURCE are by no means universal. They emerged naturally in our culture because of the way we view work, our passion for quantification, and our obsession with purposeful ends. These metaphors highlight those aspects of labor and time that are centrally important in our culture. In doing this, they also deemphasize or hide certain aspects of labor and time. We can see what both metaphors hide by examining what they focus on. (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 67, emphasis mine).

So although concepts like LABOR/TIME IS A RESOURCE may be valid conceptual metaphors in Anglo-American cultural contexts (and possibly in other industrialized contexts and/or nation-states), the relevance of these conceptual metaphors cannot simply be taken for granted for all contexts. Hence, it would appear that structural conceptual metaphors (like ARGUMENT IS WAR and LABOR/TIME IS A RESOURCE) are only of limited relevance to ELF, which is by definition a liminal space in which speakers from different backgrounds interact. It is simply unlikely (though not impossible) that all ELF speakers in an interaction share the same conceptual metaphors that structure their thought. The more basic types of metaphorical concepts like spatialization, embodiment or container metaphors, however, are much more likely to be shared by speakers with different L1s and different regio-cultural backgrounds, since the experiential basis which they originate from comes from “basic domains of experience” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 117). Lakoff and Johnson summarize the question of what such “basic domains of experience” are and what it is that makes them “natural kinds of experience” that are, to different degrees, dependent on or independent from particular regio-cultures: This raises a fundamental question: What constitutes a ‘basic domain of experience’? Each such domain is a structured whole within our experience that is conceptualized as what we have called an experiential gestalt. Such gestalts are experientially basic because they characterize structured wholes within recurrent human experiences. They represent coherent organizations of our experiences in terms of natural dimensions (parts, stages, causes, etc.). Domains of experience that are organized as gestalts in terms of such natural dimensions seem to us to be natural kinds of experience. They are natural in the following sense: These kinds of experiences are a product of Our bodies (perceptual and motor apparatus, mental capacities, emotional makeup, etc.) Our interactions with our physical environment (moving, manipulating objects, eating, etc.) Our interaction with other people within our culture (in terms of social, political, economic, and religious institutions) In other words, these ‘natural’ kinds of experience are products of human nature. Some may be universal, while others will vary from culture to culture. (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 117– 118, italics in original)

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Examples of such basic general (and fairly universal) metaphorical connections might be the link between embodied forward movement and abstract notions like progress or process (see Sections 4.1.1.4 and 6.1) or the close link between the embodied terms head and brain and the abstract notion of mind (see Section 6.3.3). In essence, this summary captures why CMT is of relevance, albeit only to a certain degree, to ELF: On the one hand, some natural kinds of experience, namely interaction with our physical environment and the experience of our bodies, can be regarded as fairly universal. These are therefore likely to have a bearing on the use of metaphors (and on the role of metaphoricity) in ELF. ELF speakers are bound to share basic metaphorical concepts that are ontological and grounded in physical reality. On the other hand, those metaphors which reside in people’s experience of interacting with other people within their ‘regio-culture’ are prone to be different for each ELF speaker. There may, of course, be overlaps between individual ELF speakers, but generally we cannot assume that they are shared by everyone. In short, while some natural kinds of experiences are more physical and thus potentially more relevant as a shared and common resource in ELF, others are more ‘regio-cultural’ and thus less likely to be relevant as a shared resource in ELF. It is primarily with regard to the potential inherent in the shared basic ontological and possibly also orientational metaphors that CMT might have a place in a theoretical framework for linguistic creativity in idiom use in ELF.

2.3.2 Psycholinguistic aspects: Linguistic metaphor and metaphoric potential A psycholinguistic concept I consider relevant to the description of linguistic creativity in idiom use in naturally-occurring spoken ELF is the distinction between process metaphor and linguistic metaphor proposed by Lynne Cameron (1999a: 108–109). Cameron’s methodology and work on metaphor combines and reconciles positions to metaphor from cognitive, semantic and psycholinguistic frameworks in order to arrive at metaphor categories and definitions that can be operationalized for the analysis of naturally-occurring interactional spoken language (not ELF, though). Her conceptual distinction of process metaphor and linguistic metaphor I find useful not only in relation to L1 naturally-occurring language use, but also for conceiving of what happens in ELF and which claims can – and cannot – be made on the basis of an analysis of the ELF data in VOICE. Process metaphors are “identified through work within the processing level, as processed metaphorically by a discourse participant on a particular occasion”

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(Cameron 1999a: 108). Evidence for such metaphoric processing, i.e. parameters for the identification of process metaphors in discourse, therefore requires some kind of first person introspective evidence from a speaker in order to determine whether an expression was indeed processed metaphorically or not. Since most linguistic corpora (including VOICE) only capture third person observed data and do not incorporate introspective ex-post material, this kind of evidence is usually not available in corpus linguistic studies. So the status of an expression as a process metaphor cannot be validated or falsified on the basis of the third person ELF data used in this book. Hence, process metaphors cannot be a focus of analysis. In contrast to process metaphors, linguistic metaphors are “identified through work within the theory level, as stretches of language having metaphoric potential” (Cameron 1999a: 108, emphasis mine). That is to say, linguistic metaphors are stretches of language which the researcher or analyst identifies as allowing for metaphorical processing because of a (perceived) “domain incongruity” (Cameron 1999a: 108), i.e. because they involve concepts from two different conceptual domains (see Chapter 3). Note that these two conceptual domains may manifest themselves in third person data in different ways. They can be individual words, but also longer phrases or they may be absent in actual linguistic output, so that a topic is given purely through context. In this last case, a metaphor arises even though we can never actually point to the prototypical form of a metaphor, i.e. A is B, in corpus data (see Chapter 3). Cameron’s (1999a) definition relates to the general semantic conceptualization of metaphor as being a linguistic device which relates two essentially unrelated things/words/concepts, a theoretical approach very different to CMT frameworks. These two different things/words/concepts that a metaphor combines are referred to by different labels of terminology in the literature, which are too numerous to discuss here in detail. Among the most common ways of referring to these two different things/words/concepts are the terms topic and vehicle (e.g. Kittay 1987: 26), which will be used in this study. What is crucial to the present study is that a central aspect of Cameron’s theoretical and empirical approach to the identification and analysis of linguistic metaphors in naturally-occurring language is that “we no longer need evidence of an imaginative leap between disjunctive domains. Metaphor can be identified without evidence that users intended or invoked metaphorical processing” (Cameron 2006: 47). This makes it possible to integrate a psycholinguistic dimension to descriptive research on metaphor which relies on third person evidence (i.e. VOICE) to some small extent. Making use of Cameron’s notion of metaphoric

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potential means to argue that metaphor processing could theoretically take/have taken place with regard to a particular linguistic expression and making this a central criterion for identifying a linguistic metaphor. The likelihood of metaphor processing actually having occurred on the part of speaker and/or listener(s) will depend on the degree of metaphoricity and domain incongruity of a particular expression (see below). The concept of linguistic metaphor thus moves away from the uni-directional relationship proposed in cognitive CMT frameworks in which metaphorically structured thought is seen to lead to metaphorical linguistic output. Rather, Cameron’s operationalization strives to regard metaphor in thought and language as “a two-way interaction within a single complex system” (Cameron & Deignan 2006: 674). Starting from the linguistic level of surface forms, this approach identifies (psycholinguistic) metaphoric potential without claiming that metaphor processing actually needs to have taken place. Of course, this is by no means a straightforward matter. In identifying expressions which have metaphoric potential, the central criterion rests on the notion of domain incongruity that exists between topic and vehicle (terms). What is actually identified as topic and vehicle would have different outcomes in a cognitive (CMT) versus a general semantic approach to the analysis of metaphors, however. Within a CMT perspective, topic and vehicle would not be regarded as surface forms, but would refer to the underlying systems of semantic and contextual information (Cameron 1999b: 14). So an expression like this paper thinks would be regarded as a linguistic instance of the conceptual metaphor THIS PAPER IS A PERSON, which would make PAPER the topic of the metaphor and PERSON the vehicle (Cameron 1999b: 14). Notably, there is no linguistic realization of the vehicle PERSON in the linguistic expression, however. The vehicle is identified in the conceptual metaphor – and not in the actual linguistic output recorded in a conversation – and is realized in different linguistic expressions, in the given example through the word thinks. A general semantic analysis of surface forms, on the other hand, would not presuppose an underlying conceptual metaphorical structure and simply identify the surface form this paper as the topic and thinks as the vehicle (Cameron 1999b: 14). Yet, also within the analysis of surface features, some would take the term vehicle to refer to the lexical item only (Cameron 1999a: 118), whereas others suggest that the vehicle is both “the label itself and the content that label conveys literally” (Kittay 1987: 26, italics in original). Similarly, topic “suggests not an expression in a text, but rather what a text is speaking about” (Kittay 1987: 26). Therefore, the topic “may or may not be explicitly lexicalized in the stretch of talk” (Cameron 1999a: 118), which has implications for the methodology used in corpus analysis (see Chapter 3).

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So from what has been said above, it is evident that different topic and vehicle terms and/or concepts have different degrees of domain incongruity – and thus different linguistic expressions exhibit different degrees of metaphoricity. This is why the next section will address a number of terminological and conceptual distinctions which relate to different degrees of metaphoricity. It will explore how these might be categorized and made sense of from a theoretical point of view, in order to map out a conceptual space in which the analysis of linguistic creativity and metaphorical expressions can take place in the present study.

2.3.3 Semantic aspects: Degrees of metaphoricity I have already talked about the identification of topic and vehicle (terms) and indicated some of the difficulties that arise in analysis in this respect. A crucial aspect which, in a way, accompanies the process of metaphor identification relates to the question of who is to determine whether and to what degree domain incongruity exists in a particular linguistic expression and on what grounds such decisions are to be taken. There are a number of factors which might influence the judgment of how big or noticeable the distance between two semantic concepts is in a particular linguistic metaphor. Or, to put it differently, how big an imaginative leap is necessary in order to resolve the “tension” (Cameron & Low 1999: 80) that exists between topic and vehicle (or source and target) domain. This aspect of (the degree of) domain incongruity in linguistic metaphors is one way in which the metaphoricity of an expression (e.g. a creative idiom) can be ‘judged’ or ‘measured’. Adopting a general semantic approach to metaphor, i.e. focusing on linguistic output and interactional discourse (rather than primarily on cognitive structures, principles and processing), we thus have to come to terms with the fact that some linguistic expressions are more metaphorical than others (Hanks 2006; Stefanowitsch 2006: 6) and that this is strongly influenced by context: The same expression might have different degrees of metaphoricity in different discourse contexts, depending on what the main topic of conversation is at the time. Of course, a crucial question in this respect is who is to decide how metaphorical a particular expression at a particular occasion is. While this question is already complex with regard to a (more or less) homogenous L1 group, it is all the more challenging when dealing with naturally-occurring ELF, which always happens in a multilingual and transcultural context. With regard to L1 use, the notion of speech community (or discourse community, see below) tends to be evoked in order to identify metaphors, making reference to what is ‘normal’ to an average

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member of the L1 discourse community. But quite clearly, this idealized L1 yardstick is not applicable to ELF. So in addition to the condition of domain incongruity, a stretch of language is said to be a linguistic metaphor only if it is possible for a receiver (in general, or a particular person), as a member of a particular discourse community, to find a coherent interpretation which makes sense of the incongruity in its discourse context, and which involves some transfer of meaning for the Vehicle domain. (Cameron 1999a: 118)

The prototypical assumption for the identification of a linguistic metaphor is for the discourse context to be situated in a monolingual discourse community in which all speakers share the same regio-cultural and linguistic background. Correspondingly, speech errors qualify as exceptions and are regarded as instances where, although domain incongruity occurs, this does not indicate the occurrence of a metaphor (cf. Kittay 1987: 84). It is evident from what has been said in the Introduction and Chapter 1 that an ELF situation is different. This is because, firstly, the notion of speech error is largely irrelevant and inapplicable. Secondly, ELF interactants are not members of a speech community but tend to form TIGs (and maybe sometimes ELF-CoPs) (see Chapter 1). What I will attempt to do in the following is to provide a theoretical and conceptual space for the analysis of metaphorical expressions in this book. The conceptual model in Table 2.1 is informed by the discussion of metaphoric potential and linguistic metaphor provided in the previous section. It is also loosely based on many conceptual distinctions (and terms) found in the literature on metaphor. Yet, essentially it is my own attempt to conceptualize different types of metaphors and degrees of metaphoricity in order to have a theoretical (and terminological) framework for the analysis of linguistic creativity in ELF. The conceptual model in Table 2.1 relies on four basic parameters that are deemed relevant for the analysis of metaphors in naturally-occurring speech: codification, domain incongruity, lexicalization and speaker intention. It is according to these four parameters that the metaphoricity of a linguistic expression might be determined. Within each parameter, the conceptual model in Table 2.1 identifies two theoretical concepts (with corresponding terms) that are considered to be the extreme poles of what we might call a metaphoricity cline or continuum. This gives rise to eight types of metaphor, which will be used in analysis of linguistic and metaphorical creativity in this book. Before I discuss these different parameters and types of metaphors in more detail below, a few general remarks are necessary. For one, by looking at Table 2.1, it should be apparent that the four different parameters according to which, I am suggesting, metaphoricity can be determined (i.e. codification, domain

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Table 2.1: Types of metaphors. CODIFICATION Conventional metaphor

Dynamic metaphor

Codified metaphorical/figurative meaning in dictionary.

Newly coined, original, not codified.

(Degree of) DOMAIN INCONGRUITY (in a specific context) Covert metaphor (~ Weak metaphor)

Overt metaphor (~ Strong metaphor)

Low level of domain incongruity. Low degree of metaphoricity.

High level of domain incongruity. High degree of metaphorcity.

SYNCHRONIC STATE OF DIACHRONIC DEVELOPMENT: INSTITUTIONALIZATION / LEXICALIZATION Dead metaphor

Live metaphor (~ active metaphor)

Expression no longer recognized as metaphorical (by L1 speaker). Virtually no probability of metaphor processing for L1 speaker. Unpredictable probability of metaphor processing for ELF speaker.

Expression immediately recognizedas metaphorical (by L1 speaker). Very high probability of metaphor processing for L1 speaker. Likely: very high probability of metaphor processing for ELF speaker.

SPEAKER INTENTION: flouting COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE (CP), intended CREATIVE EFFECT (ideational vs. interpersonal function) Opaque metaphor

Deliberate metaphor

No evidence in data suggests that metaphor is Evidence in data suggests that metaphor is intentionally produced for creative effect intentionally produced for creative effect (→ intentional creativity). Likely: 1st person orientation (~ ideational Likely: 2nd person orientation (~ interpersonal function) function)

incongruity, lexicalization and speaker intention) are not mutually exclusive. They can – and in fact often do – apply to the same linguistic expression. So an expression like up to my big toe I’m a cargo guy (see Pitzl 2009: 312 and Chapter 6) can be described as a dynamic overt metaphor. Similarly, words like rebirth and reborn can be conventional overt deliberate metaphors (see Chapter 6). While it might be more likely that one expression is best described through a combination

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of terms from one side of the spectrum in Table 2.1, the examples of rebirth and reborn just mentioned show that combinations of metaphor types from both poles are also possible. In contrast to combining terms from different parameters in order to describe one and the same linguistic expression, the metaphor types within each parameter are mutually exclusive, of course, since they represent the (idealized) endpoints of a continuum of metaphoricity within the parameter. One word or expression can therefore be characterized as a (more or less) covert or a (more or less) overt metaphor, but it cannot be a covert overt metaphor at the same time. Let us now turn to each of the parameters and types of metaphor in more detail, starting with the parameters codification and domain incongruity and the types of metaphor proposed for them. For codification, the main distinction I am proposing is between conventional metaphor and dynamic metaphor (see Table 2.1). This distinction is, for example, introduced by Hanks (2006: 17) who describes it the following way: “Dynamic metaphors are coined ad hoc to express some new insight; conventional metaphors are just one more kind of normal use of language”. So the notion of dynamic metaphor refers to expressions that are, to some extent, novel and creative in the sense that speakers create them on the spot. In contrast to these, the term conventional metaphor I use to refer to individual words or expressions that have metaphoric meaning that is established enough to be found in dictionaries. Closely related, but still distinct to this notion of conventional metaphor (i.e. a codified figurative expression) is what I have termed covert (or weak) metaphor in relation to domain incongruity. The term covert metaphor I take to refer to individual words or expressions that have a low degree of metaphoricity in the sense that the “cognitive salience” (Hanks 2006: 22) of the resonance between topic and vehicle is very low. This low cognitive salience of an expression/word as metaphorical can be due to the frequent figurative use of a word/phrase, with cognitive salience having decreased over time; or it can be because domain incongruity is low to begin with. In either case, resonance and domain incongruity are low, so covert metaphors are not generally perceived as being particularly metaphoric, regardless of whether they are codified or not. At the other end of the spectrum, we find the concept of overt metaphor, a word or expression that is clearly metaphorical because it sticks out from the surrounding language. An overt metaphor creates a high degree of domain incongruity and resonance between topic and vehicle (for example, the use of big toe in relation to being devoted to the cargo business). An example of a covert metaphor, which would qualify as conventional (i.e. codified) metaphor at the same time, would be “the use of area to denote an

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abstract domain” (Hanks 2006: 22, italics in original). Similar cases would be abstract uses of terms like push, cover, side or level, for example in presenting an argument in academic writing. Covert metaphors like these still carry the potential of being processed metaphorically, but they will often not be perceived as incongruous to the topic that is being talked about. This is why in many instances they will not be perceived as metaphors at all. Crucially though – and highly important with regard to linguistic creativity and idiom use in ELF – the metaphoricity of covert metaphors might be reemphasized at any given point, for example through formal variation (see below and Chapter 4). Many covert metaphors will in fact also be conventional metaphors whose metaphorical meaning can be found in dictionaries, either as a separate secondary, tertiary, etc entry (i.e. as polysemy) or as an additional meaning that is labeled figurative/metaphorical. Otherwise, apart from the formal criterion of codification for conventional metaphors, the two metaphor categories (i.e. conventional and covert) are very closely related and share many characteristics. Many researchers (e.g. Goatly 1997: 30–40) have stressed the impact of metaphorical processes on lexical meanings in terms of meaning change, gradual conventionalization and lexicalization of new meanings. Thus, the parameter of institutionalization/lexicalization in relation to a synchronic-diachronic dimension is included as the third parameter in Table 2.1. A category (and term) that is frequently used by scholars in this respect is the notion of dead metaphor, which tends to be contrasted – at the other end of the spectrum – with live (or active) metaphor. Arguing the need of having some generally accepted classification of metaphor, Max Black, for example, points out that [t]he only entrenched classification is grounded in the trite opposition (itself expressed metaphorically) between ‘dead’ and ‘live’ metaphors. This is not more helpful than, say, treating a corpse as a special case of a person: A so-called dead metaphor is not a metaphor at all, but merely an expression that no longer has a pregnant metaphorical use. (Black 1993: 25)

Statements like these raise the important question of what is meant by the (often evoked) notion of a dead metaphor. Because even though the term is prominent in many studies – and gets frequently mentioned particularly in relation to the analysis of idioms (see Section 2.4.1 below) – there are considerable differences as to what researchers mean when making use of the term. While some researchers within a CMT framework might attach the label dead to metaphorical concepts which are “marginal” and “do not interact with other metaphors” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 55), the more widespread “objectivist” view of dead metaphors is that they are “homonyms, deriving historically from oncelive metaphors” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 214):

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An objectivist might grant that digest an idea was once a metaphor, but he [sic] would claim that it is no longer metaphorical. For him [sic] it is a ‘dead metaphor,’ one that has become conventionalized and has its own literal meaning. This is to say that there are two homonymous words digest. The objectivist would probably grant that digest1 [i.e. food] and digest2 [i.e. an idea] have similar meanings and that the similarity is the basis for the original metaphor. This, he [sic] would say, explains why the same word is used to express two different meanings; it was once a metaphor, it became a conventionalized part of the language; it died and became frozen, taking its old metaphorical meaning as a new literal meaning. (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 211–212, italics in original)

This objectivist position, which Lakoff and Johnson clearly distance themselves from, is certainly the most categorical view in relation to diachronic metaphorical developments and changes in meaning prompted by metaphor. In this extreme position, the metaphorical origins of synchronic meanings of homonyms like mouse1 (i.e. animal) and mouse2 (i.e. computer hardware) are considered completely irrelevant and hence dead. While such an extreme position is difficult to maintain even in relation to an L1 speech community (where the diachronic metaphorical link between homonyms can be reestablished again), it is even more debatable whether and how this strong view can or should be maintained in relation to ELF. Nevertheless, in mapping the conceptual territory of degrees of metaphoricity for this study, also this strong position deserves to be mentioned as a extreme view on the diachronic-synchronic spectrum of the lexicalization of metaphors. Adopting a less extreme position that relates to the general category of linguistic metaphor (see below), one might alternatively label a particular expression or word a dead metaphor if it is assigned “a very low probability of being given ‘active analogical processing’ by members of particular discourse communities” (Cameron 1999b: 24). At the other end of the spectrum, a live metaphor (or active metaphor) would have a very high probability of metaphor processing. The last parameter proposed in Table 2.1 relates most directly to the notion of linguistic creativity and particularly to the subcategory of intentional creativity (see Chapter 1 and Chapter 8). This last parameter puts the focus on pragmatic speaker intention and on deliberate metaphors as intentional instances of flouting the Cooperative Principle. In this functional and pragmatic view, metaphors can be (more or less) deliberate, i.e. uttered intentionally as metaphors in order to achieve a creative effect in listeners. In contrast to this, expressions and words may be opaque metaphors that are produced without a speaker actually having intended to use metaphorical language (as far as this can be determined on the basis of corpus evidence and contextual information). An opaque metaphor

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happens accidentally, so to speak, as a speaker tries to express him- or herself clearly and effectively. In Hallidayan terms, opaque metaphors thus are likely to fulfill primarily an ideational function, i.e. they tend to be used in order to refer to objects in the world, explain a topic, describe something etc. A deliberate metaphor, on the other hand, will (in addition to being ideational) always also appeal to the interpersonal function, since it is produced by a speaker intentionally in order to achieve an effect (e.g. humor, emphasis etc.). Importantly, this final parameter of speaker intention relates the analysis of metaphor in spoken language (including ELF) to a pragmatic perspective. It emphasizes the spoken language and interactional component and argues that an analysis of metaphorical expressions needs more than formal semantic classification through an identification of topic and vehicle terms. In discussing the different parameters and metaphor types it will have become apparent that metaphors produced in naturally-occurring spoken language – and hence also in ELF – will usually not be categorized as either–or phenomena within a parameter. Rather, analyzing them will be a matter of describing and categorizing them as ‘more or less’ phenomena in relation to each parameter continuum. So although metaphors can theoretically be either conventional or dynamic, either covert or overt, either dead or live, and either deliberate or opaque, in practice most metaphorical expressions in real language use will be more or less conventional/dynamic, covert/overt, dead/live, deliberate/opaque. In order to come to terms with this gradedness of metaphoricity, some scholars have proposed more refined labels and categories in order to distinguish more clearly between different degrees of metaphoricity, in relation to my parameter of lexicalization, for example. Black (1993: 25) suggests substituting the crude live/dead metaphor distinction with a more fine-tuned scheme that distinguishes “extinct” metaphors (that are “beyond resuscitation”), “dormant” metaphors (in which the original metaphor tends to remain unnoticed, but can be restored), and “active” metaphors “that are, and are perceived to be, actively metaphoric” (Black 1993: 25). In proposing this scheme, however, Black himself also points out that these distinctions are still likely to be inadequate to some extent. Thus, for the time being, I will refrain from suggesting any more subdistinctions on the continuum for each parameter, but rather stay with the eight terms proposed in Table 2.1 as marking idealized extreme scenarios. Before turning to question of how idiom and metaphor are seen as related in the literature, I would now like to conclude the discussion of metaphoricity by indicating three key dimensions, which I see as having emerged as central for an analysis of metaphors in spoken ELF interactions: the textual-semantic dimension, the cognitive-psycholinguistic dimension and the discourse dimension of metaphor analysis.

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2.3.4 Dimensions of metaphor analysis in spoken language In the previous sections, I have reviewed central aspects of theories of metaphor and metaphoricity within cognitive, psycholinguistic and semantic frameworks. I have attempted to isolate core concepts and introduce basic terminological and conceptual distinctions along four parameters that are relevant for the analysis of linguistic creativity at the level of idioms in ELF. Within this admittedly very brief account of metaphor as a research topic, to my mind, three dimensions have emerged in which metaphor can potentially be analyzed in relation to naturallyoccurring spoken language – and thus also in relation to naturally-occurring ELF interactions. Table 2.2 summarizes these three dimensions and identifies a number of potential questions which can be asked in metaphor analysis with regard to each dimension.

Table 2.2: Dimensions of metaphor analysis in spoken language.

Dimension

Metaphor

Potential questions for analysis

TEXTUAL & SEMANTIC

as a matter of language → linguistic phenomenon

Textual characteristics of metaphor (A is B, A is like B, topic only implicit, … )? Corresponding codified expression(s)? Resemblance to *English and/or other *language (L1/LN) idioms? Type and degree of variation from codified form? Degree of conventionality? Degree of metaphoricity? Degree of domain incongruity of topic and vehicle?

COGNITIVE & PSYCHOLINGUISTIC

as a matter of thought → cognitive phenomenon

Underlying conceptual metaphor(s)? Active metaphor processing vs. holistic non-compositional processing?

DISCOURSE

as a matter of interaction → communication strategy

Communicative effectiveness? Discourse function in interaction? Transactional vs. interactional? Intentional creativity / deliberate metaphor?

It has been argued in the previous sections that it is important for corpus-based research to keep the distinction between linguistic metaphor and conceptual metaphor. This becomes evident once again when approaching the actual analysis of real data, where the textual-semantic and the cognitive dimension refer to different levels of analysis. Thus, with regard to a cognitive CMT approach,

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[t]here is a risk inherent in the cognitive linguistic tendency to discuss metaphors [i.e. conceptual metaphors] in the reduced schematic form A is B, namely that insufficient attention is paid to variations in the grammatical form of a metaphor that carry significance in discourse. An important contribution of applied linguistics to the development of metaphor studies lies precisely in the restoring language form and use as central variables in investigation (Cameron & Low 1999: 79).

The analysis in Chapters 4 and 5 therefore puts one focus of metaphor analysis on the textual-semantic level, drawing on descriptive corpus evidence from VOICE, which can be analyzed in relation to the questions listed in Table 2.2 for this dimension. While some aspects of cognitive and psycholinguistic frameworks have entered the theoretical discussion of metaphor in this chapter (and will continue to be addressed as side aspects), the cognitive dimension of metaphor will not be the focus of analysis in this book. This is mainly due to the lack of corroborative introspective or neurolinguistic evidence in the present descriptive framework (see Chapter 3). It is an underlying theoretical assumption of this study, however, that metaphor processing is a universal capacity that, we can assume, is shared by all (ELF) speakers. The idea that all (ELF) speakers are generally capable of recognizing and resolving the domain incongruity that makes an expression a linguistic metaphor, means that metaphor processing might thus function “as one strategy for dealing with interpretation problems” (Cameron 1999a: 111). The third dimension proposed in Table 2.2 is the discourse dimension of metaphor. This has to do with communicative functions and effects that individual metaphorical expressions have in interaction. Alongside the textual-semantic dimension, this third dimension will be a preeminent focus in the analysis of VOICE. The creativity and novelty that is part of many metaphorical expressions does some communicative work and fulfills functions in any interactional context. This can be expected to be the case also in ELF, so Black’s statement – although made about L1 use – also applies to this study: “But what is a ‘creative’, rule-violating metaphor producer really trying to do? And what is a competent hearer expected to do in response to such a move?” (Black 1993: 23). These and other questions that relate to the functional discourse dimension of metaphor will continue to be relevant in my analysis. Metaphor is a highly context-sensitive and context-dependent phenomenon that can usually only be interpreted and analyzed in context and not in abstraction from its actual occurrence. This is the main reason why the metaphor analysis in Chapters 4 to 7 will rely on a largely qualitative corpus linguistic approach. Before I turn to research methodology in Chapter 3, I would like to conclude the theoretical discussion by bringing together the preceding

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discussion of idiom (and idiomatizing) and metaphor (and metaphoricity). In doing so, I will explore why these phenomena can be regarded as intricately linked and why I am suggesting that this link is of particular salience in relation to linguistic creativity and ELF.

2.4 An ELF approach to creativity at the level of idioms The suggestion that there is a close relationship between idioms as conventionalized semi-fixed phrases and metaphors as creative and dynamic expressions linking two different concepts is not new, or unique to ELF, but has been pointed out by a large number of researchers with regard to *English.3 Many studies on the nature of idioms and fixed expressions mention metaphor (e.g. Cacciari & Tabossi 1993; Gibbs 1993; Nunberg, Sag & Wasow 1994; Moon 1998; Jaeger 1999; Langlotz 2006) and a substantial amount of the literature on metaphor (particularly within cognitive and psycholinguistic frameworks) comments on the relationship of metaphors and idioms (e.g. Cameron 1999a; Gibbs 1999; Hanks 2006). Additionally, we find literature on creativity in language use (e.g. Carter 2004) or on lexical semantics (e.g. Cruse 1986: 37–45; Lipka 2002: 90–147) that mentions both concepts as closely linked. Whether the two categories, that is, idiom and metaphor, are seen as theoretically distinct (and mutually exclusive) and thus kept apart or whether they are treated as related or distinct subcategories within the same conceptual framework varies – not least because of the different purposes which the categories serve in different studies. In the following, some positions found in the literature which seem most relevant to an analysis of ELF data will be presented, drawing attention to key concepts such as the diachronic dimension of the idiom-metaphor-relationship in L1 use and the much claimed idiom requirement of noncompositionality.

2.4.1 The chicken or the egg? The diachronic dimension of idiom and metaphor What is common to many observations with regard to idiom and metaphor is that the distinction between what is seen as an idiom and what as a metaphor is, in many ways, a diachronic one in first language use, relating

3 Section 2.4 contains some passages previously published in Pitzl (2009).

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to the effects of language change over time. This is evident in statements which, for example, refer to best-example idioms as “frozen phrases that were originally metaphors” (Hanks 2006: 26). In this view, it is essentially the extensive use of certain metaphors within one speech community which brings about their conventionalization, institutionalization and codification in the course of time and which, in short, turns the metaphor into an idiom. It should also be noted that the metaphorical origins of an idiom may no longer be noticed by (L1) speakers. Thus, as Gibbs (1993: 59) points out, guesses or intuitions (by L1 speakers) about which metaphor an idiom originates from may also be wrong. As a consequence, some researchers draw an absolute distinction between idioms and metaphors in the sense that they insist on the fixed and non-compositional meaning of idioms which “does not depend on resonance between primary and secondary subjects [i.e. topic and vehicle]” (Hanks 2006: 27), with such resonance being characteristic of metaphors according to Hanks. So although the relationship between idiom and metaphor is acknowledged, it is seen as purely diachronic. A particular expression such as all at sea is thus considered to be an idiom – and not a conventional metaphor – by Hanks (2006: 27) because the resonance within the expression is purely historical and no longer active. If the resonance were still active, it would have to be classified as a metaphor (according to Hanks 2006). So what we are witnessing in positions like this is an either-or distinction: either an expression is an idiom, or it is a metaphor. Since Hanks (2006) bases his analysis on the British National Corpus (BNC), he is referring to L1 *English use and does not theorize about idioms and metaphors in relation to ELF, of course. Relating to this diachronic aspect of metaphor conventionalization and institutionalization, it is common to refer to some idioms and IEs as “dead metaphors” with regard to L1 use (cf. e.g. Carter 2004: 122), thus explicitly linking metaphor and idiom terminology and concepts. A central, but by no means undisputed, question in this respect concerns what could be termed the idiom – dead metaphor – metaphor continuum. While some insist that dead metaphors should be treated as distinct from true idioms (e.g. Cruse 1986: 41– 42), there are authors of idiom dictionaries who mention fossilized metaphors as a prototypical class of idioms: “Idioms are typically metaphorical: they are effectively metaphors which have become ‘fixed’ or ‘fossilized’” (Speake 1999: iv). Again others, such as Gibbs (1993), insist on the metaphoricity of idioms and state that idioms are not dead metaphors but involve active conceptual metaphorical mappings. The status of idioms on the metaphoricity cline is therefore far from undisputed, even with regard to L1 use. Needless to say, it is even more of an open question with regard to ELF.

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The question whether a specific metaphor within a certain conventional idiom is really ‘dead’ is ultimately a question for empirical research in cognitive studies and psycholinguistics. Gibbs (1999: 148), for example, mentions that, from a cognitive and psycholinguistic perspective, idioms retain metaphoricity because they arise from conceptual “metaphorical mappings between dissimilar source and target domains”. There are studies which document the close link in people’s minds between understanding a particular idiom and the corresponding conceptual metaphor (Gibbs 1999: 151). But the findings nevertheless do not necessarily entail that conceptual metaphors are actually accessed during idiom processing, or that their accessing is essential for interpreting the (figurative) meaning of an idiom (Gibbs 1999: 151). Goatly (1997: 31–34) mentions different degrees of conventionality in this respect and distinguishes between dead, buried, sleeping and tired metaphors with regard to diachronic changes in the meaning of lexical items. The different types of inactive (i.e. tired and sleeping) metaphors in Goatly’s terminology are distinguished from dead/buried and active metaphors on the basis of whether the grounds, i.e. the similarities and/or analogies between topic and vehicle are – or are not – essential for interpreting the meaning of a word (see Goatly 1997: 9 for the definition of grounds, topic and vehicle). That is to say, the decision of whether something constitutes an inactive metaphor depends on whether the grounds are likely (or unlikely) to be activated during processing the meaning of an expression. (It remains an open question as to how this could be investigated empirically.) In Goatly’s (1997) theoretical scheme, in the case of dead metaphors, the grounds are virtually non-existent and can only be recreated in exceptional circumstances. Active metaphors, on the other hand, involve unpredictable grounds which are highly context-dependent and will be created and perceived in the particular communicative situation. It is in the interim area of inactive metaphors, where lexical items such as fox, crane or cut are regarded as polysemous and where we find expressions that – although conventionalized to some degree – might still be perceived as metaphorical in some contexts (Goatly 1997: 34).

2.4.2 Intrinsic creativity and the myth of non-compositionality Although Goatly focuses primarily on single/individual (and not so much phraseological) lexical items, the concept of sleeping or inactive metaphors is particularly useful with regard to idiomatic creativity, and is therefore, for example, taken up by Langlotz (2006: 102). Working within a cognitive linguistic paradigm, he states, in line with some of the positions outlined above, that idioms

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“were originally created as non-conventional metaphors or metonymies” (Langlotz 2006: 11). Within his cognitive linguistic approach, idioms are thus regarded as “semantically complex linguistic constructions that are intrinsically creative” (Langlotz 2006: 11, italics in original) because “their internal structure incorporates the systematic and creative extension of semantic structures” (Langlotz 2006: 11). But since Langlotz is interested in investigating idiomatic creativity (with the aim of establishing in a cognitive grammar the regularities of idiom variation as they are produced by L1 speakers of *English), he importantly goes on to remark that the degree to which an idiom can be systematically and creatively manipulated in discourse is dependent on the degree to which the idiom’s intrinsic creativity remains accessible to the language user or can be re-established by him or her. (Langlotz 2006: 11, emphasis mine)

With intrinsic creativity, Langlotz refers to the metaphorical origin of the idiom. So in other words, how much an idiom can be formally varied, changed and adapted depends on how active or (re-)accessible its inherent metaphor is to a language user. A metaphor that is sleeping (to use Goatly’s term) within an idiom might thus be re-awakened in order to re-enliven and structurally vary, adapt, or change the idiom. The same point is made by Cruse (1986: 42–44) with regard to dead metaphors, which for him, however, is a category that remains distinct from idioms. Yet, Cruse points out that dead metaphors may be revived via lexical substitutions or paraphrases or syntactic modification. He also points out that, despite the general distinction (between idioms and dead metaphors) that he argues for, idioms and dead metaphors have characteristics in common, so that synchronically some expressions may be regarded as transitional cases (Cruse 1986: 44). He mentions semantic transparency and opacity in this respect. Dead metaphors that are varied are described with the intermediate term translucent, since they are neither what Cruse calls semantically transparent (i.e. they do not involve a recurrent semantic contrast) nor completely opaque (which idioms are in Cruse’s terminology). One could say that an idiom which is varied in this way is re-metaphorized: It is deconstructed and reassembled in order to create a new (or different) meaning (or to reinforce the original meaning); this meaning relies on the semantic properties of the individual linguistic components; it is thus compositional, but not literal. One aspect which deserves to be mentioned here is the general notion of the non-compositionality of idioms, which is listed as a defining feature of idioms by many researchers (cf. Nattinger & DeCarrico’s 1992 narrower sense of idiom). This

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general tendency to characterize idioms as non-compositional is also expressed in reference works such as the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, which refers to idiomatic phrases as “expressions with a meaning not entirely derivable from the meaning of their parts” (Biber et al. 1999: 1024). So according to this traditional definition, the meaning of an idiom is different from the sum of the meanings of its individual components, i.e. an idiom is, at least to some extent, non-compositional. Yet, the formulation “not entirely” suggests that the meanings of the component parts of an idiom may still play some role in interpreting the meaning of the idiom. The extent to which this may be the case is left unspecified, however.

2.4.3 Idiom decomposition and figurative compositionality In relation to the notion of (non-)compositionality, Abel (2003: 8) points out the general distinction between this traditional (and partly generative) concept and the alternative psycholinguistic notion of decomposition. A concept which has been central with regard to the latter is the idiom decomposition hypothesis. Relating back to the work of Gibbs and Nayak (1989), this hypothesis states that “idioms are partially analyzable and speaker’s assumptions about how the meaning of the parts contribute to the figurative meanings of the whole determines the syntactic behavior of idioms” (Gibbs & Nayak 1989: 104, quoted in Abel 2003: 9). To use Langlotz’s words, the idiom decomposition hypothesis proposes that “a great number of idiomatic constructions are semantically decomposable or analysable with the specific meanings of their parts contributing independently to their overall figurative meanings” (Langlotz 2006: 36). Importantly, the compositional analysis and processing which is involved in this process of idiom decomposition does not involve the literal meanings of the constituent elements, i.e. the individual words of an idiom, but refers to the “specialised idiom-bound figurative [i.e. metaphorical] meanings of these words” (Langlotz 2006: 36). Idiom decomposition therefore stresses the notion of “idioms as analysable linguistic strings” (Langlotz 2006: 37), rather than referring to actual literal compositionality. Gibbs (1993: 62) thus cites evidence of psycholinguistic studies testing the decomposability of idioms. Idioms such as spill the beans are regarded as decomposable “because each of their components [i.e. spill and beans] obviously contributes to their overall figurative interpretation” (Gibbs 1993: 62). Other idioms such as kick the bucket are considered non-decomposable “because people experience difficulty in breaking theses phrases into their component parts” (Gibbs 1993: 62). Additionally, he mentions a third group, “abnormally decomposable idioms” (Gibbs 1993: 62) such as carry a torch, in which the identification of the figurative

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referent requires familiarity with a conventional metaphor, i.e. torch as a descriptor for warm feelings. He therefore stipulates that “[t]his relationship between an idiom’s words and their figurative referents is not arbitrary, but based on active metaphorical mappings between different source and target domains that structure much of our experience” (Gibbs 1993: 63, emphasis mine). The evidence cited by Gibbs (1993: 62–66) therefore confirms that idiom comprehension and processing do not seem to involve processing of a literal compositional meaning, i.e. the literal interpretation of an expression, but rather often only involve figurative decomposition. The question of (the degree of) the (non-)compositionality of idioms and multi-word units is addressed from the point of view of lexicography by Grant and Bauer (2004). They distinguish figures of speech like metaphors from idioms on the basis that “figures of speech can be interpreted according to general cognitive principles, while idioms have to be learnt” (Grant & Bauer 2004: 49, emphasis mine). Yet, they point out that “many figurative expressions are referred to as being idiomatic” (Grant & Bauer 2004: 51), which is indicative of the meaning conflation of idiomatic and *nativelike (see Section 2.2.2). Based on this distinction between idioms and figurative expressions, Grant and Bauer devise an idiom test which they apply to a random sample of nineteen entries for idioms taken from two different *English idiom dictionaries. In devising the idiom test, they differentiate between figuratives and what they call core idioms based on the assumptions that – figurative language is recognized as compositionally involving an untruth which can be reinterpreted pragmatically to understand the intended truth [e.g. metaphors per definition flout the CP and are thus not true] […] but idioms cannot. – figurative language can be undone or ‘unpicked’ to work out the meaning […] but idioms cannot […] (or at least cannot without non-linguistic, historical knowledge, cf. red herring) (Grant & Bauer 2004: 51, italics in original). What Grant and Bauer stress is that figuratives can be made sense of, while what they call core idioms cannot be “unpicked” or decomposed semantically. Putting this in relation to the diachronic dimension of idioms being regarded as fossilized or dead metaphors which I have mentioned above (Section 2.4), this non-compositional nature of “core idioms” is true also for idioms which have arisen “by the freezing of figures of speech” (Grant & Bauer 2004: 52) and are thus figurative in origin, but have lost their figurativeness over time. From the perspective of lexicography, as adopted by Grant and Bauer (2004), only “core idioms” should then be regarded as institutionalized and lexicalized (cf. e.g. Lipka 2002) single units whose meaning cannot be guessed if it is not known by a listener. So

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even though Grant and Bauer approach the subject within a different theoretical framework, the conclusions they come to are very similar to the conclusions drawn in cognitive and psycholinguistic studies: Only a certain group of idioms (which Grant and Bauer’s call “core idioms”) are in fact really non-compositional and cannot be decomposed. What is remarkable about Grant and Bauer’s (2004) re-analysis of their sample of entries in idiom dictionaries is that they find that, in fact, according to their idiom test, none of the tested idioms qualify as core idioms. Most idioms are reclassified either as figuratives or as “ONCEs”, i.e. expressions in which only a single word is non-literal or non-compositional (such as a devil of a job, with devil being the only non-literal element) (Grant & Bauer 2004: 54–58). Like many of the issues discussed in the previous sections, Grant and Bauer’s (2004) findings again cast doubt on the status of (the majority of) idioms as fixed lexical units, even for L1 speakers of *English (or other *languages) and emphasizes the close link between idioms, figurativeness and metaphoricity. If idioms are much less fixed (in form) and less non-compositional than is commonly assumed for L1 speakers, then fixity and non-compositionality should be regarded as less central aspects of idioms for ELF speakers. This makes them an intriguing area for researching linguistic creativity in ELF, of course. What Grant and Bauer’s (2004) findings also seem to reflect is – again – the general difficulty of defining what the term idiom actually denotes (cf. Section 2.3). On the one hand, there is the broad spectrum of IEs addressed by Sinclair’s (1991) idiom principle and investigated predominantly using corpus linguistic approaches. On the other hand, there is the extremely narrow definition of noncompositional (and hence non-decomposable) core idioms (e.g. according to Grant & Bauer 2004). This second approach, in turn, implies that much of what we could subsume under a narrower, yet not completely restrictive, idiom category might also be something else, i.e. a figurative in Grant and Bauer’s (2004) terms. I would argue that, unless one adopts an extremely narrow definition of core idiom (like Grant and Bauer 2004), then one necessarily needs to allow for the fact that an idiom may be something other than a non-compositional institutionalized lexical unit. Many expressions that we can or might refer to as idioms may in fact be decomposable (see e.g. Nunberg, Sag & Wasow 1994; Abel 2003; Langlotz 2006) and may thus be interpretable according to general cognitive principles. In this respect, Nunberg, Sag and Wasow (1994: 499) point out the terminological confusion that has been present in much of the traditional idiom literature where “conventionality has seemed to entail non-compositionality, with the result that many linguists use the two terms interchangeably in talking about idioms”. In fact, this is precisely what seems to have happened partly with regard to Sinclair’s idiom principle and many corpus studies that build on it; evidence

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from L1 *English corpora, i.e. evidence of attested conventional (frequent) use by L1 speakers, tends to be directly interpreted as evidence of non-compositional speech production and processing. I have argued in this section why, even in L1 *English contexts, the two phenomena of conventionality (i.e. actual use) and non-compositionality (i.e. processing) need to be kept apart. Obviously, this has direct implications for the study of idiom variation and metaphoricity in ELF.

2.4.4 The re-metaphorization of idioms: Metaphor as a shared resource in ELF In light of the previous discussion, I am suggesting that idioms in ELF, particularly if they are creatively varied in form, might in many instances be used and interpreted metaphorically. In other words, I am proposing that the relationship of idiom and metaphor is not an either-or question in L1 contexts (see above) and that this is particularly so in the context of naturally-occurring ELF interactions. Allowing for an integrative framework that looks at creativity in relation to both idioms and metaphors opens up an alternative approach of interpretation and analysis that is considerably removed from the territorial perspective on idioms one often encounters in ELT discourse and/or corpus linguistics. Getting an exact idiomatic (L1-like) wording ‘right’ becomes less central if we allow for the possibility that many (creative) idioms might first and foremost function as figurative expressions and metaphors, i.e. expressions that can be interpreted metaphorically according to general cognitive principles. Of course, this integrative approach has implications for how idioms are assessed in ELF as far as correctness and appropriateness are concerned; in contrast to conventional idioms, metaphors have (more or less by definition) the license to be creative, dynamic, active and deliberate. We might find that dormant or sleeping metaphors that ‘inhabit’ many conventional and codified (seemingly frozen) idioms can easily become active and allow for considerable flexibility and creativity in ELF use, while maintaining intelligibility through (re-)activated metaphoricity. Idioms might undergo a process of what I call re-metaphorization in ELF (see Pitzl 2009, 2012, 2018a), whereby metaphoricity is reintroduced into expressions that are seen as conventionalized and idiomatic in L1 *English contexts. This process is illustrated in Figure 2.1. In an analysis of ELF data, it therefore makes sense to reverse the hierarchy of idiom and metaphor: Instead of regarding an idiom as a dead metaphor, one might look at some uses and instances of metaphors in ELF as formally resembling already existing *English (or also other *language) idioms. To put it more simply: While the tendency in L1 use is to say that an idiom contains a conventional, covert or dead metaphor, i.e. the metaphor was there first and then

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Idiomatizing/idiom building

taken up by other speakers

conventional(ized) (semi-)fixed, lexicalized

creative metaphor

codified idiom

formal variation

Re-metaphorization

Figure 2.1: Idiom building and re-metaphorization (Pitzl 2018a: 237).

evolved into an idiom, in ELF we could say that a particular metaphor contains an idiom, i.e. the idiom came first (for example, it was taught in an EFL context as a conventional L1 expression) and undergoes a process of re-metaphorization in ELF. So while an expression in ELF may resemble an *English (or also other *language) idiom at the textual surface level, it may first and foremost function as a metaphor at the discourse level of interaction. Crucially, the cognitive ability of metaphor processing is common to speakers of all *languages and is thus likely to be shared by all ELF speakers. The suggested ELF approach proposes that metaphor, and hence the capability (cf. Widdowson 2016a) of metaphor encoding and decoding, i.e. of metaphor creation (production) and interpretation (reception), can be regarded as a shared resource in ELF which cuts across different linguistic and regio-cultural backgrounds of speakers and which might thus be considered something like a (meta)linguistic universal. It is advocated that it is the figurativeness and the metaphoricity inherent in (conventionalized) idioms that make them amenable to linguistic creativity in the first place and that creative use and variation, in turn, foreground and (re)activate the conventionalized sleeping metaphors that are hidden in these expressions.

2.5 Summary This chapter has suggested a theoretical framework for the analysis of linguistic creativity at the level of idioms in spoken ELF interactions. After exploring the

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notion of linguistic creativity in relation to idiom use in general, it has focused on the characteristics of ELF interactions and proposed that the use of idioms in ELF is unlikely to be motivated by the same territorial mechanisms that operate in interactions among more homogenous L1 in-groups. In contrast to L1 interactions, ELF interactions encourage interpersonal work to build a shared (transcultural as well as linguistic) territory in each situational context. If anything, the use and variation of idioms in ELF is likely to be motivated by specific interpersonal and/or ideational functions and/or to be indicative of inclusive strategies of online idiom building, i.e. idiomatizing. The central aspect of the theoretical approach to creativity in the use of idioms suggested in this chapter is the general semantic dimension of metaphor as a shared creative linguistic resource. After providing theoretical and terminological background on idioms as well as metaphor and metaphoricity, the final section has proposed this interrelationship as central in ELF. Building on this theoretical framework, Chapter 3 will explore how this approach to creativity in ELF can be operationalized for the description of ELF based on VOICE.

3 Describing ELF: Analyzing VOICE Having established a theoretical framework of linguistic creativity in ELF idiom use, the central question addressed in this chapter is how these phenomena can be investigated empirically. I will start by providing some details about VOICE (the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English), the corpus used for the study in this book. Being at the time (i.e. in 2009) the first ELF corpus to be made publicly available, the compilation of VOICE posed a number of theoretical and practical challenges for us as corpus compilers. Section 3.1 briefly introduces the main characteristics of VOICE and discusses some of these methodological challenges. The way in which these challenges were resolved in corpus building and the decisions that were taken have shaped the properties of VOICE and hence influence all analyses conducted on the basis of the corpus, including the present one. Aspects that are particularly noteworthy in this respect are the ethnographic dimension of VOICE as including complete speech events and the detailed nature of VOICE transcripts. Section 3.2 will then focus on the research methodology for investigating linguistic creativity in the use of idioms and metaphors. Having started from a number of unstructured initial observations, it will be discussed how the study has made use of my involvement in the corpus building process. My approach was to adopt what I call a qualitative corpus linguistic methodology and to rely on manual identification and annotation of examples. Main challenges in this process were to establish operationalizable criteria for identifying and categorizing instances of creative idioms and for determining (degrees of) metaphoricity. Finally, Section 3.3 will focus on issues of data analysis and address problems of interpretation related to corpus linguistic evidence, spoken language and ELF as well as to the topic of linguistic creativity. Considering the properties of VOICE as a corpus, the relationship of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis will be discussed and the methodological approach adopted in this study will be portrayed. In addition, the role of the analyst as an outside observer and resulting problems of interpretation with regard to judging shared understanding, communicative success and effectiveness, or functional motivations and communicative effect will be discussed.

3.1 The data: The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English It is one of the general truths in corpus linguistics that “[m]any of the criteria for the composition of a corpus are determined by its intended uses” (Aston & https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-004

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Burnard 1998: 23). When compiling a corpus of any kind, it is therefore essential for corpus builders to have clear objectives with regard to what the envisioned corpus should (or might) be used for, why it is being compiled, and who its intended future users are. It is these questions and objectives that guide many (if not all) of the decisions taken in the process of corpus compilation. The idea of compiling a spoken corpus of naturally-occurring ELF conversations dates back to the early beginnings of ELF research, when Barbara Seidlhofer argued the case for a description of ELF in its own right in her 2001 article. In the years to follow, Seidlhofer’s idea developed and matured and eventually (in 2005) resulted in the first of two substantially funded research projects in Vienna, which turned VOICE from an idea into a reality (see Acknowledgements). The central research objective which governed the compilation of VOICE was to build a corpus on the basis of which the description of ELF could become possible (see e.g. Seidlhofer 2001, 2010a, 2011; Breiteneder et al. 2006; Breiteneder et al. 2009). Since ELF research was then only its beginnings, it was deemed important that the corpus should be usable for a wide range of research purposes to scholars. In consequence, VOICE was to become a source of data not only for quantitative research but was, from its beginnings, always intended to allow also for situated qualitative analyses. Much early ELF research emerged in “situated qualitative studies with a strong ethnographic element” (Seidlhofer, Breiteneder & Pitzl 2006: 21) and the ethnographic and qualitative dimension of ELF research still continues in many studies today. ELF is always co-constructed and situationally adapted and the functional motivations for linguistic variation as well as any potential “situational endonormativity” (Pitzl 2012: 39) can only be observed in a qualitative manner. This is one of the reasons why a qualitative approach to VOICE is also the main mode of analysis adopted in this study (see Section 3.3). Being a corpus project with strong ethnographic and conversation analytic roots, both qualitative and quantitative aspects were thus central in the compilation of VOICE: The methodology involved in a project of this kind covers a broad spectrum. Recording naturally-occurring spoken language in real-life situations involves qualitative field work. The subsequent transcription process is equally qualitative since it involves a detailed representation of natural, spoken language use. At the other end of the spectrum, issues of corpus design, target population and balancing data in the corpus are rather quantitative in nature and influence the overall structure of the corpus. Both qualitative and quantitative methodology in VOICE are influenced by the project being situated in the emergent framework of ELF research where corpus builders are faced with many challenges due to the novel and innovative nature of the undertaking. (Breiteneder et al. 2009: 25)

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In the following, I will give a very brief sketch of both quantitative and qualitative aspects of VOICE as a spoken language corpus used as the basis of describing creativity in ELF in this book.

3.1.1 Quantitative aspects: Design and structure As “a computer-readable corpus capturing more than one million words of naturally-occurring, spoken ELF” (Breiteneder et al. 2009: 21), VOICE was the first of its kind, i.e. the first general ELF corpus to be made publicly available (in 2009) for scholars all across the globe. It comprises 1,023,043 tokens of orthographically defined words, which total 110 hours 35 minutes and 56 seconds of recorded ELF interactions (see Appendix B). These 1,023,043 tokens correspond to slightly over 19,000 individual lexical types in VOICE (Radeka 2010), including one-character words, hesitations, discourse markers and function words, but excluding corpus mark-up. As is common practice in corpus linguistics, the data for VOICE were recorded and selected according to several external criteria, i.e. non-linguistic text characteristics that needed to be fulfilled by each corpus text (see e.g. Clear 1992; Sinclair 2005; for a more extensive discussion see Breiteneder et al. 2006: 163–169). Thus, each sampling unit in VOICE (i.e. each speech event, see below) had to meet seven external criteria which together describe the target population of VOICE: 1. English as a lingua franca, 2. spoken, 3. naturally occurring, 4. interactive, 5. face-to-face, 6. non-scripted, 7. self-selected participation. (For a more detailed discussion of these criteria and the concept of target population see the VOICE Corpus Header in Appendix B). The minimum requirement for an interaction to be considered an ELF speech event for the purposes of compiling VOICE was that the majority of speakers in the speech event needed to have *English as an additionally acquired language and not as their L1. In dyadic interactions involving only two speakers, both speakers therefore do not have *English as their L1 in VOICE. In multi-party speech events included in VOICE, L1 *English speakers may be participants if they are a minority. In other words, a main decision in compiling VOICE in the mid-2000s was not to exclude L1 *English speakers entirely – a decision that is in fact very much in line with current ELF thinking (cf. e.g. Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey 2011: 283). This, i.e. the inclusion of L1 *English speakers in VOICE, was thought to reflect the reality of the sum of naturally-occurring ELF speech events that take place around the globe. Some ELF contexts (like international conferences) are likely to involve L1 *English participants, whereas other ELF contexts take place completely without L1 *English individuals. Out of the 151 speech events

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recorded in VOICE, there are 61 events in which at least one L1 *English speaker participates. In total, 87 L1 *English speakers participate in these 61 events. This also includes L1 *English speakers who grew up bilingually with *English and another *language. Together, the 87 speakers (who are 57 individuals) produce 7.07 percent of the linguistic output in VOICE (in terms of the number of words captured). So some TIGs will involve (some degree of) L1 *English participation, others will not. In either case, they will be, first and foremost, international groups, i.e. groups not dominated by L1 *English-speaking participants. In addition to deciding on and operationalizing the external criteria of the target population of VOICE, the novel undertaking of compiling an ELF corpus also posed challenges in relation to representativeness, corpus balance and sampling, which I will not discuss here in detail (but see Pitzl 2016a). Suffice it to say that, since the representativeness of a corpus tends to go hand-in-hand with the notion of language variety (see e.g. McEnery, Xiao & Tono 2006: 13), this clearly constitutes a conundrum for ELF corpus builders, since ELF is no *variety (see Chapter 1). Concerning corpus balance, the category that was chosen for the stratification (Biber 1993; Sinclair 2005) of the VOICE target population is domain, i.e. a socially defined situation or area of activity or knowledge. Similar to Hymes’ (1974: 55–56) concept of scene, domain is distinct from the physical setting in which a speech event takes place; rather, it refers to the “psychological setting” (Hymes 1974: 55). The domain is “the most important social context in which the text was realized or for which it is intended” (TEI Consortium 2007: 471). VOICE represents data from three domains, which are considered to reflect the reality of ELF speech events in the world as defined in the target population. These are the educational (ED), leisure (LE), and professional (P) domain, with the professional domain being subdivided once more into professional business (PB), professional organizational (PO) and professional research and science (PR) (see Appendix B for short descriptions). Based on “theoretically informed estimations of the relative occurrence of [spoken] ELF” (Breiteneder et al. 2009: 21), the proportions of these five domains are not of equal size but range from 10 to 35 percent. In addition, VOICE is also structured – but not balanced in terms of target proportions – with regard to a second text typological criterion, namely speech event type. The ten different speech event types contained in VOICE are: conversation (con), interview (int), meeting (mtg), panel (pan), press conference (prc), question-answer session (qas), seminar discussion (sed), service encounter (sve), working group discussion (wgd), and workshop discussion (wsd) (see Appendix B). In contrast to domain, which was known in advance of recording,

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corpus texts were classified as belonging to a particular speech event type on an ex-post basis, i.e. after the event had taken place. Reflecting these two structuring categories, each speech event in VOICE is labeled with a specific event ID, which includes a domain abbreviation (e.g. PO), an abbreviation of speech event type (e.g. wsd) and the number of the event in the internal project database (e.g. 257). The event ID POwsd257 therefore indicates that the speech event 257 is a ‘workshop discussion’ (wsd) in the ‘professional organizational’ (PO) domain. Whenever examples of creative idioms are discussed in Chapters 4 to 7, the event ID is indicated in order to specify which interaction the extract is taken from. VOICE was first publicly released in 2009 in its online version (VOICE 1.0 Online). The corresponding xml version was released in 2011 (VOICE 1.0 xml) and a slightly updated version of both VOICE xml and VOICE online in 2013 (VOICE 2.0 Online, VOICE 2.0 xml). Both online and xml version of the corpus were used for the analysis in this book. A section of sound files for 23 speech events was released for corpus users in 2010, which – among many other aspects some of which will be discussed below – indicates our awareness to make VOICE usable for qualitative research.

3.1.2 Qualitative aspects: The ethnographic dimension In addition to the quantitative aspects of design and corpus structure, it has already been indicated that VOICE has a strong qualitative and ethnographic dimension, the most relevant aspects of which will be introduced briefly in this section. As has already been mentioned, the sampling unit used in the compilation of VOICE is the speech event. Following Gumperz (1992: 44), speech events are “longer strings of talk each of which is marked by a beginning, middle and an end”. Needless to say, how ostensible or implicit such a beginning, middle or end actually is will differ from event to event. Equally obvious is the fact that speech events vary considerably in length and thus, in terms of corpus building, do not constitute equal-sized chunks of linguistic output. As an ethnographic and discourse analytic category, they are the largest units for which one can discover linguistic structure and are not necessarily coterminous with the situation; several speech events can occur successively or even simultaneously in the same situation, as for instance with distinct conversations at a party. (Coulthard 1985: 42)

The difference in magnitude between speech events and speech situations relates back to Hymes’ ethnography of communication:

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The term speech event will be restricted to activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech. An event may consist of a single speech act, but will often comprise several. […] [O]ften […] one will find a difference in magnitude: a party (speech situation), a conversation during the party (speech event), a joke within the conversation (speech act). It is of speech events and speech acts that one writes formal rules for their occurrence and characteristics. Notice that the same type of speech act may recur in different types of speech event, and the same type of speech event in different contexts of situation. Thus, a joke (speech act) may be embedded in a private conversation, a lecture, a formal introduction. A private conversation may occur in the context of a party, a memorial service, a pause in changing sides in a tennis match. (Hymes 1974: 52, italics in original)

This proposed distinction is relevant, since a corpus provides a sample of language in order to allow for the description of forms and functions of linguistic output. In order to allow for the investigation of a broad range of phenomena, it is thus advisable to sample these larger ‘pieces’ of language, like speech events, and not just individual examples of a particular phenomenon. What Hymes’ distinction also makes clear is that speech events do not occur in a vacuum, of course, but are always embedded in a larger social context (i.e. Hymes’ speech situation). This outermost layer roughly corresponds to the level of domain in VOICE, which provides the larger social context to the speech event sampled for the corpus. What becomes obvious is that the category speech event is clearly important in terms of reflecting the reality of the speakers whose language is actually being included in a corpus. Audio recording naturally-occurring spoken language interactions is an undertaking which is situational and qualitative in nature: The researcher enters the field (in sociological terms) and records linguistic output that is ‘real’ for the speakers in the particular context in which it is being produced. Yet, by recording this linguistic output for research purposes, the researcher necessarily takes the language out of its natural environment. What is contextualized authentic language in the real world (i.e. a real speech event), therefore necessarily becomes decontexualized linguistic data in a corpus. A corpus text is necessarily removed from its accompanying context (cf. Widdowson 2000: 7). It is only through the inclusion of additional contextual information via metadata (Burnard 2005) that a decontextualized corpus text can be re-contextualized to some degree – and hence be made real and somehow authentic also for corpus users. The speech event thus functions in three different ways in VOICE. Firstly, it constitutes a sampling unit that arguably reflects the reality of the speakers and provides a frame to what participants experience in the real world. Secondly, it is “a theoretical notion, referring to a perspective of analysis[, namely] […] that of an analyst looking at a strip of social interaction from the point of view of the

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speech in it” (Duranti 1985: 201). Notably, these two dimensions are not in conflict, but simply complement each other. The speech events identified by corpus builders are seen to have “a psychological reality for the actors (i.e., speakers)” (Duranti 1985: 202) and can thus serve as “an intended bridge between the macro- and the microlevels of sociocultural analysis” (Duranti 1985: 202). Thirdly, the notion of a complete speech event is also relevant in terms of “a [corpus] user’s perception of a text as useable on its own” (Scott 2000: 106). That is to say, the speech event also provides a frame of context, and especially co-text (in the sense of Widdowson 2000: 58–73), for corpus users to interpret what happens in a particular corpus text. While the corpus as a whole, once it has been built, constitutes a finished product in which all texts follow a unified pattern of representation (e.g. for transcription, encoding, and annotation), the work that is needed in order to arrive at this uniform product is often very detail-oriented. Gaining access to ELF interactions and obtaining permissions, administering audio recordings in the field with non-participant observation, taking field notes and collecting contextual information are only some of the steps involved in the data gathering process. If care is not taken by corpus builders, the significance of decisions taken at these stages can easily be overlooked by corpus users. In order to reflect this strong qualitative dimension, VOICE incorporates fairly detailed contextual information about the data it includes. For my own research, the ethnographic dimension is relevant, since I have privileged knowledge of many of the speech events, having been involved in data gathering, selection and transcription. Crucially, additional information in the form of metadata is also relevant for regular VOICE users in order to be able to recontextualize the language that is captured in the transcribed speech event. Without contextual – and thus contextualizing – information, any transcript of spoken language would be practically useless, since the corpus user would have no idea how the transcribed language came about, when and where it was produced and by whom. Following the specifications and taxonomies provided in the TEI P5: Guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange (TEI Consortium 2007), VOICE includes contextual information as metadata in structured text headers for each transcribed speech event. These text headers include essential information like duration, time and place of the recording, the number of speakers and number of words in the text. They provide information on speakers (such as L1 background, age, gender, occupation, speaker role and speaker ID) and additional categories like power relations/symmetry of speaker relations, degree of acquaintedness, setting, locale and activity. In addition, the ethnographic dimension of ELF speech events accounted for by a short prose description that accompanies

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each speech event in VOICE. This informal and qualitative account of what happens in an interaction was drafted during the phase of transcription and checking of transcripts. It serves to re-contextualize each text for corpus users by capturing a few impressions that seem most salient for a particular event. Before I introduce the research methodology adopted for investigating linguistic creativity in idiom use, the final aspect that needs to be discussed concerns the actual properties of VOICE corpus texts as transcripts. To provide some background on the examples of creative idioms and metaphors that are presented in the subsequent chapters, the next section summarize some very basic information about transcription for VOICE.

3.1.3 Corpus texts: Properties of transcripts While written corpora are mainly faced with questions of representativeness and sampling, a spoken corpus has to meet one big methodological challenge in addition to data collection, namely that of transcription, which means that some interpretation (in the process of transcription) will always have taken place before any analysis can happen (cf. e.g. Cameron 2001: 31–44, Breiteneder et al. 2006: 171–183, Breiteneder et al. 2009: 22–23). The written representation of spoken language is therefore probably the most essential, but also the most labor- and time-consuming stage in the compilation of a spoken corpus: Without transcription, there would simply be no corpus. The properties of the corpus texts, as decided on during the process of transcribing are therefore of crucial importance, since the transcripts form the basis for all subsequent analyses of the corpus. As is good practice in compiling spoken corpora, each transcript (produced in most cases by an external transcriber trained by the VOICE project team) was checked twice by two different VOICE researchers. The first check happened with listening to the audio recording, the second one without listening to the recording, i.e. primarily as proofreading. One of the most general characteristics of VOICE texts is that they represent ELF in full orthographic form. This means that VOICE transcripts provide (full) lexical representations of the words uttered by the speakers. Generally, VOICE transcripts therefore do not include phonological or phonetic information on how words were actually pronounced. (The only exception to this are the selectively used and tags.) In the following, I will introduce main properties of the VOICE transcription format (as specified in the VOICE Transcription Conventions, see Appendix A), albeit without elaborating on the corresponding elements in the XML corpus format (but see Breiteneder et al. 2009: 23–26; Majewski 2011a).

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At a general level, there are several requirements which transcription conventions for a project like VOICE needed to fulfill: Transcripts need to be human readable as well as computer readable, they need to be unambiguous and consistent in mark-up and mark-up syntax, and the transcription format needs to be manageable for transcribers (Majewski 2011b). To meet these aims, the VOICE Transcription Conventions [2.1] comprise two kinds of conventions: markup and spelling conventions (see Appendix A1 and A2). The VOICE Mark-up Conventions [2.1] were hence specifically designed to reflect what seem to be the most significant features of ELF interactions, while the VOICE Spelling Conventions [2.1] were devised in order to render the diversity of ELF speech in a standardized way. The dual nature of the conventions, i.e. mark-up and spelling, already makes obvious that VOICE transcripts contain two kinds of information: the actual words uttered by ELF speakers and additional corpus annotation (i.e. mark-up). Starting with the second type of information, i.e. annotation through markup, at the most basic level, transcripts in VOICE represent ELF interactions as sequences of utterances assigned to individual speakers. The notion of an utterance in VOICE simply refers to a line of speaker output in the transcript; it is thus not synonymous with the conversation analytic category of a turn (see Santner 2015; Santner-Wolfartsberger 2015 for a detailed discussion of the concept turn in relation to ELF multiparty conversations). The sequence and organization of utterances in VOICE is determined solely by their chronological order, not by interpreting content. Traditional turns are therefore often split up into various utterances in VOICE transcripts due to overlapping speech, intermittent backchannels (like okay, yeah, mhm), pauses or interjections by other speakers. Together with the event ID (see above), utterance numbers specify the exact location of an utterance in the corpus. Utterance identifiers are therefore always provided for longer extracts and examples in this book. In line with the ethnographic nature of data collection discussed above, VOICE also follows the tradition of conversation analysis (CA) in the sense that transcripts include a relatively high level of mark-up. In addition to an exact representation of overlapping speech (via numbered tags overlapping speech ) and short pauses (with (.) for half a second and (1), (2), etc. for the number of seconds), VOICE transcripts also render all false starts and word fragments (e.g. frag-), repetitions (e.g. any (.) any) and hesitations and fillers (er, erm). They also include basic mark-up for rising and falling intonation (what? what.), emphasis (WHAT), lengthening (wha:t, wha::t), and other-continuation (what=) (see Appendix A1 for the detailed description of these mark-up features). Additionally, mark-up is available for annotating laughter (@@) and laughingly spoken words ( what ), various speaker noises (e.g.

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) and speaking modes (e.g. what ). Words for which transcription is uncertain are put in parenthesis (e.g. (what)) and unintelligible speaker output is indicated via x’s and annotated with a separate tag (e.g. xx xx ) (see Appendix A1). Following the principle of re-contextualizing corpus texts, contextual events like people entering or leaving the room or being involved in activities other than speaking, can also be indicated in the transcript between curly brackets { }. Similarly, if short passages of an interaction are not transcribed, the reason for this gap (like sensitive, unintelligible or foreign language content) is specified in the transcript (see VOICE Corpus Header in Appendix B). Taken together, all these mark-up features make for rather detailed transcripts with a high amount of conversational detail which can serve to interpret how ELF is locally adapted and co-constructed in interaction. In addition to these general features, the VOICE transcription format also includes a number of characteristics that were specifically prompted by the nature of ELF. Three main features of VOICE mark-up in this respect are the tags for code-switching, for pronunciation variations and coinages (PVCs, see Pitzl, Breiteneder & Klimpfinger 2008 for a detailed discussion), and onomatopoeic sounds. Although these categories are not unique to ELF but can be found in other data, they are not systematically indicated in most corpora. Since especially the first two features (code-switching and PVCs) occur rather frequently in ELF and can be observed in almost every ELF speech event that is longer than a few minutes, it was deemed essential to provide specific mark-up to consistently represent these phenomena in VOICE. The tags used for annotating non-*English speech indicate the *language that is being switched into (e.g. *German, *Japanese), and they also give information about whether the *language constitutes the speaker’s L1 or not (e.g. , , ). This explicit and systematic way of tagging code-switched items in VOICE was prompted by the various combinations of *languages being switched into in the recorded ELF data. It allows researchers to search for either switches into a particular *language or for switches into speakers’ L1s/LNs/LQs (see Appendix A1) in order to analyze code-switching and multilingual practices in VOICE (see Pitzl 2016a for a more detailed discussion). It also makes it possible to incorporate information on code-switching into studies concerned with other aspects of ELF, such as investigation of linguistic creativity in the use of idioms and metaphors (see Chapter 7, see also Pitzl 2016b). Tags for code-switching and for PVCs are the two mark-up features in VOICE transcripts that are most ELF-specific and also rather frequent. The tag occurs 2,116 times in 131 speech events, which means that at least one non-

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codified item occurs in 86.75 percent of all VOICE corpus texts (although some speech events are just a few minutes, i.e. a few hundred words, long). Roughly two out of 1,000 words are non-codified lexical items in VOICE. And although multilingual practices are not transcribed to their full extent in VOICE but only up to one turn per speaker (see Pitzl 2016a: 19–22 and VOICE Corpus Header in Appendix B), 3,601 code-switched items are tagged in 127 transcripts. Of these, 2,087 elements (57.96%) are into a speaker’s L1 and 1,465 elements (40.68%) are into LN (i.e. *languages other than *English). To conclude this section on VOICE, a few brief remarks on the visual rendering of transcripts are called for in order to contextualize the representation of data extracts and examples in Chapters 4 to 7. There are three different standard output styles in the VOICE Online interface that are also used for tables and extracts in this book: VOICE style, plain style, and kwic style. VOICE style is, for the most part, identical to the transcription format specified in the VOICE Transcription Conventions [2.1]. That is to say, it includes the complete amount of detail that is available in a particular transcript, i.e. pauses, overlaps, intonation, lengthening, contextual remarks, laughter, speaking modes, speaker noises, tags, non-*English speech et cetera. In contrast, plain style renders a reduced version of the transcript in plain format without tags and most mark-up features. The focus is on the actual words uttered by ELF speakers. The only mark-up features represented are laughter (@@) and anonymized items (e.g. [first name1]). Plain style is thus convenient because of its easy readability, but does not display the complete amount of information that is actually available in the corpus. The third style, KeyWord-In-Context (kwic), is available only for the concordance view of search results in VOICE Online. It provides up to 50 characters before and after the search item within the same utterance. Like plain style, kwic style does not include mark-up and tags and it does not display @-symbols for laughter. The standard output styles used for presenting examples and longer data extracts of VOICE in Chapters 4 to 7 are primarily VOICE style and plain style. Longer extracts that show turn-taking among ELF speakers in a speech event are usually represented in VOICE style with the full level of conversational mark-up. Plain style as well as VOICE style are used for numbered examples that render utterances from a single ELF speaker. Kwic style is used only occasionally for displaying the search results for a particular idiomatic expression in VOICE in concordance lines.1

1 For a detailed description see the section on Output styles in Using VOICE Online (VOICE Project 2009, https://www.univie.ac.at/voice/help/output_formats, 30 September 2017).

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3.2 Research methodology: Identifying instances of linguistic creativity Having been one of the researchers involved in the compilation of VOICE, the next sections will outline how this involvement was operationalized to identify, annotate and analyze instances of linguistic creativity in spoken ELF. Having started with a number of unstructured initial observations concerning creativity in ELF idiom use in early stages of my research, it became necessary to establish guidelines and criteria for identifying instances of creative idioms and metaphors in VOICE in order to be able to annotate, retrieve and categorize them for analysis.

3.2.1 Annotating creative idioms During transcription, checking and proofreading transcripts, I closely read through (and partly listened to) 87 of the 151 speech events in VOICE. Altogether, these 87 speech events make up almost two thirds (62.45 percent) of the corpus. This means I closely engaged with 638,900 words of transcribed spoken ELF. I manually annotated instances of creativity in VOICE with internal mark-up in order to be able to retrieve them for more systematic categorization later on. Essentially, the annotation of instances of linguistic creativity in VOICE can be characterized as a kind of pragmatic annotation, as discussed by Maynard and Leicher (2007), that was added to the corpus for the purposes of this study. This annotation is projectinternal, however, and is not part of published versions of VOICE, since it was carried out only for large portions of the corpus, but not all of VOICE. Since this annotation phase was of considerable length, what started out as largely unsystematic observation gradually became more controlled and systematic over time. As my interest was both in describing and modeling linguistic creativity in general as well as in linguistic creativity in relation to idioms and metaphors in particular, my approach to linguistic creativity takes account of creativity at different linguistic levels, not just at the level of idioms (see Pitzl 2012 and Chapter 1). My annotation practice was therefore guided by my working definition of linguistic creativity (see Section 1.4). In line with this form-focused definition, I annotated new, i.e. non-codified, linguistic forms and expressions as well as existing forms and expressions which (it seemed) were used in a nonconventional way. Among my annotated example were therefore not just instances of creative idioms and metaphors, but also many examples of lexical creativity, creative compounding and examples for (creative) use of ontological or spatial metaphors that will not be discussed in this book.

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The complete list of examples (of creativity on different linguistic levels) comprised about 1,200 instances, which I subjected to a preliminary analysis and categorization. In doing so, I looked at each example in co(n)text of interaction and coded it with one or two initial keywords. In a second round of analysis, I then identified those examples that were centrally related to creativity in the use of idioms and metaphors. This usually involved an initial check for codified vs. non-codified status of an idiom/an expression (cf. conventional metaphor in Table 2.1.) already during the first annotation. Subsequently, I explored the nature of the creative expression and its relation to potential corresponding codified form(s) in more detail during the second phase of categorization and analysis. Although VOICE exhibits evidence of linguistic creativity also at the levels of lexis, syntax and morphology, I only carried out in-depth categorization and analysis for those examples of creativity that related to idioms and metaphors. This qualitative procedure for identifying, categorizing and analyzing creative idioms in VOICE was deemed most suitable, not only because of my personal involvement in corpus compilation, but also because the investigation of idiomatic and metaphorical creativity does not easily lend itself to quantitative approaches. Performing corpus queries for instances of varied idioms and/or non-codified (metaphorical) expressions is not only notoriously difficult, but it will essentially always lead to a circular methodology. In order for a corpus query to produce any results, the researcher would need to know – or guess – in advance just how a particular idiom might be varied creatively in use. By carrying out particular corpus queries – but not others –, I would thus have been actively looking for some variations – but not for others. Hence I would have found instances of precisely those variations that I had been anticipating – but not others. Since a central question to be answered in this book is how ELF speakers creatively vary idioms and use metaphor in naturally-occurring interactions, i.e. which forms creative idioms and metaphors exhibit, a more quantitative corpus approach would have strongly biased and practically pre-determined the results. Let me illustrate this methodological issue with an example discussed in Pitzl (2009; see also Chapter 7). The expression we should not wake up any dogs (PBmtg3:2023)2 in VOICE is quite different in form from the corresponding idiom let sleeping dogs lie. The speaker neither uses the verb sleep nor lie, but expresses the concept via negation

2 The reference given in parentheses is the utterance identifier for the example in VOICE, i.e. event ID and utterance number. The representation of the expression here is simplified, i.e. mark-up and repeated words are not shown.

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of another verb (wake up). Nevertheless, the semantic and pragmatic-functional link between the codified *English idiom and the creative version coined by the ELF speaker is quite obvious. So it seems relatively uncontroversial to say that there is some sort of connection between we should not wake up any dogs and let sleeping dogs lie. Whether one would have been able to find this creative variation via a corpus query is questionable, however. If one wanted to actively search for creative variants of the codified idiom let sleeping dogs lie in VOICE (without knowing if the corpus would exhibit any instances of such variation), one might decide to run a number of plausible queries, such as ‘sleep* * dog*’ or ‘let * * dog*’ or ‘dog* lie’. (The * symbol can be used as a wildcard in corpus queries in VOICE to allow for additional characters/words between other search items.) None of these would render we should not wake up any dogs as a result, however, since the speaker in VOICE makes use of neither sleep nor lie nor let. One might be even more open and simply run a query for ‘dog*’ and/or ‘dogs’. This produces a manageable number of hits in VOICE: 44 for ‘dog*’ and 18 for ‘dogs’. Seeing that VOICE (with one million words) is a relatively small corpus, such an approach might be possible for lexical elements if they are not too frequent. Practically all of the 44 instances of dog/s found in VOICE have nothing to do with the idiom in question, however. So although one might eventually find an instance of a creatively varied idiom by looking for an individual salient word of existing idioms in corpora, this procedure would be extremely laborious and time-consuming because one would always be confronted with having to manually go through a long list of irrelevant search results. Additionally, to make matters worse, what if the speaker had decided to say I think in that case we should not wake up any cats or pudels or wolves? How would one ever be able to retrieve such an example of creativity via traditional corpus methods? So although the methodology of manually annotating individual instances of linguistic creativity in VOICE during checking and proofreading transcripts might be criticized for not being quantitative enough, it should be evident that a qualitative approach of manually collecting individual instances in individual corpus texts was the only way forward for an investigation of linguistic creativity in idiom use in ELF. During the stage of categorization and analysis of my annotated examples, i.e. when I had already collected a substantial number of instances of creative idioms, I also carried out some additional corpus queries in VOICE Online, when I felt this might be promising. I thus searched for some keywords of already identified creative idioms (like ‘dog*’) in order to check whether I could retrieve additional instances of creative (or also canonical) occurrences of these idioms or related metaphorical expressions. These searches occasionally rendered further

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examples in speech events that I had not checked or proofread and provided a small number of additional instances that could be included in analysis. In accordance with the nature of corpus evidence (as third person data) and my working definition of linguistic creativity, I started my analysis at the level of (surface) forms and checked annotated examples of creativity against potentially related codified idioms. Since the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 7th edition (OALD7) was used as the main reference point for transcripts in VOICE,3 it seemed prudent to use the OALD7 as initial point of reference for my analysis of creative idioms. I have since used updated versions of the OALD, in particular the OALD9 (see Chapters 4 to 7). Hence, I checked if expressions used in VOICE were related to items labeled ‘idioms’ in the OALD and had a look at what the dictionary – prescriptively – stated about meaning and use of the idiom. With most examples, recourse was also taken to at least one other dictionary.4 This was necessary, for example, in order to a) corroborate codified idiom status, b) compare differences in meanings assigned to an idiom in different reference works, c) broaden the range of sample sentences (and thus potential morphosyntactic variants presented in dictionaries), and d) review and compare comments on socalled ‘standard’ use and codified syntactic or structural variants. While it might have been ideal to compare instances of creative idioms in VOICE with examples of idiom variation attested in L1 *English corpora, the problems of searching for instances of idiom variation via corpus queries have already been outlined above. The same problems would apply to searching for comparable examples of creative idioms in L1 *English corpora, which makes this an impractical undertaking. The larger the corpus, the less feasible targeted searches for instances of creative idioms become. Returning to the example used above, a query for ‘dog’ renders more than 47,000 occurrences in the 520+ million words of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and close to 8,000 hits in the 100 million words of the British National Corpus (BNC).5 Such frequencies are clearly far too high to allow for manual scrutiny 3 See Breiteneder et al. (2006: 179–181), Pitzl, Breiteneder and Klimpfinger (2008: 25) and Osimk-Teasdale (2015) for why stable points of reference are relevant for corpus compilation and annotation. 4 Dictionaries used for the purposes of supplementing information given in the OALD were the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (ODI) (Speake 1999), the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (CALD) online (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/), the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (CIDI) online (http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/default.asp?dict=I), Merriam-Webster online (http://www.merriam-webster.com/) and, occasionally, the idiom section of the Free Dictionary (http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/). 5 Queries in BNC and COCA carried out on 30 September 2017 via the Brigham Young University search interface provided by Mark Davies (http://corpus.byu.edu/).

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of examples in search for idiom variants. Even limiting the search to the spoken components of the two corpora still produces over a 1,000 (BNC) and over 8,000 hits (COCA). In short, looking for creative idioms by means of traditional quantitative corpus methods would come close to looking for a needle not in a haystack but in an entire barn. It is for this reason that codified forms of idioms as recorded in dictionaries are used as the main point of reference for investigating creativity in ELF idiom use (especially in Chapter 4). Although this has potential shortcomings, for example in that attested instances of idiom variation are compared to canonical forms in reference works (and not to other instances of attested use), this methodology is in line with the work of other idiom researchers. Both Moon (1998: 121) and Langlotz (2006: 175–178), for example, discuss the shortcomings of using dictionaries as reference points, but nevertheless adopt this approach themselves, i.e. they compare and analyze evidence of creativity and idiom variation from a corpus against the backdrop of codified idioms, since they are convinced that alternative approaches are even more problematic. From the qualitative methodology employed in annotating and analyzing examples, it follows logically that I will refrain from making any frequency of occurrence claims (or statements concerning statistical significance). This has to do with my qualitative corpus linguistic approach, but also with the fact that most idioms and metaphorical expressions are in themselves rather infrequent. They occur only a few times even in relatively large (spoken) corpora. Needless to say, this scarcity of tokens of individual idiom types puts severe limitations to statistical measurements or predictions concerning idiom variation (cf. Langlotz 2006: 226–227). Even more crucial than practical feasibility is the fact that frequency claims are not the point of this book – and of most descriptive studies done on ELF thus far. The central interest of this book is in how multilingual ELF users vary idioms creatively, how the creative idioms and metaphors function in interaction and why the novel forms are (usually) communicatively effective in ELF contexts. My interest is thus in the processes involved in creative variation, both in relation to forms and communicative functions, and not in how many ELF speakers might use the same (creative) idiom. The examples analyzed in Chapters 4 to 7 are not an exhaustive list of all potentially relevant instances of creative idioms in VOICE, but they originate from a thorough and systematic multi-step engagement with more than 630,000 words of spoken transcribed ELF. Since VOICE is a general corpus, the examples occur in a large number of different settings and communicative situations, and they reveal a wide range of phenomena related to linguistic creativity, idiom use and the role of metaphoricity in spoken ELF. In this sense, they can certainly be taken to be representative of the communicative

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processes that are central in ELF and they can be seen as indicative of the effects that these communicative processes have on the lexicogrammatical and pragmatic characteristics of ELF.

3.2.2 Annotating metaphors and judging metaphoricity Since the process of annotating examples of linguistic creativity at the level of idioms in VOICE also involved the annotation of metaphorical expressions and the critical engagement with different types of metaphors, I would like to add a few comments with regard to methodological questions that arise in this respect. As was discussed extensively in Chapter 2, the relationship of idiom(s) and metaphor(s) is a very intricate and complex one. Yet, it is precisely this relationship which I consider to be of central importance for understanding linguistic creativity at the level of idioms in ELF. The fact that the link between the two concepts is so difficult to conceptualize is because metaphor is in itself an enormously multifaceted topic. Thus, procedures of metaphor identification and annotation are far from straight-forward and raise many questions in terms of methodology and theory. The theoretical account of metaphor provided in Chapter 2 has already highlighted the need to operationalize metaphor within a specific research context. As has been indicated previously, the present study relies on corpus evidence and hence does not include data that could provide psycholinguistic evidence of metaphor processing. Such evidence could be gathered, for example, by asking ELF speakers how they react to certain creative idioms and metaphorical expressions or by eliciting judgments about the degree of metaphoricity and/or intelligibility for specific examples. Nevertheless, such evidence collected in experimental settings or via surveys would still only give a vague indication of the actual cognitive and psycholinguistic processes that happen during naturally-occurring ELF interactions. Both metaphoricity and idiomaticity are always strongly affected in interpretation by the surrounding co- and context. Since elicited judgments would necessarily have to be made in detachment from natural discourse context, they would only provide limited insights as to what actually happens in a speaker’s mind during an authentic ELF conversation when a metaphorical expression or a creative idiom is spontaneously uttered, interpreted and reacted to. What has therefore been suggested from a theoretical point of view in Chapter 2 is a focus on ‘linguistic metaphors’ as stretches of language with “metaphoric potential” (Cameron 1999a: 108). The position adopted in this study is that metaphors in naturally-occurring spoken language data can be identified at

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a theory level as linguistic expressions which exhibit a certain domain incongruity and thus have the potential of being processed metaphorically in order to resolve this incongruity in context. The methodology adopted thus involves the identification and annotation of metaphors – and topic and vehicle terms – at the level of surface forms, i.e. as evidenced in the linguistic output of ELF speakers in VOICE, taking into account co-text and context as much as possible. While I agree that metaphors may indeed be “more than language” (Cameron 1999b: 12) in the sense of having a cognitive, psycholinguistic and conceptual dimension, the emphasis in my study is on the textual and semantic dimension of metaphor (i.e. on its form and semantic structure) as well as on the discourse dimension of metaphor (i.e. on its communicative functions and effects in interaction, cf. Table 2.2. in Section 2.4.4). What is important with regard to the methodology of metaphor identification and annotation – which necessarily starts at the level of form in VOICE – is that, although both topic and vehicle may have explicit lexical realizations in the data, this is not necessarily the case. Thus, when identifying and analyzing metaphors in naturally-occurring spoken language, there is good reason to speak, for example, of “the myth of the nominal metaphor” (Cameron 1999b: 15). While an expression like Juliet is the sun may be regarded as prototypical in form, with both topic and vehicle terms being nouns (A is B), the linguistic forms of metaphors in naturally-occurring language are actually much more varied and diverse: As lexical items, Topic and Vehicle may be drawn from any word class and may range in scale from morpheme, e.g. parts of compound nouns as in bookworm (author’s data), through word, phrase and sentence to unit of discourse, as in poem or allegory. (Cameron 1999b: 14, bold emphasis in original)

But what is more is that “[a] further way in which metaphors in discourse often deviate from the typical examples is in the absence of explicitly stated Topic terms. The non-explicit Topic must be recovered in processing from clues in the surrounding text and context” (Cameron 1999b: 15). These statements simply serve to illustrate that metaphor identification and annotation in real-language data – and thus also in spoken ELF – yields many forms and expressions that clearly depart from the prototypical A is B structure of metaphor. Considering this wide range of potential metaphor forms (that may even have absent topic terms), it is obvious that the manual annotation of individual instances of linguistic metaphors in individual corpus texts is again the most promising way forward. Addressing methodological aspects of corpus-based approaches to metaphor, Stefanowitsch (2006: 11) points out that “[i]n virtually all studies of metaphor, whether corpus-based or not, metaphors are identified and categorized based on more-or-less explicit commonsensical intuitions of [sic] the

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part of the researcher“. Specifying in more detail which attributes are potentially relevant for identifying and categorizing metaphors in natural language (corpus) data, Stefanowitsch (2006: 11) first and foremost mentions source and target domain of a metaphor, which roughly corresponds to what I refer to as topic and vehicle (terms). Additional attributes he mentions are, for example, “degree of metaphoricity”, “degree of conventionality”, or “the reason for using a metaphor” (Stefanowitsch 2006: 11). So metaphor identification necessarily constitutes the basis for any systematic analysis of metaphor. This always involves some degree of interpretation and the recognition of a flouting of the Gricean manner and/or quality maxim – through domain incongruity – in relation to conventional norms. In addition to establishing and making explicit criteria for metaphor identification, it is essential for the researcher to conceptualize a theoretical space in which different types of metaphor can be categorized as one stumbles upon them during manual annotation of authentic spoken (ELF) data. Judging metaphoricity on the basis of “perceived domain difference” is thus one central parameter of metaphor analysis: The degree of difference between Topic and Vehicle domains required for the existence of metaphor is ultimately a matter for decision by the researcher. […] Naturally occurring data will frequently produce situations like this, forcing the researcher to make a series of decisions about metaphoricity as judged by perceived domain difference. (Cameron 1999b: 21)

The dimension of determining metaphoricity on the basis of perceived domain incongruity has thus been suggested as a central parameter for identifying and categorizing metaphors in Table 2.1. (see Section 2.4.3). The types of metaphor that can be identified via this parameter are located on the continuum of what I refer to as overt vs. covert metaphor. Alongside this parameter, three other metaphor types were established in the theoretical framework in Chapter 2. Alongside the parameter of perceived domain incongruity, the parameters that have guided the annotation and categorization process codification (dynamic vs. conventional metaphor), institutionalization and lexicalization (live vs. dead metaphor) and speaker intention (deliberate vs. opaque metaphors). These parameters and metaphor types will be used in the analysis of creative idioms and metaphorical expressions in subsequent chapters.

3.3 Analyzing ELF interactions: Questions of interpretation Having addressed relevant characteristics of VOICE and having introduced the methodological approach for identifying and annotating instances of creative

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idioms and metaphors, there are some aspects that pertain to the interpretation of spoken interactive ELF data that are in need of being addressed. This chapter therefore concludes by discussing three core aspects of interpretation that are salient for my qualitative corpus approach to ELF interactions. The first addresses the need for considering linguistic forms as well as communicative functions in a description of ELF and relates the question of forms and functions to the topic of linguistic creativity, idiom and metaphor. The second concerns the nature of interpreting corpus evidence using contextual information and insider knowledge based on my role as a compiler of VOICE. The third aspect draws attention to problems linked with judging communicative success, effectiveness and shared understanding on the basis of third person evidence.

3.3.1 Forms and functions The analysis of creative idioms and metaphorical expressions in VOICE in the next chapters will focus on two dimensions of annotated examples: their linguistic forms and communicative functions. The interrelatedness of these two aspects has repeatedly been stressed in ELF research (Seidlhofer 2009b; see also e.g. Cogo & Dewey 2006, 2012; Pitzl, Breiteneder & Klimpfinger 2008; Osimk-Teasdale 2014, 2015) and also appears highly relevant for the analysis of idioms and metaphors (see Pitzl 2009, 2012; cf. also Franceschi 2013). On the one hand, my analysis will therefore examine the formal characteristics of the examples in VOICE and explore existing resemblances to codified *English idioms and metaphors – and in some cases also other *languages (see Chapter 7; Pitzl 2016b). On the other hand, the specific contexts of interaction will be considered in order to identify the communicative functions which the creative expressions fulfill. Taking as a point of departure the annotation and analysis at the level of form was considered to be in line with my form-focused definition of linguistic creativity. After the first rough categorization, I subsequently categorized and analyzed the annotated examples in greater detail according to how they actually varied from corresponding idiom(s) – if a corresponding idiom could be identified. While the identification of a corresponding idiom is relatively straightforward for some instances, it remains ambiguous in some cases (see Chapter 4). This I take as illustrative of the central nature of metaphoricity in this respect. This categorization according to formal types of variation is mirrored in the organization and discussion of examples in the analysis chapters. While Chapter 4 presents instances of more traditional types of idiom variation (which have been observed also for L1 *English use, e.g. by Langlotz 2006) and Chapter 5 considers functions of creative idioms, Chapters 6 and 7 go beyond

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these established types of idiom variation and analyze more unusual, unconventional and potentially more ELF-specific instances of linguistic creativity. The formal categories and types of variation distinguished in Chapter 4 should at all times be regarded as broad, approximate and non-exclusive, since different forms of variations can occur within the same expression. Furthermore, it should be noted that, although the analysis relies on codified idioms as a point of reference for distinguishing formal types of idiom variation and linguistic creativity, this is not to suggest that the codified idiom forms are actually accessed during the production/creation and interpretation/processing of the creative forms. The actual cognitive salience of codified idiom forms for creative idiom production and processing in ELF speakers’ minds has to remain an open question in this book, just like the psycholinguistic reality of metaphor processing cannot be assessed on the basis of corpus analyses. Corpus evidence alone does not allow for definitive statements in terms of cognitive salience and/ or psycholinguistic reality; at best, it can lead to descriptive insights that might lead to hypotheses that can be tested with different methodologies. This point needs to be made especially with regard to the fact that ELF speakers are multilingual and thus have more than one pool of idiom and metaphor resources available in their minds (see Chapter 7). Thus, multilingual repertoires and similarities and/or differences in idioms and conceptual metaphorical mappings across *languages a speaker knows might affect the production and processing of creative idioms and metaphorical expressions at any point. Although multilingual resources and idiom mappings become observable only for some examples at the level of idiom forms, the cognitive and psycholinguistic salience or influence of other *languages on the creation of idioms and metaphors can never be completely ruled out, even if there is no third person evidence for this. On occasion, multilingual connections are addressed explicitly by ELF speakers also in relation to the functional discourse dimension (see Chapter 7). In addition to analyzing formal characteristics, all creative idioms and metaphorical expressions are considered within co-text and context in order to explore their communicative purposes and functions in ELF interaction. What Carter (2004) points out with regard to his analysis of creativity in spoken language by L1 *English speakers also – or even more so – holds true for ELF: “it is not simply the identification of puns or forms of wordplay that we are interested in but also a fuller understanding of the effects they create and the functions they perform in stretches of discourse” (Carter 2004: 96–97). The analysis therefore does not only consider creative idioms and re-metaphorization in terms of linguistic forms, but also looks at why ELF speakers might use these forms in the first place, i.e. what might have motivated their creation, and what their communicative effects and functions are in a particular situation. At this point it is important to note that

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creative uses of idioms and metaphors need not be instances of “puns or forms of wordplay” (to use Carter’s words). That is to say, linguistic creativity is not just intentional creativity (such as the use of deliberate metaphors, cf. Table 2.1). Creative idioms and metaphors will not just be employed with creative intent, but will be used for various communicative purposes. It should be pointed out that we can, by no means, expect a consistent formto-function mapping in this respect. Similar formal changes in different expressions can in fact have very different communicative effects: Since it is not possible to predict a direct and precise correlation between the type of formal and structural change and the semantic and communicative effects triggered by these alterations, idiom variation cannot be simply explained in terms of a uniform idiomvariation grammar. While for one idiom a specific structural alteration is fairly trivial and hardly noticeable, the very same change may be unconventional or ungrammatical for another idiom or lead to a completely different communicative effect. (Langlotz 2006: 183)

With regard to idiom variation, Langlotz (2006: 184) therefore suggests three different dimensions of analysis: a) a technical description of formal and semantic alterations, b) an exploration of variation processes and communicative effects and c) an attempt at classifying both dimensions in terms of linguistic regularity and/or communicative motivations. While the last dimension is primarily motivated by his goal of establishing an idiom-variation grammar (a research aim very different from my own), the first two dimensions are relevant to my aims in Chapters 4 to 7. I will analyze forms (Chapter 4) and functions (Chapter 5) of creative idioms and metaphorical expressions in VOICE in order to shed light on the communicative patterns (Chapter 6) that emerge as central in multilingual ELF speakers’ language use (Chapter 7).

3.3.2 Corpus evidence, contextual information and insider knowledge It has already been explored why VOICE is special as a corpus, not only because it is an ELF corpus, but also because it exhibits a fairly strong ethnographic element in data collection, re-contextualization through metadata and CAbased transcription details. It has been discussed that, having been involved in its compilation, the relationship I have with VOICE is different from the way an average user approaches the corpus. While these two aspects, i.e. the characteristics of VOICE and my role as a corpus compiler, have influenced my research methodology (i.e. the manual identification and annotation of instances of linguistic creativity), they also have an impact on interpretation and analysis. This means that there are, in fact, three kinds of data that contribute to the

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analysis of linguistic creativity in this book: corpus evidence, contextual information through metadata and insider knowledge as a compiler. The first and most obvious kind of data is what has been referred to simply as data in the previous sections (especially Section 3.1). This is the linguistic output of speakers as captured in corpus texts, i.e. transcribed versions of naturallyoccurring interactive audio-recorded ELF speech events in the case of VOICE. These main or primary data constitute third person external evidence of spontaneous (i.e. non-elicited) authentic language use and provide direct evidence of instances of linguistic creativity attested in ELF. Such third person textual evidence of linguistic phenomena, however, is not necessarily sufficient for interpreting the “discourse significance” (Widdowson 2000: 9) of these attested forms in their context of occurrence: [C]orpus linguistics provides us with the description of text, not discourse. Although textual findings may well alert us to possible discourse significance and send us back to their contextual source, such significance cannot be read off from the data. The factual data constitute evidence of the textual product: what evidence they might provide of the discourse process is a matter for further enquiry. (Widdowson 2000: 9)

The need to re-contextualize corpus texts through the inclusion of contextual information as metadata has already been discussed in relation to the ethnographic dimension of VOICE. Metadata are therefore the second kind of data that play an important role in analyzing forms and functions of creativity in ELF. Without the contextual information, interpretation would be considerably limited: The researcher would have no information on the type, purpose and setting of an interaction, nor on the speakers taking part in it. Re-contextualizing corpus texts and making use of metadata means taking a step towards a more integrated analysis of textual evidence as product of discourse. The third kind of data I call insider knowledge. Having compiled the corpus I analyze, I know considerably more about most speech events than a regular corpus user who needs to rely solely on metadata. I was present during the recording of many speech events as a non-participant observer and tend to have additional informal knowledge about the particular circumstances in which an interaction took place, who participated in it, why it happened, and how the recording came about. Furthermore, I had access to the audio recordings for all speech events. Most speech events in VOICE are thus real and authentic to me, because I know considerably more about their history and contextual circumstances than the information that can be systematically encoded as metadata in the corpus. In interpreting the primary data (i.e. the third person corpus evidence), I thus make use not only of metadata, but also of my insider knowledge, which allows a more

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ethnographic and discourse analytic approach to interpretation than is commonly found in corpus linguistic studies.

3.3.3 Judging understanding and communicative effect(ivenes)s The final aspect concerning interpretation relates to what I would like to call the emic-etic dilemma of analyzing third person data: A researcher can gather as much contextual information and insider knowledge as possible in order to come close to the emic perspective participants in a conversation. Nevertheless, s/he will eventually always be a bystander, an outside observer trying to make sense of linguistic phenomena that happened in a context that the researcher her/ himself was not part of. Unless a researcher has actively participated in the conversation s/he is analyzing, interpreting discourse functions and communicative effects is necessarily partial and tentative. Many studies and descriptions of ELF tend to focus on linguistic forms as well as communicative functions as many researchers agree on the importance of analyzing ELF conversations in this way: [S]pontaneous ELF communication always has an element of adhoc negotiation of relevant norms, because speakers’ systemic/linguistic and schematic/cultural backgrounds vary from case to case, by definition. It is thus particularly important to understand every speech event in its own right, to appreciate the negotiated nature of the interaction (including speaker relationships, purpose of the interaction, and all the Hymesian factors of the speech event) and the way speakers co-construct the medium of communication to best suit their needs. (Seidlhofer, Breiteneder & Pitzl 2006: 13)

The variability and the co-constructed locally negotiated nature of ELF can thus be seen as “vivid and salutary testimony to the remarkable flexibility and robustness of natural language, and offers compelling evidence of people’s often extraordinary ability to make sense in situ, as part and parcel of the local demands of talking to one another” (Firth 1996: 256, italics in original). Thus, it is clear that a functional approach is preferable to an analysis of linguistic forms only when it comes to ELF. The issue of how such an analysis is to be reliably conducted remains. In addition to re-contextualizing corpus texts with metadata and ethnographic detail, the two main requirements for being able to analyze discourse functions and communicative effects are interactive data and detailed transcripts. If statements about whether expressions are communicatively effective are to be made and communicative effects are to be interpreted, it is essential to have primary data that provide evidence of how participants react to a particular

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expression, i.e. to have interactive data. The more detailed the representation of interaction is in transcripts, the more fine-grained the analysis can be. If the researcher wants to judge the degree of shared understanding to be able to comment on indication and resolution of non-understandings (cf. Pitzl 2005, 2010; Cogo & Pitzl 2016), transcripts need to include pauses, hesitations, repetitions, etc. Crucially, many ELF studies have shown that what is communicatively effective does not necessarily correspond to what is formally ‘correct’ or conventional. Likewise, successful communication does not mean communication that is free of miscommunication as this is an idealized myth (see Pitzl 2010: 18–20, 2015, 2017). Rather, communication would seem to be successful when speakers collaborate to achieve their communicative goals at a transactional content-oriented level as well as at an interactional relation-oriented level. Interpreting how and to what degree these communicative goals are actually fulfilled means trying to get as close to the emic reality of speakers as possible, while being aware that the analyst’s position will necessarily have to remain an etic one.

3.4 Summary This chapter has provided the methodological background for the analysis of creative idioms and metaphors in the subsequent two chapters. Building on the conceptualization of linguistic creativity, I have introduced VOICE as a corpus of spoken ELF and addressed challenges in corpus compilation. It was discussed how decisions taken in this process affect the usability of the corpus, for describing ELF in general and for the present study in particular. The importance of the ethnographic dimension of ELF speech events in VOICE and their re-contextualization through metadata were specifically emphasized in this respect and the main properties of VOICE transcripts were outlined. The chapter then discussed the annotation of examples of linguistic creativity in VOICE. The qualitative approach chosen on the basis of previous research made use of my intensive engagement with individual corpus texts during checking and proofreading and integrates my experience as a corpus compiler. After having pointed out theoretical and practical issues in the annotation and categorization of creative idioms and metaphors, the chapter briefly turned to questions of interpretation, stressing, for example, the importance of analyzing both forms and functions of creativity in ELF.

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The next four chapters will now turn to the analysis of instances of linguistic creativity in VOICE. Starting with more traditional types of idiom variation, the first two chapters will focus on forms and functions of creative idioms. Chapter 4 will discuss how idioms are creatively varied in VOICE and Chapter 5 how these creative forms function pragmatically in ELF interactions. Chapter 6 will then move on to explore patterns of metaphoricity, for example with regard to concrete imagery, before Chapter 7 will turn to the multilingual dimension of idioms and metaphors in ELF interactions.

4 Creative idioms in ELF interactions: Exploring forms This chapter presents an analysis of instances of creative idioms in VOICE. It discusses formal aspects of idiom variation and, in doing so, it distinguishes different well-described types of idiom variation and semantic properties of creative expressions. The examples of creative idioms are organized according to their formal characteristics reflecting different types of variation. That is to say, expressions are, first of all, grouped according to how they differ from codified versions. The formal categories I have used for this purpose are those repeatedly found in the literature on idiom variation. In particular, they have been adapted from Langlotz (2006: 179): lexical substitution, syntactic variation and morphosyntactic variation. Previous research shows that these categories are attested for L1 *English use, so they are not only relevant for the description of ELF but for creativity in idiom use in general.1 Although, for the sake of presenting a coherent discussion, individual examples will be discussed primarily in relation to one type of variation, it needs to be pointed out that lexical substitution, syntactic and morphosyntactic variation are, of course, not mutually exclusive. Many of the examples discussed thus cut across these categories and exhibit more than one type of variation. In addition to formal characteristics, the semantic properties of creative idioms will be analyzed. The consideration of semantic aspects is central because they vary with each expression and are largely unpredictable. The same type of variation, such as lexical substitution, can have a wide range of different semantic properties, depending on which words are substituted. The resulting semantic effects can be more or less salient in different idioms. Making use of the theoretical framework established in Chapter 2, the concepts of metaphoricity and re-metaphorization will be of central importance in analyzing this interrelation of formal variation and semantic properties of creative idioms. While metaphoricity refers to the general quality of an expression having (more or less overt or covert) metaphoric potential, re-metaphorization refers to a process whereby metaphoricity is (re-)awakened and/or (re-)emphasized in an expression. An idiom, which might normally be 1 Retaining the convention introduced at the beginning of Chapter 1, labels for individual languages such as *English, *French, *German, *Korean, *Arabic are represented with an *symbol in the running text of Chapters 4 to 7. This representation is intended to signal that none of these *languages are homogeneous or clearly bounded linguistic ‘entities’. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-005

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considered conventional, uncreative and not overtly or deliberately metaphorical, becomes more noticeable as having metaphoric potential because it is varied from its codified form. Larger theoretical and conceptual issues with regard to this relationship of convention and creativity and of idioms and metaphoricity/remetaphorization are therefore also part of the discussion and analysis.

4.1 Types of idiom variation: Lexical substitution The first type of traditional idiom variation that will be discussed is lexical substitution, which refers to “general alterations of an idiom’s lexical constituents” (Langlotz 2006: 180). Prototypically this means that a speaker uses one lexical element within an idiom that is different from the conventional form. Normally, the original and the substituted element tend to belong to the same word class, i.e. a noun is replaced by a noun, an adjective by an adjective. One way of classifying instances of creative idioms with lexical substitution is therefore in relation to the word class of the original and substituted word (Langlotz 2006: 180). In this way, one might distinguish nominal from verbal and adjectival lexical substitutions, for example. Alternatively, however, it seems more interesting and rewarding in terms of analysis “to focus on the semantic relationship between the alternating elements and the meaning adaptations that result from the substitutions” (Langlotz 2006: 180). Thus, one can explore whether original and substituted elements are synonyms, antonyms, hypo-/hypernyms, for example. It is this second classification scheme, drawing on semantic relationships between original and substituted element, that I rely on in the subsequent sections. In discussing instances of lexical substitution – and other types of variation – I am not suggesting that ELF speakers intentionally substitute one word for another one, just like I am not suggesting that linguistic creativity is always intentional creativity (cf. Chapter 1). My analysis explores the formal and semantic dimension of creative idioms – but this does not presuppose that the new variants are intentionally produced as new variants or that speakers are aware of the creative forms they produce. Whether and for which examples intention to produce a creative expression is salient is an issue that will only be relevant in relation to communicative functions.

4.1.1 Semantic relationships and fields Table 4.1. provides examples of creative idioms in VOICE that exhibit lexical substitution, i.e. idioms in which at least one word is substituted by another one

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by an ELF speaker. Without having looked at (ELF) data, one might assume that such substitutions are somewhat random. When looking at the ELF examples assembled in Table 4.1. (discussed in more detail below), it is obvious, however, that the semantic relationships between the substituted lexical element and the original word are actually quite systematic. The examples from VOICE in Table 4.1. are represented in plain style as supplied by the online search interface of VOICE 1.0 online, i.e. without tags

Table 4.1: Creative idioms with lexical substitution. Examples from VOICE

Corresponding conventional idiom

how to draw the limits between you as a traditional and draw the line (between sth and sth) you as as a modern person or state (PRpan1:22; S5=L1: Arabic (P413)) but again to preserve their face they won’t withdraw (POmtg403:475; S4=L1:Hungarian (P505))

save (sb’s) face

institution networks were very important in paving the ground er for the er for the er socrates program (POwgd243:252; S1=L1:German (P176))

pave the way (for sb/sth) or prepare the ground (for sth)

you can do that yourself i don’t wanna start the meeting get/start off on the right/wrong foot off on a bad foot there (POcon543:621; S7=L1: Danish (with sb) (P503)) because the voters will turn a blank eye on you (PRqas409:12; S3=L1:Slovak (P695))

turn a blind eye (to sth)

don’t kill the messengers (EDwsd302:1164; S17=L1: Bulgarian (P115))

shoot the messenger

anyone will wish to sit in the control of how the systems be in control (of sth) +take a firm line/ definitely | works so that’s where we will have to make stand (on/against sth) our stand (POmtg542:215+217; S1=L1:Danish (P499)) well to my head that is not a joint degree (POwgd325:41; to my mind S1=L1:Norwegian (P214)) i’d just like to to put and s- sort of keep in the head (POmtg314:394; S4=L1:Norwegian (P214))

bear/keep sb/sth in mind

then we’ll be able to sort of identify because that doesn’t come/spring to mind come to their head easily i mean (POwgd243:113; S3=L1: Finnish (P178)) because i mean to smooth the process i said [first name7] okay let’s get rid of the c p s charts (PBmtg269:917; S3=L1:Polish (P541))

smooth the path/way

(continued )

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Table 4.1: (continued ) Examples from VOICE

Corresponding conventional idiom

you still get those few who are the cream of the lot (EDint331:386; S1=L1:Maltese (P167))

the cream of the cropa

six hundred applicants for twenty-five places so it’s the the cream of the crop or crème de la cream on of the cream at my er university (PRqas18:39; crème S2=L1:Norwegian (P705)) i’m i feel that many times i am pulling the brakes and i’m jam on the brakes really and i’m consciously doing it because i know that time is needed (POmtg314:180; S5=L1:Finnish (P178)) the the ball is in your corner @@ (PBmtg414:2133; S3=L1:German (P526))

the ball is in your/sb’s court

The expression the cream of the crop is listed as structure (not as “idiom”) in the OALD9, yet other dictionaries, such as the Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms online list it as idiom.

a

and mark-up. Layout modifications are bold print for indicating the creative idiom, regular underlining for the substituted lexical element and dotted underlining for other types of formal variation (see Section 4.2). A vertical line | signals that the expression stretches over more than one utterance in the corpus and indicates the utterance boundary. The reference in parentheses provides the utterance identifier in VOICE, the speaker’s L1 background and the overall speaker ID (e.g. P413). The expressions listed in the right column are codified in the OALD 9. Before I explore the different semantic relationships in more detail in the sections below, I would like to draw attention to the formal characteristics of these examples in terms of ELF speakers combining different types of idiom variation. All the examples listed in Table 4.1. feature at least one prominent instance of lexical substitution, which is why they are discussed primarily in relation to this category. (The substituted element is indicated with single underlining.) As was already mentioned, it is noticeable, however, that other types of formal variation also occur in many examples. (These are indicated with dotted underlining.) In addition to lexical substitution, we find morphosyntactic variation like pluralization (messengers, limits), aspect marking (pulling), flexible use of definite and indefinite articles (the control, the head, a bad foot), modification of determiners (our stand, their head), an alteration of a prepositional phrase (on you) as well as syntactic variations like object insertion (the meeting). These aspects will be discussed later (see Section 4.2). At this point, we will explore the semantic relationship of original and substituted lexical items in more detail.

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4.1.1.1 Semantically related words Although the substituted lexical elements in the examples in Table 4.1 are mostly not synonymous with the lexical elements used in the codified form of the idiom, it is noticeable that there is a close semantic relationship between original and ‘new’ element in most examples. This is evidenced, for example, by the expression how to draw the limits, which seems to be influenced by the conventional to draw the line. (4.1) how to draw the limits between you as a traditional and you as as a modern person or state (PRpan1:22; S5=L1:Arabic (P413); plain style) The word limit is substituted2 for line, with both words denoting similar concepts. This, I would argue, foregrounds and exploits the common semantic properties of these words (i.e. limit and line both indicate a boundary) and thereby the creative idiom reactivates metaphorical resonance that is otherwise dead or only covert in the conventional idiom. A similarly close semantic relationship between original and substituted lexical element can be observed in several of the examples above: (4.2)

but again to preserve their face they won’t withdraw (POmtg403:475; S4=L1:Hungarian (P505); plain style)

(4.3)

institution networks were very important in paving the ground er for the er for the er socrates program (POwgd243:252; S1=L1:German (P176); plain style)

(4.4)

you can do that yourself i don’t wanna start the meeting off on a bad foot there (POcon543:621; S7=L1: Danish (P503); plain style)

(4.5)

because the voters will turn a blank eye on you (PRqas409:12; S3=L1:Slovak (P695); plain style)

In these examples, preserve is substituted for save (4.2), ground is substituted for way (4.3), bad is substituted for wrong (4.4), and blank is substituted for blind (4.5). Although the differences in meaning of the substituted words will affect the

2 The phrase “is substituted” refers to and describes the properties of conventional vs. creative idiom. It does not refer to a cognitive process of the speaker.

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meanings of the newly created expressions, these effects will be rather subtle if there is a close semantic link between original and substituted element. The only example of the four listed above in which the effect on meaning might be more significant is the case of preserve – save. This substitution has the potential of triggering a rather different mental image, since the act of ‘saving’ something/ someone is rather different from the act of ‘preserving’ something. However, the word save in the conventional idiom to save (sb’s) face has probably only a rather slim chance of actually triggering the mental image of someone/something being saved. Thus, the general meaning of the substituted word preserve is probably actually closer to the conventional meaning of save associated with this particular conventional idiom than the meaning of the verb save when it is not used in the idiomatic phrase. In fact, the substitution of preserve for save highlights the specific conventional meaning which the word save takes on in the L1 *English idiom. Very often, as in examples (4.2) to (4.5), both words belong to the same semantic field or share important conceptual properties (e.g. ground and way can both be described with properties like ‘physically located below one’s feet’ and ‘can be walked on’). In many cases, the overall meaning of a creative idiom in which a semantically similar word is substituted thus remains similar to the meaning of the conventional idiom, as is also the case in don’t step on each other’s feet (Franceschi 2013: 86). Whether ELF speakers in the context of interaction produce/utter – as well as interpret and process – a creative idiom with a substituted element ‘as is’, i.e. without reference to the conventional form, or perceive them as creative variations of an existing idiom is a question that has to remain largely unanswered. For most instances, corpus data does not provide evidence (such as explicit comments) about the speaker’s idiom/metaphor processing of a particular expression or about her/his (non-)familiarity with a particular idiom.

4.1.1.2 Hyponyms and superordinate terms Semantic relationships of similarity between original and substituted elements are also in operation in the case of (4.6), where kill is substituted for shoot, and in (4.7), where sit is substituted for be. In these examples, original and substituted words are semantically related via hyponymy, i.e. a hierarchical meaning relationship where one lexical item can be regarded as an example or subclass of the other. In (4.6), the verb kill is used for the more action-specific verb shoot, which is part of the conventional idiom. (4.6) don’t kill the messengers (EDwsd302:1164; S17=L1:Bulgarian (P115); plain style)

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In this expression, kill seems to express the same (or similar) semantic content as shoot, but in a more general way. So although shoot is not a full hyponym of kill – the act of shooting does not necessarily result in death – it is the hyponymic relationship of shoot as a specific instance of kill that seems to be activated when the speaker uses kill (not shoot). Noticeably, this is one of the few examples of idiom variation that is relatively easy to retrieve also via quantitative searches. A quick query in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) renders 28 occurrences of ‘kill the messenger’ in COCA (compared to 43 occurrences of the conventional ‘shoot the messenger’) and one occurrence of ‘kill the messenger’ in BNC (compared to four occurrences of ‘shoot the messenger’).3 The hyponymic relationship between shoot and kill thus seems to make this particular lexical substitution a likely one, not only in ELF, but also in L1 *English use. So although currently only shoot the messenger is legitimized through codification as an idiom, kill the messenger is an attested alternative in COCA, not just in VOICE. The opposite type of substitution in terms of hyponymy happens in the case of the newly created expression to sit in the control of, where sit is used where the conventional idiom has the general verb be.4 (4.7) anyone will wish to sit in the control of how the systems definitely | works so that’s where we will have to make our stand (POmtg542:215+217; S1=L1:Danish (P499); plain style) The new expression with sit is more specific and creates a much more visual and concrete image than the conventional codified idiom. This new metaphorical image created via the use sit (instead of be) is nicely expanded in the creative idiom make our stand, which immediately follows the expression sit in the control. The semantic and iconic contrast between sit and stand is only created via the lexical substitution in the first expression; it would not have been present had the speaker used the conventional idiom be in control of.

3 Queries in BNC (n=100 million) and COCA (n= 520 million) carried out in January 2017 via the Brigham Young University interface. 4 The speaker (P499) who coins the expressions sit in the control of and make our stand is not the same person who coins the expression start the meeting off on a bad foot (P503), although both speakers have *Danish as their L1. The two speakers know each other, however, and both participate together in several speech events included in VOICE.

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4.1.1.3 Terms of embodiment A similar trend towards more concrete images, and more precisely towards terms of embodiment, can be observed in examples (4.8) to (4.10). (4.8)

well to my head that is not a joint degree (POwgd325:41; S1=L1:Norwegian (P214); plain style)

(4.9)

i’d just like to to put and s- sort of keep in the head (POmtg314:394; S4=L1:Norwegian (P214); plain style)5

(4.10)

then we’ll be able to sort of identify because that doesn’t come to their head easily i mean (POwgd243:113; S3=L1:Finnish (P178); plain style)

(4.11)

she doesn’t really think it’s what comes into your head (EDint330:694; S4=L1:Maltese; English (P318); plain style))

In all of these expressions, the word mind in the conventional idioms is substituted with the embodied term head by the ELF speakers. Citing the similar examples, Seidlhofer (2009a) makes the following observation: So far, these ELF phrases for talking about opinions tend to be individual occurrences, but it cannot be ruled out that one or the other will take hold over time. Thus it might become customary in ELF interactions to use head and mind interchangeably, or to replace mind by head in variations of ENL constructions. Even if no new fixed phrases emerge, it will be interesting to see whether some free variation between mind and head eventually establishes itself as conventional in certain contexts of ELF use. (Seidlhofer 2009a: 205, italics in original)

Although only time will tell whether interchangeable use of head and mind becomes a more wide-spread feature of ELF use, the case of head and mind might be symptomatic of a cluster of processes of lexical substitution – and linguistic creativity in general – in ELF idiom use: Words denoting similar semantic concepts (including terms of embodiment) are substituted for original words, which brings forth new creative idioms with concrete images and increased metaphorical resonance (see also Chapter 6). Some examples in Table 4.1 also make use of other terms of embodiment, such as eye, foot and face, though these terms are not substituted elements but part of the conventional idioms. Whether consciously chosen by the ELF speakers or not, the words substituted for original lexical elements are clearly not arbitrarily selected

5 The expressions to my head and keep in the head are produced by the same person (P214), although in two different speech events (POwgd325 and POmtg314).

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in terms of the organization of the mental lexicon and the metaphorical image of the idiom.

4.1.1.4 Abstract words and shift in metaphorical resonance Although in most cases, the words that are substituted for the original lexical elements in creating a novel ELF expression tend to be more specific or concrete than the original words, the opposite trend can also be observed in some instances. (4.12) because i mean to smooth the process i said [first name7] okay let’s get rid of the c p s charts (PBmtg269:917; S3=L1:Polish (P541); plain style) (4.13) you still get those few who are the cream of the lot (EDint331:386; S1=L1:Maltese (P167); plain style) In smooth the process and the cream of the lot, original and substituted words also share semantic characteristics, with process presumably being substituted for path or way and lot being substituted for crop (see Table 4.1). What is noteworthy with regard to these two examples is that the substituted words are actually less concrete and more abstract than the original wordings. So while substitutions like head (for mind) and sit (for be) seem to enhance visual imagery, both process and lot are abstract nouns and potentially decrease the likelihood of concrete mental images. Crucially, substituting such abstract words such does not necessarily decrease metaphoricity, but may trigger a shift of metaphorical resonance. While the creative idiom as a whole may be less salient as a metaphor, certain parts (i.e. words) of the idiom might become more overtly metaphorical. Let me illustrate this shift in metaphorical resonance by discussing the two examples in question. Starting with (4.12) smooth the process, the word process shares some semantic content with path and way, since all three words suggest movement and action which presumably lie ahead, i.e. have a forward orientation. As has already been noted, process is more abstract than the original words path or way. A path or way literally exists and can be walked on for the purposes of moving forward. The forward orientation inherent in original wording is thus primarily spatial. A process, on the other hand, usually refers to a more or less complex undertaking that often has no observable physical shape or form, but simply denotes a series of things which happen or are done in order to achieve a particular result (OALD9: s.v. process). The forward orientation of process is thus primarily temporal, not spatial or physical; a process refers to a sequence of events, things or actions, not to someone’s physical surroundings (see Section 2.3.1).

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If we want to examine the suggested shift in metaphorical resonance, i.e. the relation of Topic (T) and Vehicle (V), it is important to look at the co-text of the creative idiom in order to consider the semantic relationship of process (i.e. the substituted word) with the content of the conversation. The overall purpose of the business meeting (PBmtg269) in which the ELF speaker coins the phrase to smooth the process is the coordination of a PR campaign across several Eastern European countries, a task that clearly involves all kinds of processes. The substituted word process is thus actually part of the topic (T) of the ELF business meeting, and not part of the vehicle (V). If we compare the attested creative idiom smooth the process in VOICE (4.12) with a fictional alternative utterance in (4.12ʹ) in which the speaker might have used the conventional idiom, we can observe how the metaphoricity of the two expressions is different, because topic and vehicle change through the variation. (4.12)

this is one of the reasons why this presentation do not incorporate any c p s because i mean to smooth the process i said [first name7] okay let’s get rid of the c p s charts (PBmtg269:917; S3=L1:Polish (P541); plain style)

(4.12ʹ) this is one of the reasons why this presentation do not incorporate any c p s because i mean to smooth the path/way i said [first name7] okay let’s get rid of the c p s charts (invented example with conventional idiom) If the speaker had uttered the conventional idiom smooth the path/way (4.12ʹ), the entire idiom would have been the vehicle (V) that would have created metaphorical resonance with the surrounding co-text, i.e. the topic (T). With the attested creative idiom smooth the process (4.12), however, the domain incongruity of topic (T) and vehicle (V) is not between the whole idiom and the surrounding co-text, but within the creative idiom itself: The word process is part of the topic (T) and therefore not metaphorical. As a consequence, in the creative expression, only smooth constitutes the vehicle (V) that creates metaphorical resonance with the topic (T). The substitution of process for path/way thus (re-)awakens metaphoricity within the idiom by means of introducing domain incongruity and metaphorical resonance within the expression, a domain incongruity that the conventional form does not have. A path or way can literally be smoothed (i.e. be made even), so interpreting the conventional phrase smooth the path/way does not require metaphor processing. With the conventional idiom, metaphoricity is between idiom and surrounding co-text, i.e. the topic (T). A process, on the other hand, as an abstract concept cannot be smoothed

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literally, just figuratively. Interpreting just the creative idiom smooth the process hence requires some metaphor processing, since metaphoricity rests within the phrase itself: While process is part of the topic (T), the verb smooth is the vehicle (V). An interesting question (that would unfortunately go beyond the scope of the present discussion) is whether the verb smooth should itself be considered a conventional (i.e. codified) metaphor or not. While some dictionaries, like the OALD, only list literal meanings for the verb smooth, others like MerriamWebster Online also list abstract meanings, such as “to free from difficulties or impediments” (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/smooth, 30 September 2017). The verb smooth thus illustrates the inherently fuzzy boundary between idioms and conventional one-word metaphors (cf. Table 2.1.; also see Chapter 5). An effect similar to the one in smooth the process can be observed in the substitution of lot for crop in the creative idiom the cream of the lot. (4.13)

you still get those few who are the cream of the lot (EDint331:386; S1=L1:Maltese (P167); plain style)

(4.13ʹ) you still get those few who are the cream of the crop (invented example with conventional idiom) Once again, the substituted word lot is similar to crop in that the two words share the semantic concept of denoting an entire group or amount of something/ someone. Similar to smooth the process (4.12) and smooth the path/way (4.12ʹ), the substituted element lot in (4.13) in VOICE appears to be closer to the topic (T) being discussed, namely the quality of university students, whereas the original element crop in (4.13ʹ) would have been part of the vehicle (V). The use of lot instead of crop breaks with convention and increases the metaphoricity of the word cream as the only vehicle term in relation to the co-text.

4.1.2 Alternative interpretations and theoretical implications The previous sections have examined some of the different semantic relationships of original and substituted elements in creative idioms and have explored the effects these semantic relationships have on the meaning and metaphoricity of idioms. This discussion has already indicated some of the challenges in analyzing and categorizing the formal characteristics of creative idioms in spoken ELF data. I will now address some of these challenges specifically and propose alternative interpretations that may be relevant for some examples. It will be explored how

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this (unavoidable) indeterminacy in categorization is in fact indicative of the intricate relationship between metaphoricity, creativity and idiom use, which is heightened through the formal variability that takes place in ELF.

4.1.2.1 Identifying corresponding idiom(s) The first challenge in interpretation refers to the fact that, for some examples, there is more than one *English idiom that the creative expression could potentially correspond to. Examples (4.3) and (4.14) are instances of such ambiguous cases: (4.3)

institution networks were very important in paving the ground er for the er for the er socrates program (POwgd243:252; S1=L1:German (P176); plain style)

(4.14)

six hundred applicants for twenty-five places so it’s the cream on of the cream at my er university (PRqas18:39; S2=L1:Norwegian (P705); plain style)

Both examples can be categorized as examples of lexical substitution, in relation to at least one corresponding *English idiom. If the cream on of the cream (4.14) is regarded as a variant of the cream of the crop, then the lexical item cream is substituted for the original word crop. Secondly, paving the ground (4.3) can be categorized as lexical substitution in relation to pave the way (with ground substituted for way) or in relation to prepare the ground (with pave/ing substituted for prepare). Crucially, however, both (4.3) and (4.14) also allow for alternative interpretations, in relation to other idioms they might correspond to. That is to say, both examples could not only be instances of lexical substitution but exhibit also other types of idiom variation and creativity. Let us start with an alternative interpretation and analysis of the cream on of the cream (4.14). If we continue to disregard the inserted pronoun on as a slip of the tongue in online speech production, the expression the cream on of the cream might not just have been influenced by the cream of the crop but also by the existing expression crème de la crème (see Table 4.1). The newly created phrase the cream of the cream could thus be an ‘Englishized’ version of crème de la crème coined by the ELF speaker. What is interesting in this respect is that the conventional crème de la crème is itself noticeable as a borrowed foreign element in *English. The OALD9 (s.v. crème de la crème) lists crème de la crème as a singular noun “from French, formal or humorous” (italics in original) that refers to “the best people or things

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of their kind” (OALD 9: s.v. crème de la crème). So although crème de la crème is not listed as an idiom in the dictionary, it only has one codified meaning, and this meaning is a figurative one – which is something typical of idioms. Although codified as a noun, crème de la crème is thus an instance of what I call conventional metaphor (see Chapter 2), since it has a codified metaphorical meaning. The fact that the OALD classifies crème de la crème as a noun – and not as an idiom – is in itself interesting and could be a side effect of the discernable loanword status of the phrase. As has been discussed in Chapter 2, a prevalent and general attitude towards idioms is that they are usually considered characteristic and typical of a language. To put this very simply: *English idioms are presumably regarded as particularly *English and ‘idiomatic’, i.e. typical of what L1 *English speakers would say. A borrowed expression, however, is precisely the opposite. It is per definition an imported foreign element and therefore untypical of the language in question. How much ‘foreignness’ is retained in the course of time varies for borrowed words and phrases, of course. Most *French loanwords that became part of the *English lexicon during the Middle English period are no longer recognizable as borrowed expressions today, since they were adapted phonetically, morphologically, orthographically and/or syntactically. These words were gradually integrated into *English and have therefore ceased to be noticeably ‘foreign’. The perceived degree of ‘foreignness’ will be influenced strongly by the way in which a borrowed item is presented, that is to say, whether the foreign element is adapted linguistically or simply adopted and remains unchanged (cf. McMahon 1994: 200–209). The latter, i.e. unchanged adoption, is the case for the now conventional crème de la crème, which is first attested in *English in the year 1848 according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED: s.v. crème de la crème). Although the expression is part of *English in the sense of being codified in *English dictionaries, the phrase has remained discernably *French in terms of pronunciation, morphology and orthography. The ELF speaker’s rendering of the expression as the cream of the cream and can be seen as an instance of adaptation of this conventional metaphor: By translating the conventional borrowed *French expression into *English, the ELF speaker transforms the ‘foreign’ phrase into an adapted *English one, thus integrating it fully into *English. The case of paving the ground is a different matter in terms of alternative interpretation. As has been stated above, paving the ground (4.3) can be considered an instance of lexical substitution in relation to two different idioms: pave the way and prepare the ground. But alternatively, it can also be regarded

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as an instance of blending that involves the fusion of both conventional idioms into a new creative expression. I am using the term blending here in the sense that is commonly found in word-formation literature, because it seems that Plag’s (2003: 122) definition of blends can also serve to describe blending of idioms: “words [or idioms] that combine two (rarely three or more) words [or idioms] into one, deleting material from one or both of the source words [or idioms]”. An alternative perspective on blending would be to adopt a syntactic approach. In relation to syntactic constructions, Aarts (2007: 189) distinguishes “syntactic blends” from “syntactic mergers”, “syntactic fusions” and “anacolutha”. The main parameters that serve for differentiating these types of blends are the structural integration vs. the structural independence of the two original constructions and frequency of use vs. (perceived) idiosyncrasy of the blended construction. For the purposes of the present analysis, a lexical definition, like the one by Plag (2003), of blending in terms of the fusion of two (or more) words/ idioms is considered sufficient. I would like to suggest that what we can observe in relation to some instances of creative idioms in VOICE, such as paving the ground and also examples (4.15) and (4.16) below, might thus be similar to what happens in terms of creativity and compositionality at the word level in ELF: Moreover, the process of analysis revealed that often different interpretations are possible for one PVC, depending on which word is identified as the ‘root’ or base word from which the new form is being derived. Pronunciate […] could be interpreted as backformation with pronunciation being the base word and the verb pronunciate following from the deletion of the suffix -ion. The same innovation could also be categorized under suffixation if pronounce is regarded as the base form to which the verbal suffix -ate is being added. As a third alternative, one could argue that pronunciate is a blend and formed via combining the words pronounce and enunciate. Co- and context would allow for any of the three alternative categorizations, and speakers simply cannot be asked retrospectively what it is that they meant to say at the particular time. (Pitzl, Breiteneder & Klimpfinger 2008: 29, italics in original)

The scenario described for an instance of lexical innovation here is almost identical to different interpretations that are plausible for the creative idiom paving the ground (see also Section 1.4). Similarly, the creative expressions move along this road, travel along that road and travel down this road in (4.15) and (4.16) can be categorized either as instances of blending or as the result of lexical substitution or morphosyntactic variation (for more details on morphosyntactic variation see below).

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(4.15)

even from a professional point of view i think it’s important people should m- move along this road they should not travel along that road gone other days when you could discuss these things at a purely departmental level (POwgd243:185; S1=L1:German (P176); plain style)

(4.16)

i think that initially there needs to be broad agreement across the board at central level why do we want to travel down this road and clear signals have to be sent (POwgd243:225; S1=L1:German (P176); plain style)

Both (4.15) and (4.16) might have been coined as a result of blending the conventional idioms go down that road and along/down the road or as a result of lexical substitution, with the more specific verbs move and travel substituted for go. A noteworthy aspect is that all creative expressions in (4.15) and (4.16) – and also paving the ground in (4.3) – are uttered by the same speaker (P176) in the course of one speech event (POwgd243). On the one hand, this means that we need to be cautious in terms of generalizations. On the other hand, it also allows us a glimpse at the linguistic creativity of one speaker with regard to one particular metaphorical image. What the expressions in (4.15) and (4.16) – with their variable use of move and travel, this and that, along and down – illustrate is that metaphoricity clearly seems to override lexical accuracy and conventionality for this speaker in the ELF context. The speaker (P176) uses the metaphorical image of ‘traveling/moving along/down this/that road’ repeatedly, presumably because he considers it effective for emphasizing a particular point he wants to make in the discussion (see Chapter 5). The exact wording of the image seems secondary. This observation leads us to another challenge in interpretation that concerns one of the most salient theoretical questions in this book, namely whether it makes sense to maintain the distinction between (creative) idiom and (overt) metaphor for ELF.

4.1.2.2 Creative idiom or overt metaphor? This challenge relates to the question of when a particular expression is to be regarded, and thus analyzed, as a creative idiom (i.e. a longer expression that is varied from its conventional form) and when it might simply be considered an overt metaphor (i.e. an expression that has a high degree of domain incongruity in relation to the topic of conversation). The main question, which will be revisited several times throughout this and the subsequent chapters, is in how

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far the distinction ‘idiom vs. metaphor’ can or should be maintained for ELF in light of evidence of linguistic creativity. Example (4.17) below illustrates that in many cases it is hardly possible to distinguish between a creative idiom and a newly coined overt metaphor: (4.17)

i’m i feel that many times i am pulling the brakes and i’m really and i’m consciously doing it because i know that time is needed […] (POmtg314:180; S5=L1:Finnish (P178); plain style)

One the one hand, the expression pulling the brakes can be analyzed as a creative idiom in which the verb pull is substituted for the verb jam (cf. jam on the brake(s)), i.e. an instance of lexical substitution (see Table 4.1). On the other hand, it seems equally plausible that the ELF speaker in this meeting simply employs a suitable metaphor to express his wish to slow down an institutional process. Contrary to most other idioms, the conventional idiom jam on the brake(s) is listed only with a literal meaning in the OALD9, namely “to operate the brakes on a vehicle suddenly and with force” (OALD 9: s.v. brake). Thus, even if the speaker had used the conventional wording, this would have required metaphor processing on the part of the other ELF interlocutors. Their topic of conversation is the development of university partnerships for joint degree programs, not driving a car. So in order to make sense of the phrase jam on the brake(s)/pulling the brakes in this context, the phrase needs to be interpreted metaphorically. The use of pulling (instead of jam on) also makes use of this metaphoricity because it denotes and triggers a physical action at least as vividly as the conventional idiom does; it also alludes, once again, to embodied experience (see above and Chapter 6). Notably, the image created by pulling the brakes is slightly different from the one that the conventional expression would denote. It involves not a break that is stepped on, but one that is pulled, presumably with one’s hand, like for example an emergency brake on a train. Examples like this suggest that the distinction between creative idiom, i.e. an adapted realization of an existing conventional expression, and overt dynamic metaphor is to some extent arbitrary. They emphasize the importance of metaphors for ELF and indicate the fuzzy boundaries of the idiom category, not just in ELF but also in L1 use.

4.1.2.3 Lexical substitution as indicator of metaphor processing? The ways in which conventional wordings of idioms are altered through lexical substitution supports the suggestion that these expressions are likely to be processed as metaphors by ELF speakers. This might involve the decomposition of the conventional idiom and – having processed it as a metaphor – the (intentional or

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unintentional) creation of a new expression that is compositional as a metaphor. Although this lends support to the suggestion that “ELF users will tend to construct what they have to say more analytically, in a bottom-up fashion, drawing on what is semantically encoded in the grammar and lexis of the language” (Seidlhofer 2009a: 202), this does not necessarily mean that creative expressions are constructed on the basis of Sinclair’s (1991) open choice principle, as Seidlhofer (2009a: 202) suggests. But neither does it mean that ELF speaker’s expressions are just approximations of target forms that “may result from either insufficient or partial representation or from insufficient access routes to the target item”, as Mauranen (2012: 41–43) argues. Metaphor processing, decomposition and re-metaphorization are clearly much more complex cognitive processes than Sinclair’s (1991) fairly simple distinction between idiom and open-choice principle can account for. They clearly involve more than just choosing words to form comprehensible sentences/utterances. They involve pragmatic choices that are influenced by context and are prompted by the need to express one’s thoughts not just literally. In many ways, they call into question the supposedly rather clear-cut distinction between idiom and open-choice principle that has very often been taken for granted in *English corpus linguistics in the past decades. Although one finds occasional concessions that “choices” may be involved also with L1 expressions subsumed under the idiom principle, for example when expressions allow for lexical or syntactic flexibility in conventional use (Erman & Warren 2000), idioms are often presented as fixed, frozen, non-compositional and in need of being ‘correct’ in their wording in order to be understood and fulfill a communicative purpose – especially when it comes to engaging learners in ELT with idioms. While this position is questionable and has been criticized also for L1 use, it is untenable for naturally-occurring spoken ELF. Rather than being stored, processed and uttered as fixed lexical units, many creative idioms in VOICE involve compositional processing of individual components. They also involve choices of particular lexical elements to use. Although the choice of lexically substituted elements may not be a completely open one but tends to be strongly influenced by semantic relationships and metaphorical images, it is – whether it is intentionally done or not – a choice. Intentional punning and word play are well documented for L1 speakers (e.g. Crystal 1998; Cook 2000; Carter 2004) and make active and intentional use of these choices. Multilingual ELF speakers similarly sometimes make active and intentional use of these choices (see e.g. Cogo 2010: 303 discussed in Chapter 5). In most instances, however, ELF speakers do probably not actively and intentionally choose to create new expressions for the purposes of word play. Yet, processes like lexical substitution, which allow them to do so, are the same ones

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that are available for intentional creativity (see Chapter 8). Crucially, since the prototypical ELF speaker is multilingual, these choices will not just be affected by *English, but by individual’s multilingual repertoires and corresponding idiom and metaphor resource pools (see Chapter 7 and Pitzl 2016b). What the examples from VOICE discussed thus far illustrate is that the creation of new idiom variants via lexical substitution is a feature that can be regarded as characteristic of ELF to some degree. As has been shown, creative idioms with metaphorical content are produced by a range of ELF speakers from a range of different L1 backgrounds. The expressions themselves are not frequent, as the idioms analyzed here are low-frequency items. Nevertheless, the spectrum of examples demonstrates that they are certainly part of ELF, in the sense that ELF speakers from all kinds of L1 backgrounds exhibit linguistic creativity of this kind. Re-metaphorization and linguistic creativity in idiom use are thus general processes that take place in ELF across speakers’ L1 backgrounds and in all kinds of settings and contexts. The individual manifestations of phrases might be differently affected by speakers’ L1s and individual multilingual repertoires, but the general processes – like lexical substitution – are indeed just that: general. Vettorel (2014: 201–202) discusses examples of lexical substitution in idioms in her online ELF data in connection with speakers’ plurilingual resources. Thus, she traces potential L1 influences that might have led to expressions such as keeping his married foot in two shoes again (cf. conventional keep a foot in both camps), adding some pepper in all the right places (cf. conventional to add spice), play with phrases (cf. conventional play with words), remember to recharge yourself (cf. conventional recharge your batteries). Although L1 patterns may of course contribute to the substitution of a lexical element for another, the examples discussed in this section have shown that lexical substitution is not just the result of L1 transfer. Lexical substitution – also observable in the use of L1 *English speakers (cf. Langlotz 2006) – often happens without being prompted by a speaker’s first language. In the next section, I will explore formal characteristics of creative idioms that have come about by syntactic and/or morphosyntactic variation.

4.2 Types of idiom variation: Syntactic and morphosyntactic variation In looking at examples of lexical substitution in VOICE, we have already seen some instances of variation on the level of syntax and morphosyntax (see Table 4.1). Distinguishing between these two, morphosyntactic variation refers to “inflectional variants of one (or several) idiom constituents, including verb inflection, noun inflection (pluralisation) and the flexible use of determiners

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and quantifiers” (Langlotz 2006: 179), whereas syntactic variation refers to “changes in the constructional organization of the base-form”, such as “postmodification”, “passivisation” and “clefting” (Langlotz 2006: 180). Since these definitions illustrate that syntactic and morphosyntactic variation may exhibit some closely related processes, they will both be discussed in this section. In the following, I will start by looking at some formal characteristics of syntactic variation, before discussing examples of morphosyntactic variation in VOICE. After having considered formal characteristics, I will highlight some of the theoretical implications the analysis of these instances of creativity has with regard to idiom decomposition and metaphorical compositionality and what this means for distinguishing between creative and conventional use of certain expressions.

4.2.1 Formal characteristics of syntactic variation As has been stated above, syntactic variation in idioms refers to changes in constructional organization, which usually involves modifying and adapting constructions that are considered part of the idiom. Such syntactic changes and modifications can happen either via extending constructions or, more frequently, via internal syntactic modification. Extending constructions can take place, for example, through postmodification, such as the addition of relative clauses or of-complements or prepositional phrases. While also varied internally (through the lexical substitution of feel for make), example (4.18) can be categorized as a case of syntactic variation through postmodification, since the phrase on the table is added to the idiom. (4.18)

feel yourself at home on the table (PBmtg462:1950; S5=L1:German (P526); plain style)

Although it is tricky (and potentially ambiguous) to decide whether an additional phrase like on the table is part of the idiom, it seems that in (4.18) the ELF speaker elaborates on the sentiment of feel yourself at home (with feel being substituted for make) through relating it to the specific context of the situation that speakers are discussing at this point (see also Section 5.3). More often than through postmodification, syntactic variation can also occur in instances of what Nunberg, Sag and Wasow (1994: 500) call internal modification, i.e. “modification of only part of the meaning of the idiom”. One kind of internal modification that the authors mention in this respect is the

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insertion of adjectives, which may also involve quantification (Nunberg, Sag & Wasow 1994: 501). Examples (4.19) to (4.23) are instances in VOICE in which syntactic properties are modified internally through the insertion of adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. The examples are given in plain style. Creative idioms are indicated in bold. Single underlining indicates syntactic variation, i.e. here the internal modification that involves the insertion of an element in most instances, which tends to bring about quantification or additional emphasis. Dotted underlining indicates other types of variation. (4.19)

the right of these persons to er to receive er a bigger share of of this pie because they contributed initially (PRpan13:103; S10=L1:Rumanian (P88); plain style)

(4.20)

er no need to go er into much details why’s the adoption of euro advantageous for us i think (PBpan25:6; S2=L1:Hungarian (P376); plain style)

(4.21)

because we can never know that for sure to wait until the the big crest of the wave has passed and then and then see where you where you are (PBpan25:52; S5=L1:Rumanian (P379); plain style)

(4.22)

er i’ll i’ll ma- i’ll i’ll make a very safe bet with you xx (POcon543:958; S1=L1:Danish (P499); plain style)

(4.23)

yes erm i think there are two different sides of the same coin (POwgd12:651; S10=L1:German (P101); plain style)

All examples follow a very similar pattern in syntactic variation with regard to internal modification. Almost all examples contain an inserted additional lexical element which is either an adjective (bigger, big, different, much) or an adverb (very). Additionally, they are also rather similar with regard to how the inserted or modified elements affect the meaning of the idioms semantically. Idiom meaning is not considerably altered in most cases but modified in one of two ways: Either the original meaning of the idiom is emphasized (much details, big crest, very safe bet, two different sides) or it is specified and adapted to the present communicative situation (bigger share of this pie). Syntactic variation is generally much more closely linked to the syntactic characteristics of the particular idiom that is being varied than, for example, lexical substitution is. Lexical substitution, i.e. replacing one word with another, can occur in any kind of syntactic structure. The nature of syntactic variation depends more closely on the structural characteristics of the conventional idiom. Metaphoricity still seems to be at play in allowing for and being conducive to syntactic variation,

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although the extent to which metaphoricity is (re)-activated will, of course, also vary with regard to different idioms and syntactic realizations. What psycholinguistic experiments with L1 *English speakers have shown is that “normally decomposable idioms (e.g., pop the question) were found to be much more syntactically productive than semantically non-decomposable idioms (e.g., chew the fat)” (Gibbs 1993: 63). So (non-)compositionality and the potential for idiom decomposition are clearly also factors to be considered for syntactic variation (see below). In addition to post-modification and internal modification, syntactic variation can, of course, also occur at clause level, as is in (4.24). (4.24)

i mean we we ARE we are (2) by deciding never to take an open confrontation on the definition of standards we have x xx the problem in front of us we have to face it x and sooner or later it will explode por- hopefully not in our faces but it will explode. i mean (1) there are so much sort of positioning around this. (POmtg403:565; S1=L1: Danish (P499); voice style)

In this example, the conventional idiom blow up in sb’s face seems to be syntactically restructured, negated, partly repeated and subjectively evaluated (hopefully). In addition to the lexical substitution (explode is used instead of blow up) and the instance of morphosyntactic variation (faces is pluralized), the changes on the level of syntax are quite extensive in (4.24). Because of the extent of syntactic (and lexical) variation that occurs in this one phrase, example (4.24) once again highlights the problem of categorizing and interpreting some examples (Pitzl 2012, 2018a). As was also discussed in relation to pulling the brakes (4.17) above, it is, to my mind, an open question whether the phrase it will explode hopefully not in our faces but it will explode is best interpreted and analyzed as creative idiom or as overt metaphor. If we adopt the ‘creative idiom’ perspective and corresponding terminology, (4.24) is an instance of extensive syntactic variation, combined with lexical substitution and morphosyntactic variation. Because of the degree of variation the expression involves, it might, however, be justifiable to analyze this expression without reference to the conventional idiom blow up in sb’s face. In this case, we would regard the speaker’s humorous and hyperbolic use of explode hopefully not in our faces simply as an instance of an overt and probably deliberate metaphor (see Chapter 2). The metaphoricity of the expression is also highlighted by the fact that it is produced as part of a metaphorical pattern that can be observed in this speech event (see Chapter 6). The potential for these two interpretations, i.e. creative idiom or overt metaphor, once again illustrates the

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fact that the distinction between idiom and metaphor is, to some extent, arbitrary for many creative ELF expressions.

4.2.2 Formal characteristics of morphosyntactic variation Variation in idioms occurs, of course, not only through lexical substitution and at the level of syntax, but can also happen on the morphosyntactic level. As has been mentioned above, this can affect inflectional endings of one or several idiom constituents but also alter the use of determiners, quantifiers and pronouns (cf. Langlotz 2006: 179). The following sections present examples of morphosyntactic variation of idioms that can be observed in VOICE. Once again, these examples and subtypes are not to be read as an exhaustive list, but as indicative of the nature of the variation that happens at this level in naturally-occurring spoken ELF.

4.2.2.1 Pluralization An example of morphosyntactic variation that affects inflectional endings of nouns is pluralization. This subtype of morphosyntactic variation has already been mentioned in the context of some examples above. Thus, example (4.1) draw the limits, example (4.6) don’t kill the messengers and example (4.24) it will explode por- hopefully not in our faces but it will explode all exhibit pluralization alongside lexical substitution. Examples (4.25) and (4.26) are further instances of pluralization in VOICE: (4.25)

[…] okay HOW it is used NOW at the very moment in hungary in the context of hh arguing for changing the education system IN LINE with the bologna treaty as if they were a patented version OF it anyway (.) carved in stones (1) […] (PRqas224:26; S5=L1:Hungarian (P576); voice style)

(4.26)

[…] we have er some er amounts er annually er in neighborhood policy hh er some amounts in er interact policy (.) in cohesion (envelope) anand er a lot of er such kind of pieces by pieces but hh everything starts from (.) lack of coordination between member states? […] (POprc557:5; S2=L1:Lithuanian (P610); voice style)

Example (4.25) carved in stones occurs in a question-answer session on gender studies in the middle of a rather long statement by an L1 *Hungarian ELF speaker. The pluralization of stones might have been influenced by the fact that the preceding clause features a plural subject (they). The semantic content

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of the creative idiom remains largely unaffected, making use of the same metaphorical image. This image is only minimally affected through pluralization. If anything, pluralization might be seen to contribute to the overall function of the metaphorical expression, which appears to be to emphasize the point the speaker wants to make. Example (4.26) pieces by pieces is uttered in the course of an EU press conference and constitutes a pluralized version of the conventional piece by piece. In this example, pluralization seems to emphasize the concept of fragmentation. A few examples of pluralization, similar to the ones observable in VOICE, are also mentioned by Vettorel (2014: 202) in relation to online ELF use (burst into laughters, they’ll get us into troubles, they have the tendency on trying to put their noses on matters that are nothing to do with them).

4.2.2.2 Flexible use of determiners Another feature of morphosyntactic variation of idioms observed also for L1 users (Langlotz 2006: 179) is the flexible use of determiners. The nature of article use is also an area that has received special attention by some ELF researchers. Different studies (e.g. Seidlhofer 2005; Dewey 2007a: 339–342, 2007b: 106–119; Björkman 2008; Cogo & Dewey 2012: 61–70; Vettorel 2014: 153–157) have found patterns of variation and innovation in ELF regarding the use or zero use of articles, although neither of these addresses the use of determiners in relation to idioms in particular. In the context of idiom use in VOICE, this feature has already been mentioned with regard to some examples of lexical substitution such as sit in the control of (4.7), keep in the head (4.9) and start the meeting off on a bad foot (4.4). Examples (4.27) and (4.28) below show two instances of creative idioms in which article use is varied from the codified idiom form. In the case of (4.27), the indefinite article that is part of the conventional codified idiom a/one hell of a … is not present in the variant produced by the ELF speaker. (4.27)

just to avoid to have to type in it a er in a in a calculator all the time the amounts of weight and hh change it in the original booking sheets and all this shit it takes hell a lot of time (2) (PBmtg27:425; S3=L1:German (P74); voice style)

In addition to the indefinite article being dropped before hell, it is noticeable that the genitive preposition of between hell and a lot is also omitted by the ELF speaker in VOICE. What is interesting is that although an L1 *English speaker might have said something like all this shit (it) takes one/a hell of a lot of time,

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thus making use of two indefinite articles and two prepositions (of), the metaphoricity of the attested ELF variant is still very similar to what a conventional form might have looked like. Metaphorical resonance in both variants exists between hell (and maybe shit, which sticks out from the rest of the topic and conversation in general) and the co-text, which provides the topic. Example (4.28) represents the opposite case as far as article use is concerned, since here a definite article is being inserted where we would find zero use of an article in the conventional version of the idiom on top of sth/sb. (4.28)

because agency got already money. (1) there is NO intention to pay anything on the top (.) from our (.) country budgets. (.) to the project. […] (PBmtg269:402; S3=L1:Polish (P541); voice style)

The phrase there is no intention to pay anything on the top is not only noticeable because of the use of the definite article in on the top, but it is also noteworthy because it is elliptical. The supplementary genitive that we normally find in the conventional codified form of the idiom on top of sth/sb is not present in the L1 *Polish ELF speaker’s expression. The prepositional phrase from our country budgets that follows the expression on the top in (4.28) clearly has a different function and expresses something different than a genitive would have done. The use of the prepositional phrase from our country budgets is therefore not a case of a morphological variation, with one preposition being substituted for another (i.e. from substituted for of), but rather an instance of syntactic variation. The meaning of the whole idiom is being extended and specified through the additional phrase. The reason I am drawing attention to these two aspects of variation in (4.28) is that, in terms of the semantic content of the creative expression, the insertion of the definite article and the absence of the of-genitive may very well be linked. While the idea of not paying anything on top (i.e. on top of the money that the agency had already received) could have been provided with an of-genitive, the same idea, i.e. the specification that top refers to the money which was paid to the agency, seems to be expressed in the creative idiom via the definite article, i.e. on the top. The referent of top (i.e. the money the agency has already received) seems to be made specific via the definite article as an implicit deictic expression instead of via the conventional genitive. This is concurrent with Dewey’s observation that patterns of article use in ELF are more context dependent and meaning driven than they are in ENL. In particular, the formal rules handed down through idiomatic use in ENL have little or no value in lingua franca settings. (Dewey 2007a: 341)

Dewey mainly observes the use of the definite article, particularly with generic nouns, as being functionally motivated by the need to enhance prominence.

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Similarly, the examples of idioms presented above exemplify the flexible nature of morphosyntatic features in ELF and underline that this flexibility is related to functional and semantic concerns (see also Vettorel 2014: 156–158).

4.2.2.3 Prepositional variation Another type of morphosyntactic variation that can be observed in VOICE is the flexible use and/or substitution of prepositions in creative idioms. Both example (4.29) and (4.30) are structurally very similar and presumably relate to the same conventional idiom, namely off the top of your/my/one’s head. Both involve a change of preposition alongside an ellipsis, which leads to the new expressions being very much condensed to their semantic core. (4.29)

and now er i need to double-check? but i’ll let you know (.) e:r this additional flight (.) and er i remember from the head (1) i ge- i get a little schedules er in december (.) (PBmtg300:2140; S2=L1:Dutch (P506); voice style)

(4.30)

[…] but erm i i’ll fi- i’m gonna (.) take a look i don’t know it m- from my head (2) it’s it’s (1) it’s the (1) what? (2) yah she’s got my number […] (LEcon560:1653; S5=L1:Dutch (P687); voice style)

Both expressions are uttered by L1 *Dutch speakers from the Netherlands, i.e. P506 and P687, but in very different discourse contexts that are not related to each other. Though the new expressions are considerably shortened via ellipsis, their meaning seems to be more or less identical to the conventional idiom, which the OALD paraphrases as “just guessing or using your memory, without taking time to think carefully or check the facts” (OALD 9: s.v. head). Both expressions use the noun head, i.e. a term of embodiment, which has already been highlighted in several examples of lexical substitution (see above). The main semantic content of the idiom in (4.29) and (4.30) can be seen to rest in the embodied term head, and it is this which seems to allow for the shortened creative expressions to carry the same meaning as the conventional phrase (see Chapter 6). It is interesting to note that the ellipsis makes the resulting expressions ONCEs in Grant and Bauer’s (2004) classification, i.e. expressions in which only a single word is non-literal or non-compositional (see Chapter 2). The variation of form in these examples therefore does not bring about a change in meaning or inhibit their functionality. Also exhibiting strong similarities although uttered by two speakers in completely unrelated speech events, examples (4.31) and (4.32) both make use of the phrase in the air, thus varying prepositional use.

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(4.31)

okay (2) is it already existing? is it already in the air? the: the (PBmtg414:2846; S2=L1:Dutch (P534); voice style)

(4.32)

[…] that erm er because a joint program doe- doesn’t exist in the AIR so to say it must be (.) it must be (.) be attached er somewhere (2) (POwgd14:616+618; S1=L1:Swedish (P97); voice style)

In (4.31), the question is it already in the air is posed by another L1 *Dutch ELF speaker (P534) in order to enquire about the publication of a website that the company is in the process of redesigning. So although the phrase in the air formally looks like the conventional idiom in the air,6 the question is it already in the air seems to be a variant of and more closely related to the idiom on/off (the) air, with the preposition on substituted by in. In (4.32), the meaning of in the air appears to be is similar to the meaning of out of thin air, which is codified as denoting “from nowhere or nothing, as if by magic” (OALD9: s.v. air). Formally and structurally, the difference between out of thin air and in the air is considerable, since preposition and determiner/adjective are modified. Furthermore, things or concrete physical objects normally appear out of thin air, which denotes a process. In (4.32), the L1 *Swedish ELF speaker refers to the fact that academic programs do not exist in the air, which denotes a state rather than a process. It is therefore possible that the use of in the air is also influenced by the idiom in a vacuum, i.e. “existing separately from other people, events, etc. when there should be a connection” (OALD9: s.v. vacuum). If this were the case, in the air in (4.32) would be an instance of lexical substitution (air for vacuum) as well as morphosyntactic variation in the use of determiners (the for a). Both interpretations are possible, but to some extent unsatisfactory. A third – maybe more plausible – interpretation thus would be to regard this particular occurrence of in the air simply as an overt metaphor used to express that a joint degree program needs to be attached to the institutional structure of one or more universities. Regarding in the air as an overt and deliberate metaphor (cf. Table 2.1.) means that it may – or may not – have been influenced by the two existing idioms out of thin air and in a vacuum. So this use of in the air thus again indicates the inherent fuzziness – and even potential arbitrariness – of distinguishing clearly between idiom and metaphor in naturally-occurring spoken

6 There are two conventional occurrences of the idiom in the air in VOICE: and it was violence was in the air you could say (EDsed363:416, S1=L1:German (P345); plain style), love is in the air @ (EDwsd304:405, SX-f; plain style).

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ELF and it highlights the importance of metaphorical imagery in the context of idiom use (see Chapters 5 and 6). Coming back to prepositional variation as a subtype of morphosyntactic variation, the pattern of the preposition in being substituted for on can also be seen in example (4.33). (4.33)

[…] if we FIND out that we are not er th- that there’s not a GEneral feeling that we are on the right track (.) or that we DON’T make suf- er sufficient progress then we will immediately stop [org3] . (1) if howEVER (.) there is the feeling that we are in the right track (.) then we will go on. […] (POmtg404:293; S7= L1:Dutch (P565); voice style)

Notably, in the right track is used alongside the conventional form on the right track in the same utterance by the same speaker. This can be considered indicative of the general variability in use that is observable in ELF. The two variants are used side by side by the speaker. Both seem to be accepted as ‘normal’ forms, used synonymously, that go unnoticed – and uncommented – in the interaction. A search for “right* * * track” in VOICE Online yields four conventional occurrences of the idiom on the right track, including the conventional occurrence in (4.33). The corresponding phrase on the wrong track does not appear to be used in VOICE. The opposite direction of substitution of prepositions, namely on being substituted for in, can be observed in the phrase on the long run. (4.34)

[…] because it it doesn’t bring revenues to the e u budget. (.) it just (.) TAKES Away from the e u budget. (.) and on the long run maybe this is one of the causes for the economic recession (.) in the countries like france for example (EDsed301:78+81; S7=L1:Rumanian (P137); voice style)

Also for this idiom, we can observe that creative and conventional use co-exist in VOICE. A search for the string “long* * * run” in VOICE Online yields the following results.7 curriculum er in process in the long run i don’t know cos i i have attended hh you mentioned also australia on long run cargo vanishing from the passenger flights on the long run convergence for me is not very meaningful in the long run if it brings you to

7 Note that example (4.34) is not included in this concordance list because it spans over two utterances and hence cannot be retrieved in the corpus via the search string “long* * * run”. The examples below are given in kwic style.

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convergence was fine for the moment but in the long run as we see now it is whether that’s sustainable in the long run and i think all of these studies i think the money is wisely invested in the long run and it makes i think more development for example in barents sea in the longer run exams and so on i think in the long co- run if we are interpreting europe is the of success in erm let’s say short-term run or long-term run do you er would you

Although six of these ten examples are conventional occurrences of in the long run, there are two occurrences in addition to example (4.34) that make use of the preposition on instead of in. These are uttered by the same speaker (P73), but also exhibit variation, since one of them is used with zero article (on long run). Additionally, there are two occurrences in which the base-form of the idiom is either modified internally through morphosyntactic variation (longer run) or expanded through syntactic variation (short-term or long-term run).

4.2.3 Creative or conventional use? – Case studies with BNC and COCA As we have already seen in the previous sections, a crucial question in terms of methodology and analysis that is especially salient with regard to syntactic and morphosyntactic variation is to what extent certain structures are to be considered integral parts of a particular idiom or whether they are to be regarded as optional elements so to speak, i.e. elements that are not actually part of the idiom as such. It is the blurriness of this distinction between what is – and what is not – part of the idiom (morpho)syntactically that makes some instances ambiguous cases as far as categorization is concerned. The main question that arises in categorization and analysis is which instances of syntactic and/or morphosyntactic variation are to be considered creative, i.e. constitute a departure from codified standards and conventional use, and which are to be considered conventional, falling within what we might call regular or conventional idiom variation. This ambiguity is illustrated in (4.35): (4.35)

[…] but it was never challenged by any political force hh (.) and er the only time this came into the public eye was (.) when (.) er (.) […] (PRpan13:103; S10=L1:Rumanian, female (P88); voice style)

With regard to the expression came into the public eye, the question is: Does this constitute an unconventional (i.e. creative) departure in terms of variation or is the variation within what would be considered conventional usage also in L1 *English use? This question arises, among other aspects, because the idiom is ambiguous in terms of codification. While the OALD lists the idiom as in the public eye, the CIDI includes the verb ‘to be’ and has the entry be in the public eye.

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So is the verb be to be considered an integral part of the idiom or not, and should we therefore regard (4.35) as an instance of syntactic variation (came into rather than be in) or morphosyntactic variation (into rather than in)? The ambiguity that exists in the codification of this idiom seems to be reflected also in L1 *English use. By means of illustration, I have thus conducted case studies for the idiom (be in) the public eye in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).8 Starting with the BNC, the expression the public eye occurs 124 times in the 100 million words contained in the corpus. Of these 124 occurrences, 26 instances (i.e. 20.97%) are directly preceded by a noun + preposition and 41 instances (i.e. 33.06%) are directly preceded by verb + preposition. The latter group is shown in Table 4.2.

Table 4.2: Realizations of (be in) the public eye in the BNC. BNC (100 million) Query

Tokens (per million)

Verb + prep. + the public eye

41 (0.41)

Be + prep. + the public eye

15 (0.15)

Verb + NOT in + the public eye

20 (0.20)

… the public eye (tokens) are in brought into being in lived in are in being in been in be in brought into came into vanished from setting before returned to retreat out of removed from remained out of

(3) (3) (3) (2) (3) (3) (2) (2) (4) (2) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1)

been in be in was in came into was in am in is in ’re in kept out of keep out of have caught emerged into did reach did not seek brings him into sell techniques into

(2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1) (1)

8 Queries in BNC and COCA were carried out via the Brigham Young University search interface in August 2017. The detailed queries used for Table 4.2, Table 4.3 and the discussion of safe bet are not provided here for the sake of readability, but can be obtained from the author upon request.

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A more specific query reveals that more than one third of these verb occurrences, namely 15 (36.59%), are realizations of the idiom with forms of be. All of these 15 instances of be combine with the preposition in. Among the remaining verb occurrences (i.e. those in which be is not used), the phrase the public eye combines with a number of verbs that prompt the use of in. These are lived (see Table 4.2) and single occurrences of fused, keeping, kept, live, overlooked, playing, remain, replaced, retained and work + in the public eye. Yet, there are also some verbs that combine with prepositions other than in. These include three occurrences of brought into and two occurrences of came into the public eye as well as individual instances of vanished from, setting before, returned to, retreat out of, removed from, remained out of, kept/keep out of and emerged into + the public eye (see Table 4.2). If we exclude those three occurrences that use no preposition (i.e. have caught, did reach and did not seek), then 17 occurrences of the public eye in the BNC collocate with different phrasal verbs that make use of prepositions other than in. In light of this evidence, is the use of the phrase this came into the public eye in example (4.35) to be considered creative or conventional use? A picture that is similar in principle, but different in some respects emerges in 520 million words captured in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). In the COCA, the expression the public eye occurs 944 times (i.e. with a normalized frequency of 1.8 occurrences per million). Of these 944 instances, 331 occurrences (35.06%) of the public eye come directly after ‘verb + preposition’ (see Table 4.3) and 186 occurrences (19.70%) are directly preceded by noun + preposition. The number of instances collocating with verbs make up a higher normalized frequency in the COCA (0.64 tokens per million) than in the BNC (0.41 per million), though the difference is not very drastic. What is different in BNC and COCA is the relative percentage of the tokens in which the idiom the public eye collocates with be. While realizations with different forms of be make up about a third of all occurrences in the BNC (36.59%), they constitute more than half of the 331 occurrences in the COCA, namely 169 (51.06%). Correspondingly, the normalized frequency of be + preposition is 0.33 per million (n=169) in the COCA (see Table 4.3), which is more than double compared to 0.15 (n=15) in the BNC (see Table 4.2). This might be interpreted as indicative of the fact that be in constitutes a more integral part of the idiom be in the public eye in *American English than in *British English.9 Forms of be + in the public eye occur in the BNC, but less frequently than in the COCA.

9 I am using the terms *American English and *British English for reasons of simplicity in order to differentiate the data comprised in the two corpora. The use of this terminology does not imply that I am suggesting that these are monolithic varieties (hence * representation).

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Table 4.3: Realizations of (be in) the public eye in the COCA. COCA (520 million) Query

Tokens (per million)

Verb + prep. + the public eye

331 (0.64)

Be + prep. + the public eye

169 (0.33)

… the public eye (tokens) been in be in being in ’re in ’s in are in stayed out of stay out of was in been in be in being in ’re in ’s in are in

(30) (29) (27) (22) (15) (12) (10) (8) (7) (30) (29) (27) (22) (15) (12)

been out of disappeared from is in thrust into stay in remains in remained in lived in … was in is in been out of am in were in …

(6) (6) (6) (5) (5) (4) (4) (4) (7) (6) (6) (3) (3)

Case studies like this one show how complex – and necessarily selective – the investigation of linguistic creativity in idiom use by means of more traditional corpus methods is, irrespective of whether one is working with an ELF or an L1 corpus. For one, the decisions that determine which particular queries are performed for a particular idiom make this approach partly circular. A researcher will only find those variants that have been actively looked for (see in Chapter 3). Secondly, the case study with BNC and COCA illustrates the difficulty of attempting to generalize the results quantitatively. Both corpora are large (with 100 and 520 million words respectively), but the normalized frequencies in Tables 4.2 and 4.3 show how rare occurrences of a particular idiom like the public eye tend to be, whether creatively or conventionally used. What this brief case study also shows is that conventional and creative usage are by no means clearly distinguishable in the use attested in L1 *English corpora. While the results of COCA and BNC suggest that lexical entrenchment of the public eye with be in might be stronger in *American than in *British English, combinations with different phrases verbs (and hence different prepositions) occur in both corpora, but individual tokens have very low frequencies. Both these large corpora only yield very few occurrences with the phrasal verb ‘come into’ with the

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public eye. The COCA renders one occurrence each of come into, comes into and came into + the public eye, while the BNC includes two occurrences of the phrase came into the public eye (the same expression that is uttered by the L1 speaker of *Rumanian in VOICE). So clearly, it is sometimes impossible to distinguish unambiguously between creative and conventional use. A similarly ambiguous case would be the expression i’ll make a very safe bet with you in example (4.22). Although dictionaries tend to list the idiom without a verb, i.e. ‘a good/safe bet’ (OALD9) or ‘a safe/sure bet’ (CIDI), evidence in BNC and COCA suggests that the entrenchment of this idiom with be in L1 use is considerable. The phrase a safe bet is directly preceded by forms of be in 73.91% (BNC) and 66.28% (COCA) of all instances. So although the idiom tends to be codified without be in dictionaries, L1 use in BNC and COCA suggests that be might in fact be considered a fairly integral part of the idiom. Once again, this illustrates that syntactic variation in idiom use is a tricky issue because even determining in how far certain structures are integral parts or just ‘surrounding bits’ of an idiom is notoriously difficult and oftentimes ambiguous. And it may change over time or be different for particular groups of L1 speakers. Nevertheless, the use of make before a safe bet, as in (4.22), seems to be extremely rare in L1 use. It only occurs a few times in the whole COCA (e.g. make a pretty safe bet) and not at all in the BNC. Syntactic variation through adverb insertion (e.g. a pretty/fairly/very/reasonably safe bet) is slightly more frequent, but also rather rare in general, especially in the BNC. Seeing how rare these variants generally are even within large corpora like BNC and COCA, it seems justified to consider them creative realizations of the conventional idiom – in L1 use as well as in ELF use. The question of ambiguous structures is also evidenced in example (4.36). (4.36)

the time (.) where somebody e:r live in e::r hh the surrounding and everything? hh and (.) the genius is er the ONE (.) who: is able (.) to i don’t know hh make out something or exPRESS (1) make it to the point (2) putting in in (.) putting his time in a nutshell (.) so KANT (.) according to this theory would be the one who put the: (.) philosophical hh knowledge that was reached at his time in a nutshell. (EDsed251:455; S1=L1:German, male (P464); voice style)

While some dictionaries list the idiom as in a nutshell, the main entry in the OALD9 reads (put something) in a nutshell, indicating that an optional(?) verb pattern is part of the idiom. This syntactic pattern (i.e. put something) is reflected in the sample sentences in the ODI and CIDI, but not in the idiom entry. One question that arises in relation to example (4.36) is similar to the one discussed with regard

4.3 Summary

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to came into the public eye and make a very safe bet with you. Should the verb put be regarded as part of the idiom in a nutshell? Or should it not? In terms of L1 corpus evidence, it is safe to say that the use of put as a collocate of in a nutshell is rare in both *British and *American English. While there are 671 occurrences of in a nutshell in the COCA, only 16 of these (2.38%) are preceded by forms of ‘put’ (put: 14, puts: 2). The relative percentage of put/puts used with in a nutshell in the BNC is a little higher, but still relatively low. The phrase in a nutshell occurs 73 times in the BNC and is preceded by forms of ‘put’ in 9.59%, i.e. 7 instances. In both corpora, collocations of put and in a nutshell occur most often in the form put it in a nutshell (BNC: 6, COCA: 10). Instances which take on longer objects – like in example (4.36) – seem to be extremely rare in L1 use. The general syntactic structure of the two instances in example (4.36) mirrors the conventional syntactic pattern put something in a nutshell, but is creatively expanded by the speaker. S1’s use of the abstract object his time in the first instance can be seen to enhance metaphoricity: What is normally put in a nutshell is a certain topic or a previous contribution by a speaker; very often, the topic has been specified beforehand and is only evoked in the idiom via the pronoun it. In the instance in VOICE, it is a whole period of time (his time) that is put in a nutshell by a genius. The abstractness of the concept time might be what prompts S1 to rephrase the idiom with a more specific and elaborate description of what it is that Kant put in a nutshell, namely the philosophical knowledge that was reached at his time. This second use contains considerable internal modification through the insertion not only of an object (the philosophical knowledge) but also a relative clause (that was reached at his time), a type of internal syntactic modification also mentioned by Nunberg, Sag and Wasow (1994: 500). So although corpus evidence from the 100 million words of the BNC and 520 million words of the COCA shows that variations with longer objects of this particular idiom are extremely rare, the same principles – inserting an object and a relative clause – might be drawn upon by an L1 speaker for intentional wordplay. As unusual as the creative ELF variant put the philosophical knowledge that was reached at his time might be, it is transparent and fairly economic in expression and seems to cause no problems in comprehensibility and interpretability for the other ELF speakers present.

4.3 Summary The previous sections have discussed formal characteristics of creative idioms in VOICE. With regard to lexical substitution, I have investigated different semantic relationships of original and substituted elements and explored how these

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different relationships affect the meanings of the newly coined expressions and which effects they have on metaphoricity. While some substitutions are relatively ‘unobtrusive’ and bring about few alterations, others have the potential to increase metaphoricity through creating concrete images, for example using terms of embodiment, or bring about a shift in metaphorical resonance through an alteration of topic and vehicle terms. Furthermore, I have analyzed examples that allow for more than one interpretation or categorization (e.g. borrowing or blending as well as lexical substitution) and explored theoretical implications this has. Additionally, formal characteristics of other ‘traditional’ types of idiom variation, namely syntactic and morphosyntactic variation, were examined. It was proposed that categorization as creative or conventional use often has to remain ambiguous in relation to (morpho)syntactic structures. Before I move on to discuss functions of creative idioms, a final comment about creativity and the relationship between sociolinguistic variation and cognitive processing is in order. There is no way of determining purely via the analysis of linguistic output collected in a corpus like VOICE how an expression is actually formed and processed in a speaker’s or writer’s mind, i.e. what happens cognitively during real-time processing. So all one can do on the basis of analyzing attested use in corpus data is to put forward (more or less plausible) guesses or speculations. Two interpretations seem plausible for many of the examples discussed in this chapter so far. Either a conventional *English idiom is decomposed, varied and newly assembled; this we might refer to as the idiom decomposition interpretation (see Chapter 2). Or an overt metaphor is created by a speaker by drawing on (parts of) conventional phrases, idioms and metaphorical patterns in *English as well as other *languages in the speaker’s individual multilingual repertoire (see Chapter 7); this might be termed the metaphorical compositionality interpretation. For some examples, one of these interpretations might be more plausible than the other one, depending on how (and how much) is different/similar to a conventional L1 idiom. But the plain fact is, corpus evidence does not allow us to make a final decision. What the evidence so far suggests, however, is that a third interpretation, so often put forward with regard to idioms in the context of ELT, is rather unlikely, namely the common and widespread view of idioms as non-compositional lexical units that are produced and processed as single lexical chunks. This non-compositionality interpretation is not borne out by the evidence in VOICE. This is not entirely surprising since this view has also been questioned by some researchers, such as Grant and Bauer (2004) and Langlotz (2006), with regard to L1 *English use. Both idiom decomposition interpretation and metaphorical compositionality interpretation refer to the potential psycholinguistic reality of speakers, i.e. they

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address the open question of what happens cognitively and psycholinguistically during the creation, processing and interpretation of expressions like the ones analyzed in this chapter. In contrast to this, the term re-metaphorization that I have used repeatedly in this study and elsewhere (Pitzl 2009, 2012) refers to the process of linguistic variation and potential change that takes place in the ‘linguistic life’ of an idiom. The idea of re-metaphorization refers to what happens with an idiom (as a linguistic product) when it is being varied in an ELF (or L1) context as linguistic creativity takes place. What I am suggesting is that through formal variation, metaphoricity is reintroduced into expressions – most often idioms, but also conventional, i.e. codified, one-word metaphors – that are generally seen as conventionalized and idiomatic, i.e. fairly stable and fixed. With each creative, i.e. varied, occurrence, the expression is re-metaphorized, decomposed and thus rendered figuratively compositional.

5 Functions of creative idioms and metaphors in ELF interactions In this chapter, I would like to turn to the interactional-pragmatic and functional dimension of the use of creative idioms in VOICE. The analysis of formal characteristics and semantic relationships in Chapter 4 has shown that metaphoricity is central to the (creative) use of idioms in ELF and corroborated the theoretical arguments presented in Chapter 2. A central question which remains is why ELF speakers produce such creative idioms or overt metaphors in the first place. What are the communicative purposes and effects these metaphorical expressions have in ELF discourse? The functions that creative idioms fulfill vary widely in the different discourse situations. Thus, the analysis of examples presented here has to remain partial to some extent, since one creative expression often fulfills more than one discourse function. So although examples are discussed more extensively under one heading, this is not to suggest that they might not also serve other additional communicative purposes. The labeling of functions presented here was derived qualitatively during analysis. It is conceived as a first glimpse at the range of functions and effects that creative idioms and metaphorical expressions can fulfill in ELF interactions. The functions proposed in this chapter will be supplemented with further functional dimensions also in subsequent chapters.

5.1 Humor and mitigation One of the prime functions that a number of creative idioms presented thus far can be observed to fulfill is adding a humorous note to an interaction. Although humor and mitigation can, of course, occur independently from each other in relation to idiom use, a co-occurrence of these two functions can be observed several times in VOICE. Examples of humor and mitigation through idioms in ELF are discussed by Pitzl (2009) and by Franceschi (2013: 93–95), the latter drawing on data from ELFA (the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic settings). To illustrate this connection between humor and mitigation, example (5.1) presents an instance of creativity through lexical substitution with its interactional context. This example from an ELF business (i.e. BELF) context illustrates how a creative idiom can serve to make a humorous remark in conversation.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-006

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Example 5.1 (PBmtg414) S2=L1:Dutch, male (P534), S3=L1:German, female (P526), S4= L1: Dutch, female (P535), S5=L1: German, female (P525); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 2125 S2: yeah [S3] told us that i- it was a great taste so we had to do that 2126 S5: a:h 2127 SS: @@@@@@@@@@ 2128 S3: @@@@@@@ @@@ @@@@@@@@@@@ 2129 S4: and she knows it 2130 S2: i was fully against it but e:r 2131 S3: i i just give advices @@@@@@@@@@ 2132 S2: yeah i was fully against it but they are you know {parallel conversation between S4 and S5 starts} (1) 2133 S3: the the ball is in your corner @@ 2134 SS: @@@@@@@@@@@ {parallel conversation between S4 and S5 stops} 2135 S5: so it’s really it’s: (.) a big difference 2136 S4: yeah As can be seen in this extract, the creative expression the ball is in your corner is produced in a rather relaxed and jocular atmosphere. It is surrounded by laughter (represented by @-symbols in the VOICE transcript), which might seem unexpected given the fact that it occurs in the course of a business meeting (though see Pullin 2010 on the importance of small talk and humor for rapport in BELF settings). Like the other examples of creative idioms shown without more extensive cotext in Chapter 4, the lexical substitution in (5.1) the ball is in your corner does not seem to affect intelligibility and communicative effectiveness of the newly created expression. S3’s utterance (u 2133) is immediately followed by joint laughter (u 2134) and clearly adds a humorous note to the business interaction. In addition to being uttered jokingly in order to create a pleasant and communal atmosphere, the ball is in your corner may also have had a mitigating effect on what was said before. In utterance 2125, S2 states that S3 recommended a product and so, he (i.e. S2) says exaggeratingly, they had to do that, by which he means they had to order the product produced by the Austrian company to sell it in the Netherlands. To this, all speakers (SS) react with laughter (u 2127). Particularly S3 (Austrian) continues laughing, which leads S4 (Dutch) and S2 (Dutch) to add further comments. S4 says that she (i.e. S3) knows it and S2, having stopped laughing, voices that he was fully against it, i.e. introducing the product to the Dutch market.

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S2 says this (i was fully against it) in a friendly tone,1 he is not openly blaming the Austrian company or accusing S3 of strong-arming the Dutch retailer into buying the particular product for distribution. Nevertheless, it is possible that S2 was in fact against introducing the product in the Netherlands; after all, he says i was fully against it twice. So whether his remark was made sarcastically or not remains unclear, not just for the analyst as outside observer but possibly also for the speakers themselves, especially for S3. In utterance 2131, after S2’s first i was fully against it, S3 starts to (mock-)defend herself by saying i i just give advices. She (i.e. S3) laughs after having made this statement, so she does not seem to be in full defense mode. When S2 has uttered his second i was fully against it (u 2132), S3 finally utters the creative idiom the ball is in your corner (u 2133) and all speakers laugh (u 2134). The meaning of the conventional idiom the ball is in your court stresses the need for an immediate action that is someone else’s responsibility. The OALD9 glosses the meaning of the idiom as “it is your/sb’s responsibility to take action next” (OALD 9: s.v. ball). The CIDI states that “if the ball is in someone’s court, they have to do something before any progress can be made in a situation” (CIDI: s.v. ball is in sb’s court). What S3 seems to want to express in her utterance, however, is that it was S2’s decision whether they wanted to introduce the new product into the Dutch market or not. Thus, having said that she (i.e. S3) just gives advices (u 2131), S3 states that the ball is in S2’s corner (u 2133), implying that it is up to S2 and the company he works for to decide what to do (or not to do) with the advices she (i.e. S3) offers and the products she recommends. What we can see in this example is how a metaphorical expression that also happens to be a creative idiom can function as a humorous remark and as a mitigating device at the same time. By saying the ball is in your corner, S3 distances herself from S2’s mock accusations (we had to do it, i was fully against it), but she does so humorously and thus mitigates the potential face-threatening effect that the propositional content of her utterance, i.e. ‘ultimately, it is/was your decision, not mine’, might have. An interesting semantic and formal aspect of this example is the substitution of corner for court in the creative ELF variant. While the original metaphorical image of the conventional the ball is in your court refers to a tennis court, I would argue that the image evoked by the ball is in your corner is a soccer(US)/football (UK) field. The words court and corner are similar in that they denote specific physical locations on the playing field of a sport that involves a ball. The lexical substitution of corner for court makes it possible to conceive that, in the case of

1 Recourse was taken to the audio recording for this example.

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PBmtg414, when Austrians interact with Dutch speakers, the sports metaphor that is evoked via the idiom refers to soccer/football (corner) rather than tennis (court), as soccer/football might have more immediate regio-cultural relevance for Dutch and Austrian ELF speakers than tennis. A similar combination of humor and mitigation can also be observed in other examples.2 As can be seen in (5.2), the whole phrase i don’t wanna start the meeting off on a bad foot there is spoken laughingly. Similarly, the utterance don’t kill the messengers in (5.3), is immediately followed by laughter from a group of speakers in the transcript. (5.2) you can do that yourself i don’t wanna start the meeting off on a bad foot there (5) (POcon543:621; S7=L1: Danish (P503); voice style) (5.3) don’t kill the messengers (EDwsd302:1164; S17=L1:Bulgarian (P115); voice style) Both expressions thus have a humorous effect and lighten the mood in an ongoing interaction. What these expressions also have in common, however, is that they seem to qualify something the speakers have said or are about to say which might be perceived as negative or unpopular. Mitigation and humor thus sometimes seem to go together as functional motivations for using metaphorical expressions in ELF interactions. A similar function also seems to be fulfilled by the expression we should not wake up any dogs (see Pitzl 2009), discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.

5.2 Talking about abstract concepts, increasing explicitness and projecting stance Another important function relates to the use of creative idioms for talking about abstract concepts. This can be observed in expressions like how to draw the limits (4.1)3 in which the ontological concepts ‘drawing’ and ‘limit’ are employed to express and elaborate on an idea which is rather abstract and elusive, namely

2 Examples (5.2) and (5.3) are also discussed in Chapter 4 in relation to lexical substitution (see examples 4.4 and 4.6). 3 The examples mentioned in this paragraph are discussed in relation to lexical substitution and alternative interpretations also in Chapter 4. Example numbers refer to the numbers in Chapter 4.

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the distinction between a modern and traditional person and/or state. A similar communicative purpose can be seen in expressions like paving the ground (4.3), smooth the process (4.12), sit in the control of and make our stand (both 4.7), which can be interpreted as increasing explicitness in relation to abstract topics of conversation. The same is true for the different creative renderings of move/travel along/down this/that road (4.15, 4.16), which also make use of a concrete ontological metaphorical image in order to talk about an abstract concept and increase explicitness. In addition to these functions of talking about abstract concepts and increasing explicitness, the expressions make our stand and the different realizations of ‘traveling down a road’ also seem to fulfill an additional function which relates to expressing subjectivity in conversation, and more specifically to projecting a speaker’s stance. Examples (5.4), (5.5) and (5.6) thus provide these expressions with more co-text. These passages exhibit the ample textual evidence of hedging, epistemic expressions and modal verbs (indicated through single underlining), all of which occur densely in the immediate co-text of the metaphorical expression. Looking at the language use surrounding the creative idioms, it is quite obvious that the ELF speakers are expressing their personal opinions in these stretches of talk. (5.4) works. so that’s where we will have to make our stand (.) so (1) i think (.) in s:- TECHNICAL terms (1) this is perhaps (.) if if we wish to keep something open for as long as possible it’s probably that part of it so that’s the reason why i haven’t (1) done more to le- to this meeting to set it up becaus:e i think we should go THROUGH the tenth may meeting and see er whether whether anything new has er come up there (1) so that’s (POmtg542:217; S1=L1:Danish, male (P499); voice style) (5.5) […] and of course it needs a bit of persuasion i know that but but i think i think that simple so in other words even from a professional point of view (.) i think it’s important people should (.) m- move along this road they should not travel along that road gone other days when you could discuss these things at a purely departmental level i think (.) […] (POwgd243:185; S1=L1:German, male (P176); voice style) (5.6) […] so can i perhaps then sort of summarize this thing (.) i think that initially there needs to be broad agreement across the board (.) at central level (.) why do we want to travel (.) down this road (1) and clear signals have to be sent to departments saying please DO consider this option (.) when redesigning your courses (1) […] (POwgd243:225; S1=L1:German, male (P176); voice style)

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It is a minor, albeit fairly important detail in terms of interpreting the discourse functions of these expressions and the accompanying hedging devices that both S1 in POmtg542 (i.e. P499) and S1 in POwgd243 (i.e. P176) act as chair persons in their speech events. This puts them in a rather powerful communicative position. The creative metaphorical expressions (indicated in bold above) are employed at points in the discussion, when the two speakers are engaged in a fairly delicate task: They are presenting their own personal opinion (i think, i know) in relation to what they consider to be the best strategy and future action of the whole group (we will have to, if we wish, people/they should, why do we want to). Using metaphorical expressions together with the other hedging devices seems to help the chair persons in expressing their personal stance. Once again, the metaphors also seem to have a mitigating effect, which cushions the force of the speakers telling the others how to proceed, a communicative act which can be perceived as face-threatening. Some creative idioms used to talk about abstract concepts with concrete ontological images might also serve the additional purpose of helping speakers to express stance in an indirect and presumably more polite way. The previously discussed phrases to my head and pulling the brakes (see Chapter 4) also seem to fall into this group. They are provided with more surrounding co-text in examples (5.7) and (5.8). Once again, the speakers’ use of modal verbs, personal pronouns and stance markers is noticeable in the immediate co-text of the creative idiom.

(5.7) […] the course ha- has as i said er (.) to be recognized in advance and of course you have to see to it that (.) the student PASS the courses (.) a- as well (.) but e:rm (1) e:r that’s (.) well (.) internationalization as such. hh a:nd (.) well to MY head that is not a joint degree […] (POwgd325:41; S1=L1:Norwegian, female (P214); voice style) (5.8) […] and and i’m (.) i feel that many times i am pulling the brakes (.) and i’m really and i’m consciously doing it because I know that time is needed. (.) […] (POmtg314:180; S5=L1:Finnish, male (P178); voice style) Generally, what we can see in many of the expressions like pulling the brakes above is that creative idioms also always add an expressive contour to what is being said. Being metaphors, which are per definition un-true and require metaphorical processing, expressions like the cream of the cream (4.14), turn a blank eye on you (4.5) and preserve their face (4.2) thus create implicatures in the Gricean sense and trigger emotive perlocutionary effects that literal expressions would not have had.

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5.3 Re-creating clichés for rapport and comity The function of establishing and maintaining rapport and comity, which partly overlaps also with the mitigating function of some creative idioms, is certainly relevant for many creative idioms and metaphorical expressions in VOICE – and generally very prominent in many ELF conversations (see e.g. Planken 2005; Kordon 2006; Pullin 2010, 2013). A particular way in which this function is realized in relation to idiom use is through the use of re-created conversational formulae. The term conversational formula here refers to “a conventionalized formula with an illocutionary function” (Moon 1998: 4), i.e. a concept partly associated with speech act theory and less so with lexicography, nevertheless referred to also as idiom by some, as Moon (1998: 4) points out. Again, we can see how inconsistent and fuzzy terminology is in this area. The phrase have a nice day, a creative realization of which is discussed below, is mentioned as an example of a cliché by Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992). They consider clichés to be similar to idioms in that they too consist of patterns that are relatively frozen, but […] unlike them in that the patterns usually consist of larger stretches of language and that their meaning is derivable from the individual constituents. (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992: 33)

Examples of such clichés or conventional formulae given by the researchers are there’s no doubt about it, a good time was had by all, and have a nice day (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992: 33). The conventional idiom make yourself at home would be another example of this type of cliché. This phrase is used in its conventional form only once in VOICE, but, occurs five times in newly created – or re-created – versions, which are presented below. (I have excluded from the analysis those three occurrences of feel at home in VOICE that do not relate to the conventional expression make yourself at home but express the idea of ‘feeling at home’ in a foreign country.) Four of the five creative instances involve lexical substitution, with feel being substituted for the conventional make (5.9, 5.10, 5.11). The fifth instance makes use of feel in addition to make as an instance of syntactic variation (5.12). Since it is noteworthy that the contextual situations in which these creative expressions are used are strikingly similar, they are presented with some co-text below in examples (5.9) to (5.12). Example 5.9 (PBmtg414) S2=L1:Dutch, male (P534), S3=L1:German, female (P526), S4= L1:Dutch, female (P535); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining)

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126 S2: is it allowed to take off my jacket? 127 S3: YES (1) just feel yourself at home (3) [S2] as long as you sell enough @@@@@@ 128 SS: @@@@@ 129 S3: @@ @@@@ 130 S4: we can take it off 131 S3: @@ feel yourself at home 132 SS: @@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Example 5.10 (PBmtg462) S3=L1:Serbian, male (P523), S5=L1:German, female (P526), S6=L1:German, male (P527); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 1946 S3: y- you you can you can express whatever you want to 1947 S5: right. 1948 S3: you can do whatever you wanna be. 1949 S6: with with (kid) 1950 S5: feel yourself at home. (.) on the table 1951 S3: yeah Example 5.11 (PBmtg300) S1=L1:German, male (P73), S2=L1:Dutch, male (P506); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 803 S2: […] you want some more coffee [S1] ? 804 S1: er always but i can do it myself thanks? 805 S2: yeah? 806 S1: NO worries. (.) relax (.) enjoy (.) 807 S2: i’m RElaxed (.) 808 S1: @@@ (.) you know f- f- 809 S2: don’t you have a 810 S1: feel home. (1) @@@ @@@ 811 S2: @@ Example 5.12 (EDsed251) S1=L1:German, male (P464); SX-f=unidentified female speaker; voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 18 S1: ten minutes or a quarter of an hour break a- already in the morning before lunch break. (1) to get some drinks? or whatever hh erm (.) we have billiard on the ground floor = 19 SX-f: = @@ = 20 S1: make yourself feel at home? (.) […]

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All extracts are similar in that they occur either in the opening phases (5.9 and 5.12) or in interim relaxation and small talk phases (5.10 and 5.11) of rather formal speech events, i.e. three business meetings (5.9, 5.10, 5.11) and a seminar discussion (5.12). All variants are uttered by L1 speakers of *German (and some even by the same speaker, namely P526 in 5.9 and 5.10). Since these are all the occurrences of this formulaic expression in VOICE, it is likely that *German at least partly influences the substitution of feel for make, since there is a corresponding *German expression (Fühlen Sie sich wie/ganz zu Hause) that involves the word fühlen, i.e. feel. Yet, neither of the variants listed above is an exact translation of the German expression and different variants are produced by different speakers. For the phrase to fulfill its pragmatic function the exact wording seems secondary. Whether prompted by *German or not, the use of feel seems to reflect the speakers’ wish to reinforce the emotive and personal dimension and the rapport-establishing function the expression is supposed to have. Mirroring the use of re-created pragmatic formulae in opening and interim phases of formal discussions and meetings, the same phenomenon can also be observed in the closing phase of another business meeting in VOICE. The creative idiom have a nice dream is uttered at the end of a business meeting by the chair person (S3) in order to mark her official closing of the meeting, which has at this point run for more than two hours. Example 5.13 (PBmtg269) S1=L1:German, female (P539), S3=L1:Polish, female (P541), S4=L1:Czech, female (P542); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 1195 S3: […] this one which we have discussed with erm different version of answers for the same s- questions (.) take whatever you like (.) hh e:r p r scientific dossier final and summary one page of summary of the scientific dossier so (.) all library which (.) was created upon this project you will get hh (.) have a nice dream. (.) 1196 S1: @ (.) THANK you 1197 S4: and the {SS start to get up} press release will (.) 1198 S3: will come (.) over time (2) no? not yet. {multiple parallel conversations between SS start; a lot of background noise is produced} […] Although it is impossible to know whether S3 produces the expression have a nice dream as an intentional or unintentional pun on the conversational formula have a nice day, the phrase have a nice dream functions effectively in signaling the official closing of the speech event. This seems to be clear to all participants since the speakers (SS) start to get up immediately after S3’s

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utterance. Although S4 addresses S3 with an additional question in utterance 1197, this question is relevant only to S4 and seems to belong to an informal post-meeting phase, not to the main body of the meeting. S3 and S4 discuss the issue informally afterwards when most of the other speakers have already left. Yet, I would argue that S3’s have a nice dream does more than to simply close the meeting. It displays sympathy and solidarity of the chair person with the meeting participants and shows S3’s awareness of the fact that everyone is tired after a long day’s work and that she, S3, in her position as chair is now giving everyone ‘permission’ to be tired, leave and rest. The recreated conversational formula thus seems to function on the transactional level in order to perform a crucial speech act, i.e. close the meeting, while at the same time enhancing and reinforcing rapport and comity at an interpersonal level.

5.4 Solidarity and shared *non-nativeness A similar interpersonal function, namely establishing solidarity with a particular emphasis on “shared non-nativeness”4 (Hülmbauer 2009: 328) is evidenced in example (5.14), which is reproduced from Cogo (2010: 303). What starts out as a request for help in terms of ‘correct’ prepositional use by Nana in lines 3 and 4, transforms into assertive and playful intentional creative variation of the conventional idiom be in the same boat, which establishes a sense of “in-group belonging” (Cogo 2010: 304) for the foreigners (lines 10 and 11) who participate in this ELF conversation. Example 5.14 (Cogo 2010: 303) Isabel=L1:Portuguese, female, Nana=L1:Japanese, female, Anna=L1:Italian, female5 1 ISABEL: I mean we don’t have problems … we all get 2 on yeah 3 NANA: yeah I think we are all on the same … on in … 4 ah: what is it … on the same boat

4 Although the terms *native speaker and *non-native speaker are not used in this book (see Chapter 1), Hülmbauer’s original term is retained here, because it seems relevant for this particular stretch of interaction. 5 I would like to thank Alessia Cogo for allowing me to reprint this example from Cogo (2010: 303) in original format; bold print and underlining added.

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ISABEL: NANA: ISABEL: ANNA: ISABEL: NANA:

yeah? yeah? … how do you say? on the same boat? I don’t know yeah… on the same boat I think… on the bus on the train anyway we understand you yeah … we are all foreigners all foreigners (laughing)

What is interesting in this example is that it starts out with unintentional linguistic creativity, namely morphosyntactic variation in preposition use between on and in. The fact that this variation is unintended is evidenced in the data by the fact that Nana pauses and hesitates in producing the idiom. She then asks Isabel for ‘correct’ usage (what is it, how do you say?) in lines 4 and 6, because, as she informed Cogo (2010: 304) in a retrospective interview, she assumes that Isabel would know *English better than her. What happens, however, is that correct usage is regarded as irrelevant by Isabel, who says that she does not know (I don’t know) in line 7, confirms Nana’s variant (yeah) and goes on to play with the idiom by intentionally producing creative versions. In contrast to the unintentional creative use produced by Nana, the linguistic creativity displayed by Isabel is quite clearly intentional. Playing with the metaphorical image central to the idiom, Isabel jokingly suggests other means of transportation: on the bus on the train. In doing so, she substitutes semantically related words, i.e. vehicles that can hold a substantial number of people, thus making active use of lexical substitution, a creative process we have seen in many examples in Chapter 4. Whether used intentionally or not, the underlying mechanism that allows for the semantic transparency and comprehensibility of the newly coined expressions is the same. The metaphoricity inherent in the idiom is drawn upon to produce creative variants by substituting lexical elements. The function that this particular display of intentional creativity fulfills is to emphasize the fact that the exact wording of the phrase does not matter in a context where the speakers are all foreigners (line 10). Jointly, the speakers orient towards and thereby stress their group identity as foreigners, highlighting their shared *non-nativeness which means they do not need to be concerned with whether you should say on or in, let alone boat, bus or train. This issue of multilingual and transcultural identity of ELF speakers in relation to idioms and metaphors will be explored further in Chapter 7.

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5.5 Emphasizing, summarizing and indicating metaphor awareness The previous sections have already presented a number of discourse functions that are fulfilled by creative idioms in VOICE. Most of the examples discussed were instances in which lexical substitution led to the creation of a new expression. Yet, also creative idioms with syntactic and/or morphosyntactic variation can be used for similar purposes. Thus, an expression like (5.15) it will explode por- hopefully not in our faces but it will explode adds an expressive contour to the interaction and also functions as a humorous remark (with explode being spoken laughingly) (see also Section 4.2.1). And at the same time, it also constitutes a (joking) hyperbolic statement that emphasizes the speaker’s point and adds to the sense of urgency the speaker wants to express. Providing emphasis is a function which can be observed with regard to several examples involving syntactic variation.6 Thus, expressions like go er into much details (4.20), wait until the the big crest of the wave has passed (4.21), make a very safe bet (4.22) and two different sides of the same coin (4.23) all can be assigned to this category. Also some instances of morphosyntactic variation like this shit it takes hell a lot of time (4.27) and the pluralized phrases pieces by pieces (4.26) and carved in stones (4.25) seem to have the same effect. Example (5.16) below presents an extended extract of the utterance in which the expression carved in stones occurs. In addition to the pluralized idiom, the utterance also includes other instances of creative idioms such as save the face if you wish of the old disciplines and another occurrence of the idiom put in a nutshell (see example 4.36), which is being varied with the preposition together being inserted. (5.16) because (1) i’ve okay (.) i suppos:e (.) i (.) what you are trying to say is like whether the: (.) the: i in in a (.) METAphoric sense of the word (.) translatability or (.) translations apply to (.) the: different disciplines when (.) we are talking about interdisciplinarity right? okay. (.) so: i would say above all that (.) and i have saved this

6 Examples mentioned in this paragraph are discussed in relation to lexical substitution and alternative interpretations also in Chapter 4. Example numbers refer to the numbers in Chapter 4.

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comment on x two in the morning (.) i don’t like the term personally interdisciplinarity (1) what (.) what I prefer is preCISELY because of the (1) in my understanding this approach (.) what i was trying to sort of like (.) put together in a nutshell here (1) er er concerning (.) transLATIONS (.) applies to (.) to ANY concept when it sort of like (1) travel (lots of) borders (1) so travels across BORders so i would rather talk about transdisciplinarity (.) cos interdisciplinarity (1) partly er erm (.) okay HOW it is used NOW at the very moment in hungary in the context of hh arguing for changing the education system IN LINE with the bologna treaty as if they were a patented version OF it anyway (.) carved in stones (1) what interdisciplinarity has come to mean is like (.) how to (.) save (1) the face if you wish (.) of the OLD disciplines (1) through (1) being an advocate of an interdisciplinary approach which constant- (.) -ly means like oh we still can do (1) […] (PRqas224:26; S5=L1:Hungarian, female (P576); voice style) Structurally, the insertion of the redundant emphatic together after put in put together in a nutshell is very similar to patterns that have been observed with regard to the additional use of prepositions in ELF in expressions such as discuss about (Seidlhofer 2005, 2011: 145–146). Dewey (2007b: 103–106) mentions the potential importance of semantics with regard to use of the preposition about in ELF and suggests that its semantic value of signaling a topic or a theme might lead to it being used in a wide scope of linguistic constructions in ELF. A similar reasoning, i.e. of semantic influence/importance of prepositions, might apply to together in ELF interactions. Functionally, the insertion of together might be seen to emphasize and reinforce the summarizing function which the idiom in a nutshell already has. There are three other occurrences of in a nutshell in VOICE. In all of these, the expression is used outside the syntactic structure of the sentence as a parenthetical comment that is added to emphasize and summarize what has been said. In (5.16), this effort in summarizing is not limited to the idiom itself, since we can observe how the speaker attempts to summarize her own and her colleagues’ thoughts, using phrases like what you are trying to say, in a metaphoric sense of the word, we are talking about, i would say, i would rather talk about. The function of providing emphasis thus sometimes seems to combine with summarizing, reporting and paraphrasing. This grouping of functions can be seen as linked to the general motivation of increasing clarity and explicitness in linguistic output that has been shown to be highly relevant for ELF in many studies (see e.g. Pitzl, Breiteneder & Klimpfinger 2008; Seidlhofer 2011; Cogo & Dewey 2012).

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Furthermore, what is also noteworthy about example (5.16) is that we can observe a cluster of creatively varied as well as canonical idioms in close proximity. Since these expressions occur rather densely, they might indicate a certain degree of metaphor awareness or awareness of metaphoricity – in this instance by one particular speaker. At the beginning, S5 talks about the metaphoric sense of the word thus indicating that she is aware of metaphorical meanings and expressions. After uttering the creative idiom put together in a nutshell, she goes on to use the idiom in line with, the pluralized creative idiom carved in stones and the syntactically expanded idiom save the face if you wish of the old disciplines. Especially in this last expression, creative variation is considerable since in the conventional idiom save sb’s face is used metaphorically to refer to face of an inanimate object that is fairly abstract, namely the old disciplines, rather than to an actual person. This unusual and creative metaphorical leap to save the face of the old disciplines is prefaced by the parenthetical comment if you wish that is inserted in the middle of the phrase, before the speaker utters the old disciplines. What the underlined expressions in example (5.16) therefore also indicate is that clusters of metaphors and (creative) idioms in a short stretch of conversation might be linked with metaphor awareness that is implicitly signaled through the use of hedging expressions, vague language and discourse markers. In this stretch of speech, expressions like sort of like and if you wish seem to indicate the speaker’s awareness and wish to make explicit that the expressions put together in a nutshell and save the face of the old disciplines are not to be interpreted literally. Discussing casual conversations among L1 *English speakers in the CANCODE corpus, Carter (2004: 126) comments on this link between vague language and metaphor awareness in the following way: But sometimes the producer of a metaphor is conscious of the interpersonal functions of a choice of metaphor, and generally speakers may become quite conscious of the varying degrees of approximation to the literal truth which the metaphors convey and may even comment quite explicitly. Speakers are also in varying degrees conscious of when they draw comparisons to underline meanings. They are often aware of the degrees of exaggeration implicit in utterances and adopt a number of different communicative strategies which signal that awareness. Such strategies regularly take the form of intensifiers, downtoners/ hedges and approximations or vague language. (Carter 2004: 126)

5.6 The myth of miscommunication Having illustrated a range of functions, it seems clear that formal variation of idioms is not a disturbing factor in ELF conversations as represented in VOICE. In none of the examples analyzed did a creative idiom lead to evidence of bewilderment or

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confusion on the part of the interlocutors. The analysis revealed no indications of non-understanding or negotiation of meaning sequences (Pitzl 2005, 2010; Cogo & Pitzl 2016) triggered by the use of creative idioms or metaphors. Accordingly, uttering creative idioms never seemed to undermine ELF speakers’ status in interaction or make them the object of scorn or mockery by others. While some researchers (e.g. Prodromou 2007b, 2008) seem to caution against the (creative) use of idioms in international contexts because “L2-users are playing away and if they break the rules they may be penalized” (Prodromou 2008: 238), my study finds no evidence of such penalization. This is also echoed in Deterding’s study of intelligibility and misunderstanding in ELF who comments on the issue of idioms in the following way: One can regard idioms such as these as troublesome minefields to be avoided. Alternatively, one might suggest that idioms play just as important a role in ELF contexts as in native-speaker settings, allowing for humour and creativity […]. The conclusion should probably be this: so long as ELF speakers are sensitive to the possibility of idioms not being understood, their use can enrich a conversation immensely. And it seems that misunderstandings arising out of unfamiliar idiomatic usage are quite rare in the CMACE [Corpus of Misunderstandings from the Asian Corpus of English] data. (Deterding 2013: 100)

What the analysis thus far has shown is that the use of creative idioms and metaphorical expressions in ELF interactions seems to be functionally motivated and is always intended to serve the overall goal of achieving successful communication, at a transactional as well as an interactional level. And, importantly, creative idioms and metaphors also seem to be received and interpreted as functionally motivated by ELF interlocutors. That is to say, linguistic creativity in the use of idioms is simply part of a situationally adapted ELF which is coconstructed by speakers on the basis of their common (multilingual) linguistic resources. In this sense, the use of creative idioms and metaphors in ELF is cooperative (cf. Seidlhofer & Widdowson 2007; Seidlhofer 2011). Linguistic forms may depart from conventional norms and expectations just as metaphors per definition flout the Gricean maxim of quality and create implicatures, but they are nevertheless cooperative in being directed towards the common goal of successful communication.

5.7 Summary: Ideational and interpersonal functions The creative idioms discussed thus far fulfill a range of specific functions in ELF interactions that can be broadly organized along the lines of Halliday’s (1994: xiii) distinction between ideational and interpersonal (see also e.g. Pitzl 2012,

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2018a). A similar organization of two overall categories is also suggested by Franceschi (2013), who distinguishes communication strategies and social functions in relation to idioms in ELFA, a distinction that also partly corresponds to the Hallidayan one. With regard to the interpersonal/social dimension of idioms and metaphors, establishing and maintaining rapport and solidarity is just one aspect. Related to maintaining rapport, creative idioms and metaphors are also used by ELF speakers to mitigate propositions and minimize potential face threats, which may involve humorous undertones, as in the ball is in your corner. Humor and joking by means of metaphorical creativity can, however, also occur just for their own sake, i.e. without being intended to mitigate a face threat. Furthermore, ELF speakers sometimes use creative idioms and metaphors to express subjectivity, project stance and position themselves in relation to a particular issue. When we turn to the second category, i.e. idioms and metaphors being used for ideational and transactional purposes, metaphorical expressions serve functions like emphasizing (e.g. i’m up to my hh big toe i’m a cargo guy; all this shit it takes hell a lot of time), summarizing (e.g. what i was trying to sort of like put together in a nutshell here) and increasing explicitness (e.g. a joint program doedoesn’t exist in the air so to say) in different ELF interactions. On several occasions, these transactional functions become especially relevant when speakers are discussing rather abstract concepts or topics that they try to explain or describe by using metaphors and idioms. A central characteristic of many creative idioms and metaphors in ELF interactions is that they are multifunctional, that is to say they fulfill more than one specific function. Thus, many instances of metaphorical creativity cited above operate at an interpersonal as well as at an ideational level. The same phrase can express humor and mitigate a sensitive proposition (interpersonal; interactional) and summarize what was said before (ideational; transactional). Although evidence in VOICE suggests that some ELF speakers have a greater tendency of using creative idioms and metaphors than others, metaphorical creativity as discussed in this chapter is widely used by ELF speakers from all kinds of L1 backgrounds. Individual creative expressions, as illustrated in this chapter, are generally not on the way to becoming new lexicalized ‘ELF idioms’, i.e. they are not on the way ‘back’ to becoming conventional idioms in the idiom-metaphor loop proposed in Chapter 2 (see Figure 2.1). They are, however, part of localized practices of ELF communication. Rather than being a hindrance or the cause for confusion, they are usually successful in the respective ELF contexts in fulfilling a range of interpersonal and ideational discourse functions.

6 Metaphorical creativity in ELF interactions: Discovering patterns and systematicities It has been argued and demonstrated in the previous chapters that linguistic creativity and the creative use of idioms are closely linked to the use of metaphors and the concept of metaphoricity. It has been shown in examples from VOICE that this link, albeit also relevant for L1 use, is of central importance for ELF speakers. In this respect, it has been suggested in Chapters 2 and 4 that the distinction between a creative idiom and an overt metaphor is in many cases impractical and next to impossible. The present chapter therefore attempts to push back frontiers (an expression coined by one of the speakers in VOICE) by going beyond the traditional idiom vs. metaphor distinction. It moves away from an analysis of traditional types of idiom variation (Chapter 4) or specific functions fulfilled by creative idioms (Chapter 5) towards an analysis of different types of metaphors and metaphorical images, metaphorical patterns and local systematicities. The focus of this chapter is on the exploitation of metaphor as a shared resource by ELF speakers and on how this relates to linguistic creativity. Particular emphasis is given to those instances of linguistic creativity which are brought about by and made possible through metaphor. Section 6.1 follows up further on the potential for re-metaphorization and the elaboration of metaphorical concepts in creative idiom variants. It investigates the role of concrete images and overt metaphors in ELF interaction. Section 6.2 looks at potentially recurrent images and vehicle terms within speech events involving the same participants, showing how these images and conceptual domains might lead to clusters or patterns of metaphorical expressions in ELF conversations. Continuing on the topic of vehicle terms, Section 6.3 illustrates how one basic conceptual domain, namely embodied experience, is evidenced in linguistic expressions in VOICE. It explores how the metaphorical use of basic embodied concepts goes beyond conventional use and investigates the metaphoricity of body parts as vehicle terms in different contexts.

6.1 Overt metaphors and linguistic creativity The analysis in Chapters 4 and 5 has mostly explored cases in which formal variation in creative idioms was systematic in the sense that it mainly involved lexical substitution or different types of syntactic and/or morphosyntactic variation. Yet, there are also instances of creative idioms in VOICE in which the https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-007

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metaphorical concepts inherent in the conventional expressions are even more noticeably exploited and also elaborated on by speakers. As was suggested already in previous chapters, the distinction between the idiom decomposition and the metaphorical compositionality interpretation becomes increasingly blurred for such examples. This holds true especially for metaphorical expressions in which there seems to be a clear influence of conventional *English idioms on the coining of a new expression in an ELF interaction, but in which it is nevertheless impossible to identify one or two particular *English idioms as main reference points for the newly created phrase. The statement below is made in a task force meeting of professionals involved in developing the European higher education area.1 The interactants are discussing a draft document when S1 says they do not need to adapt this head and tails. Example 6.1 (POmtg539) S1=L1:Danish, male (P499), SX-2=L1:Finnish, female (P500); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 234 S1: but (1) as (.) i’ve already said to some of you when (.) i suddenly (1) decided to gi- give it a look over i (1) i was struck by the extent to which this: (1) in MY opinion at least meets a lot of (.) OUR needs in terms of (undeveloped) specification i mean we do NOT need to aDApt this: sort of (1) head and tails but i think there’s there’s a lot of good thinking in the way in which it is set up (.) there’s a (1) and thank god (1) the mutual recognition project already at that time was (1) forward enough to recognize the value of (.) integrating the: THEN [org2] criteria = 235 SX-2: mhm 236 SX-2: = hm While the expression head and tails may have a formal resemblance to the codified expression heads or tails, the L1 *English expression and its meaning referring to the tossing of a coin clearly do not relate to the discourse context in example (6.1). The ODI also lists the idiom make head or tail of, meaning to “understand at all” (Speake 1999: 172). An additional comment in the dictionary states that this idiom is “[u]sually [used] with negative expressed (make neither head nor tail of) or implied” (Speake 1999: 172). And indeed a negative is also expressed in S1’s utterance (we do NOT need to aDApt this). Yet, the newly coined

1 This example is also discussed in Pitzl (2009).

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expression head and tails is different from the idiom make head or tail of in form and its meaning is not covered by what the ODI paraphrases. As has already been mentioned, the speakers in this meeting are talking about a draft document. If we abandon the idiom perspective and simply decode S1’s expression as a metaphor employing terms of embodiment with head referring to the beginning of the document and tails referring to the end, it becomes fairly easy to understand what S1 means and gloss his expression head and tails with something like ‘as a whole’ or ‘entirely’. As an overt metaphor (see Chapter 2), head and tails seems to be rather transparent. Like many examples discussed in the previous two chapters, the function the metaphor seems to fulfill in the context of this ELF working group meeting is to give emphasis to S1’s statement. Additionally, we can observe that the metaphorical expression – like some examples in Chapters 4 and 5 – occurs in a situation in which the speaker voices his opinion, which is reflected by phrases like i was struck, in my opinion at least, i mean and i think in (6.1). And similar to instances in the previous two chapters, we can observe that S1 prefaces the metaphor with the discourse marker and hedging device sort of, which is likely to be indicative of metaphor awareness (see Section 5.5). So even though, at first glance, the expression resembles existing L1 *English idioms, it is most likely not a particular idiom ‘gone wrong’ or being varied, but a newly created metaphor using terms of embodiment (head and tails), which is nevertheless likely to have been influenced by the fact that there are several conventional idioms which employ the two words head and tail metaphorically. The next example is uttered by the same speaker in a speech event involving the same participants that has taken place just before the previous one. Also in this passage of the interaction, the speaker makes use of a rather vivid metaphorical image in coining a new linguistic expression: Example 6.2 (POmtg403) S1=L1:Danish, male (P499), S2=L1:Finnish, male (P502), S4=L1:Hungarian, male (P505), S5=L1:Finnish, female (P500); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 317 S1: = and the- @ and and and they they understand of course the [org3] position which is that standards are (2) 318 SS: @@@@@@ 319 SX-2: and i know (1) yeah 320 S1: ex- more or less what WE are doing (.) setting off standards for quality assurance agencies. so 321 S5: yeah

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322 323 324 325

SX-5: S1: S4: S1:

326 S4: 327 S4:

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hm they’re locking the wheels so to speak [S4] mhm and if you ASK me is this a good s- situation for (1) producing an agreement before the end of the year my answer is NO it’s not a good situation (of course) mhm mhm

The image of locking the wheels and the idea that is being conveyed with this expression by S1 in this task force meeting is very similar to the codified L1 *English idiom put a spoke in sb’s wheel. With the noun spoke being a relatively uncommon noun that might be unfamiliar to many ELF speakers, it could be argued that the newly coined phrase locking the wheels might be more listenerfriendly than the conventional wording might have been. The verb lock is much more frequent than the noun spoke. Hence, the newly created phrase might be easier to understand for many ELF speakers than the conventional one and therefore be more appropriate in an ELF context. Similar to many other examples analyzed before, the expression is accompanied by a metalinguistic comment (so to speak), which can again be seen as an indicator of metaphor awareness and awareness of non-literalness by the speaker. As we have seen with some other examples before, it is noticeable that the creative ELF expression locking the wheels retains those words of the conventional phrase that are essential for creating and drawing listeners’ attention to the metaphorical image that is central to both the conventional idiom and the new ELF expression. While the semantic content of putting a spoke is substituted by locking, the concept of wheel(s) is retained. I would argue that this might be because it is the image of wheel(s) that carries the main metaphorical weight in both the conventional as well as the creative phrase used by the ELF speaker. In fact, there are a number of conventional idioms (such as oil/grease the wheels, set the wheels in motion or the wheels are turning) that employ the metaphorical image of wheel(s) to express the idea of plans being put into action. Conceptually, the ontological image of forward movement brought about by wheel(s) seems to be equated with progress, not just physical progress but also progress in relation to abstract processes or activities. Both the notion of forward movement and progress appears to be evaluated positively. If the wheel is stopped – which is the image central to both the conventional idiom and S1’s newly created ELF expression – this is seen as unwanted and obstructive of the desired progress, both literally and metaphorically.

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Within the cognitive framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the conventional wheel(s) idioms and also the newly created ELF expression might be interpreted as instances of underlying conceptual metaphors which one might label something like PROGRESS IS A JOURNEY or FORWARD MOVEMENT IS GOOD and which make use of the concrete image of wheels to express this underlying metaphorical concept. Although establishing a link with CMT may be relevant for some examples of metaphorical creativity by ELF speakers, I would argue that the applicability of CMT to ELF interactions is limited, however, since different conceptual metaphors have different levels of ‘regio-cultural’ entrenchment (see Chapter 2). Thus, it is not only an open question whether something like PROGRESS IS A JOURNEY is in fact a conceptual metaphor, but in the context of an ELF interaction it is also an open question in how far the same conceptual metaphors are shared in a particular group of ELF speakers. Regardless of whether certain metaphors are due to shared underlying conceptual metaphors or simply triggered by the salience and expressive potential of certain ontological images, the creative expression locking the wheels in (6.2) is noticeable not just for its overt metaphoricity, but also for its embeddedness in a larger cluster of metaphorical expressions and creative idioms in the same speech event. The next section examines this speech event (and related speech events involving the same group of ELF speakers) more closely in order to illustrate the kind of metaphorical patterns and local systematicities that sometimes emerge in ELF interactions over time.

6.2 Metaphorical patterns and local systematicities Although the level of conceptual metaphors like FORWARD MOVEMENT IS GOOD or ARGUMENT IS WAR is mostly disregarded in the analysis of metaphorical creativity in ELF, metaphorical patterns and recurring images occasionally can be observed also in ELF interactions. An instance where one speaker uttered different creative and conventional idioms in a rather dense manner in a short stretch of speech was already discussed in the previous chapter (see Section 5.5). While the clustering of metaphorical expressions in (5.16) did not involve similarities in terms of the metaphorical images employed, this section looks at instances in which similar or related metaphorical concepts are made use of recurrently. We have already seen that some speakers, like P499, are rather prone to using metaphorical expressions in order to emphasize certain points, express

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their personal opinion, make suggestions or summarize their own or other speakers’ statements. Leading up to the phrase they’re locking the wheels so to speak, which occurs in utterance 323 of the speech event POmtg403, the speaker (P499) and some of his interlocutors have already used a number of conventional metaphorical expressions that seem loosely related to the topic of competition and potential conflict. Example 6.3 (POmtg403) S1=L1:Danish, male (P499), S2=L1:Finnish, male (P502); S3=L1:Catalan, female (P501); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 240 S1: i think we have we have to backtrack on that one i i agree because […] […] 257 S1: […] we we we tabled or we we circulated er the report which: as you can see is (.) nice and diplomatic because we (.) 258 S3: @@@ […] 264 S1: and (.) my whole idea was that when MY turn came they should be quiet (.) and so they were they didn’t say anything so the (.) the TACTIC worked […] they almost stood up in their seats (.) eqit was a great moment of triumph because (.) it went down VERY very well e:r with these people. […] […] 288 S2: […] the working group also took note of the silence (.) of the (folk). (.) because they did NOT (.) er challenge in ANY way (.) the working group’s interpretation fo:r (.) fo:r (1) er for the TASK of its work. […] 323 S1: they’re locking the wheels so to speak [S4] When looked at individually, the highlighted words that precede the phrase locking the wheels do not seem particularly striking or creative. Considering that they are being used within a few minutes of discussion, however, they seem to form a loose thematic cluster, since the expressions orient towards a common theme of competition and strategizing that is discussed by the group. As the speakers continue their discussion of the topic and ponder their options for deciding on a confrontational strategy towards another rival organization, this orientation towards competition becomes much more salient through an even more noticeable cluster of metaphorical expressions. In example (6.4), the speaker P499, who acts as the chair person, as well as other participants in the meeting start using more overt and deliberate metaphors. What is notable

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in this long extract (that still happens in the initial phase of the meeting) is that the expressions indicated in bold involve images of ‘fighting’, ‘war’, ‘confrontation’ and ‘secrecy’.2 Example 6.4 (POmtg403) S1=L1:Danish, male (P499), S2=L1:Finnish, male (P502), S3=L1:Catalan, female (P501), S4=L1:Hungarian, male (P505), S5=L1:Finnish, female (P500); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 393 S1: […] so (.) while we sit here (.) . hh the [org3] HAS (2) a hearing process with their council (.) for OUR work (2) but the same level of specification i’m sure (1) 394 S2:

395 S1: so so @ (.) i mean (1) this is what i would call very traditional sort of east west negotiating style from the g- glorious days of the cold war but i mean (.) 396 S5: @@ 397 S3: @@ […] 402 S2: indeed and er e:r judging by the work that [org3] has been doing on (1) er is very LIkely that they will present both of these papers or the or the summaries of them in [place12] (1) i mean 403 SX-3: mhm 404 S2: er competing versions (.) 405 S1: sure sure […] 443 S4: hhh (.) hhh there is hh two things which (1) which can be done (.) two strategies. ONE is e:r the: we we: keep trying e:r to er negotiate with them (1) but i don’t know ho- how hh the possible results of of either of these two strategies. the other strategy is we (.) we have to fight. @ and 444 S3: @@@ […] 453 S1: yah (.) e:r i mean there’s always been the (.) the ugly interpretation of the fact that WE got the mandate (.) that (.) the [org3] (.) 454 SX-2: mhm

2 A shorter version of example (6.4) is discussed in Pitzl (2012).

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455 S1: 456 S5: 457 S1:

458 S3: […] 466 S1:

467 S4: 468 S1: […] 475 S4:

476 S5: 477 S1: 478 S5: […] 502 S2:

503 S4: 504 S2:

505 506 507 508

S4: S2: S4: S2: […]

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sort of (.) considered it an IDEAL situation that we were out there falling over our feet (.) hm in an impossible task where they came from behind (.) with (.) an alTERnative which could be accepted. (.) and that’s still the danger (.) hh i mean k- k- (.) BASICALLY (.) i’m not too sure we can reach a compromise (.) i mean the [org3] are formidable opponents they are well organized (.) ([org6]) (.) live (.) a life of their own in some (.) mhm (.) which is not a very advanced point of view but tha- is their MAJOR (.) platform (.) is exactly (their) thing. (1) but so [S4] you argue that we should e::r put on full armour and e:r take out the old swords and (.) lances yes? (1)

but (.) as i hear you your main argument is actually that we should go PUBLIC (1) as I mentioned we CAN try the first e:r version or option (1) a:nd er (.) to discuss with them that e:r (.) if THEY well (.) but again (.) to preserve their face they won’t (.) withdraw this document. so it’s it’s only a (.) hm hm they can’t well er (.) er (.) hh (1) e:rm (.) in principle i do agree and i think it’s a realistic approach but (.) i’m just being a bit concerned about you know (.) showing our CARDS (.) @ at this point (1) so i’m not exactly sure about that it’s just that er (2) e: r well we have this (.) meeting [org7] meeting on: on the tenth of may (1) but e:r i’m not sure that we should even THEN (.) disclose = = mhm our entire volume (.) for THEM = = mhm = = to counter-attack possibly before (.) before our general assembly even (1) so these

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i mean we we ARE we are (2) by deciding never to take an open confrontation on the definition of standards we have x xx the problem in front of us we have to face it x and sooner or later it will explode por- hopefully not in our faces but it will explode. i mean (1) there are so much sort of positioning around this.

The metaphorical pattern that tentatively begins in (6.3) becomes fully explicit in (6.4) with S1’s comparison with the east west negotiating style from the glorious days of the cold war (u 395). Reading through the passages, the speakers’ utterances exhibit a metaphorical pattern in terms of recurrent imagery that operates with different levels of overtness in different expressions. We can see overt metaphors that are dynamic and deliberately coined ad hoc not only in the cold war comparison by S1, but also in expressions like we were out there falling over our feet (u 455), put on full armour and take out the old swords and lances (u 466) and in explode hopefully not in our faces (u 656) (see also Pitzl 2012: 44–45). At the same time, we see a creative idiom, i.e. preserve their face (u 475, cf. Chapter 4), and a conventional idiom, i.e. showing our cards (u 502). These fairly overt metaphorical expressions are interspersed with conventional codified one-word metaphors that have varying degrees of metaphorical resonance, but would nevertheless seem to reinforce the pattern of metaphorical imagery established by the more overt expressions. While words like competing, negotiate and disclose are best regarded as covert opaque metaphors that are unlikely to be noticed as particularly metaphorical by speakers, other conventional metaphors like fight, counter-attack and formidable opponents are more likely to be perceived as overtly metaphorical, albeit being conventional and codified. It is interesting to note that the topic of competing with another organization is also evidenced by speakers’ frequent use of first person pronouns we and our as well as they and them in their statements (underlined above). The speakers are clearly engaged in voicing their opinions, making suggestions and summarizing and evaluating what has been said before. This is evidenced by frequent use of phrases like i mean, i think, i don’t know, i’m not sure what i would call and as i hear you (underlined above). What is most noticeable in terms of metaphorical patterning is that discussing the strategy (u 443) of whether or not to take an open confrontation (u 565) with the other organization is expressed with rather vivid metaphorical images. What conversational episodes like this one suggest is that the “systematicity of [v]ehicle choices” (Cameron 1999b: 16) and clustering of metaphorical expressions is indeed something that also happens in ELF interactions. What Cameron

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has observed with regard to L1 *English speakers is thus also relevant for ELF contexts, namely that metaphor Vehicles often occur in networks within a text or across texts. This surface systematicity can be seen at various levels: Local systematicity Within a particular text, related Vehicles may occur that develop an extended metaphor across several aspects of the Topic. Global systematicity Across texts from a range of discourse types and content, semantically linked Vehicles may occur, producing systems and layers of metaphors. (Cameron 1999b: 16)

What we see in (6.3) and (6.4) is clearly an instance of local systematicity concerning vehicle choices in metaphors as described by Cameron. Although the vehicle terms used by the speakers are not exclusively related to war (e.g. the vehicle terms cards and feet belong to other semantic domains), there is certainly a cluster of lexical choices that belong to this domain. Words such as backtrack, tactic, triumph, cold war, competing, fight, opponents, armour, swords, lances, counterattack, confrontation, explode all belong to this domain and their occurrence within a relatively short stretch of interaction about university administration is certainly noticeable and an instance of local systematicity in metaphor choices within a text, i.e. in this case a particular speech event. The immediate cluster of these metaphors in the speech event ends after (6.4), since the topic shifts to other points on the agenda and the discussion about the other organization ceases. Interestingly, the speech event in question (POmtg403) is not the only speech event in VOICE that involves the same group of speakers. While POmtg403 takes place in the morning, the speech events POmtg541 and POmtg542 take place in the afternoon of the same day and essentially involve the same group of ELF speakers, who can be said to form a TIG (see Chapter 1) at least for this day. Examples (6.5) to (6.8) shown below are taken from these meetings in the afternoon. Speaker P499, who was most active in contributing to the local systematicity of metaphors in (6.3) and (6.4), functions as the chair person during the whole day of meetings. He therefore contributes by far the highest amount of turns and words to the speech events during the whole day. It is therefore not surprising that it would be P499 who revives the metaphors again later during the day, as shown in (6.5) to (6.8) below. (6.5) er but still [S3] i have so- i c- er er i mean it’s perhaps i o- i feel i have to be a little selective abou- about the battles i i- i’m going to fight over the next months […] (POmtg541:551; S2=L1:Danish, male (P499); plain style)

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(6.6) […] i mean i have spent ten years fighting the term peer because i don’t think it’s really covering the the various use of experts in in in in in in er european agencies […] (POmtg541:739; S2=L1:Danish, male (P499); plain style) (6.7) i mean anyone who has read the review but it’s erm as [S1] says this is er going to be a discussion bordering on a battle we’re going to have in the steering group er not going to be easy er (POmtg541:1019 S2=L1:Danish, male (P499); plain style) (6.8) […] so i mean i’ll take whatever whatever stones may be be thrown will be thrown in my direction [S2] it so er (POmtg542:327; S1=L1:Danish, male (P499); plain style) Like in (6.3) and (6.4), the expressions highlighted in bold in (6.5) to (6.8) may not seem to be ‘equally creative’. Examples (6.5) to (6.7) contain the terms fight, fighting and battle, which are each used individually by P499 (fight the term peer, a discussion bordering on a battle) and one time in combination (the battles i’m going to fight). Looked at in isolation, these instances might not be particularly noticeable and creative, since these metaphorical uses of fight and battle are relatively conventional. But in light of the passages in POmtg403, these choices by the speaker contribute to and re-evoke the same metaphorical pattern that was used in the morning. This seems to go a small step beyond Cameron’s (1999b) local systematicity, creating what we might call a regional systematicity of metaphors in a cluster of related texts (here: speech events) involving the same group of speakers. This regional systematicity is continued by P499’s use of the deliberate metaphor whatever stones may be be thrown will be thrown in my direction in (6.8), which the speaker utters towards the end of the last speech event of the day (POmtg542). Once again, like in the examples before (see Section 6.1), the speaker evokes a rather vivid image through this overt metaphor to underline his point. A similar kind of local – or maybe regional – systematicity might also be a factor that occasionally contributes to situational “online idiomatizing” (Seidlhofer 2009a: 205–209, 2011: 138–143) and languaging in ELF when metaphors that are introduced start to be shared and re-used by speakers through the pragmatic process of accommodation. This can lead to new collocational patterns as situationally created and lexicalized ELF idioms. This process can be observed with the word endangered in VOICE for example (see Seidlhofer 2011: 139–141 for longer extracts). The adjective endangered is used 11 times in one speech event in VOICE (POwgd14). In addition, the word occurs once in two other speech events (POwgd26 and POwgd325), which belong

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to the same group of speech events as POwgd14 and involve some of same individuals. The recurrent use of endangered in POwgd14 involves the syntactic pattern endangered + noun in 9 out of the 11 occurrences and brings about the collocational patterns endangered factor, endangered programs, endangered fields (twice), endangered study, endangered areas, endangered disciplines and endangered activities. In addition to being in line with the suggestions made about the potential systematicity of vehicle choices at a local or regional level in clusters of speech events in ELF-TIGs, evidence like this shows that there are all kinds of factors that influence the use of metaphors and that are likely to influence patterns of co-occurrence and systematicity in ELF contexts.

6.3 Metaphoricity beyond idiomaticity: Embodied experience In Chapter 2, I have addressed the notion that some basic kinds of experience, namely interaction with our physical environment and the experience of our bodies, can be regarded as more or less universal, i.e. shared by all speakers of all languages, and may be fairly independent of specific regio-cultural backgrounds (see Section 2.3.1). As a general trend, it has been observed by many scholars “that abstract notions tend to be conceptualised in terms of concrete objects, and in general this is the direction that metaphorical mappings tend to follow” (Allan 2006: 180). In the analyses thus far, we have already seen how ELF speakers create and exploit metaphorical images which utilize basic categories of human experience grounded in physical reality. Expressions like put the philosophical knowledge that was reached at his time in a nutshell, two different sides of the same coin or pulling the brakes in Chapter 4, the ball is in your corner and travel along that road in Chapter 5, and locking the wheels and whatever stones will be thrown in my direction in this chapter all make use of concrete physical objects as vehicle terms. The most basic one of these categories grounded in physical reality is the “experience of embodiment that has been shown to be at the core of so many other mappings” (Allan 2006: 179). Hence, embodiment is also at the core of many codified idioms. For example, Jaeger (1999: 47) mentions that vocabulary denoting body parts account for a higher number of idioms than most other words in the index of headwords of the idiom dictionaries by Cowie, Mackin and McCaig (1983) and Cowie and Mackin (1993). So it is not surprising that the examples of creative idioms and metaphorical expressions from VOICE discussed thus far have also contained a number of references to body parts and embodied concepts as vehicle terms. The relevance

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of terms of embodiment was already highlighted especially in relation to lexical substitution in Chapter 4. But of course, embodied concepts are by no means limited to this type of idiom variation and can be found also in instances of syntactic and morphosyntactic variation. Instances already discussed in Chapter 4 include i don’t wanna start the meeting off on a bad foot (4.4), i remember from the head (4.29), i don’t know it m- from my head (4.30) or the only time this came into the public eye was (4.35). The subsequent sections therefore look at some terms of embodiment in VOICE more systematically and consider how different uses of embodied concepts can have varying degrees of metaphoricity, conventionality and linguistic creativity. We will see how linguistic forms and metaphorical resonance interact in these instances and how metaphoricity here clearly goes beyond idiomaticity. Starting from the concept of body parts that were shown to be relevant in the examples analyzed thus far, the subsequent sections focus on a number of specific concepts and lexical items, such as extremities, face and eyes, head, mind and brain and finally heart. They present examples in which these embodied concepts are used metaphorically and creatively, but also conventionally, in VOICE.

6.3.1 Feet, toes, shoulders and hands Taking a look at different types of idiom variation and metaphorical creativity, we have seen how phrases like start the meeting off on a bad foot (4.4), falling over our feet (6.4) and put my hands into the fire for it (see Pitzl 2009: 311–312 and Chapter 7) make use of extremities as vehicle terms. A similar type of metaphor occurs in the next example, also discussed in Pitzl (2009: 312), in which the speaker who coins the expression put my hands into the fire for it uses another term of embodiment in (6.9) to make a humorous and emphatic remark. Example 6.9 (PBmtg300) S1=L1:German, male (P73), S2=L1:Dutch, male (P506); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 1229 S2: but again you know (.) and this this is a good scenario for us because (.) i’m (1) up to my (.) hh big toe i’m a cargo guy = 1230 S1: = @@ @@ 1231 S2: @ @ hhh and er (1) I (.) 1232 S1: 1233 S2: i want EVERYTHING in cargo to be successful whatever. […]

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The expression coined is a dynamic metaphor (i.e. appears to be coined ad hoc) that is overtly metaphorical since it is evident that S2’s big toe literally has nothing to do with how much of a cargo guy he is. S2’s metaphorical remark functions to provide emphasis to his statement that S2 considers himself to be a cargo guy who wants EVERYTHING in cargo to be successful. Yet additionally, the metaphorical insertion up to my big toe also clearly has a humorous effect. S2 says big toe laughingly and the remark also prompts laughter on the part of S1. In a similar, but probably more covert metaphorical way, the next examples also make use of extremities as vehicle terms. This time, it is not someone’s toe, foot/feet or hands, which are being used to create an embodied image, but people’s shoulders. Noticeably, the three examples below are the only occurrences of the word shoulders in VOICE. (6.10) […] but these are both accounts on my shoulders? […] (PBmtg27:633; S1=L1:German, male (P73); plain style) (6.11)

it will fall heavily heav- heavily on your finnish shoulders afterwards as well (.) (POmtg541:702; S2=L1:Danish, male (P499); plain style)

(6.12)

[…] as a student it would be a real chance for me er to have a look over the let’s say shoulders of er silvio berlusconi or er schroeder or tony blair so erm […] (POwgd14:233; S3=L1:German, male (P99); plain style)

All of these examples are probably best categorized as being somewhere between creative and conventional use. Depending on the dictionary one consults, (6.10) and (6.11) closely resemble the *English idiom on sb’s shoulders (OALD9) or the codified metaphorical meaning of the noun shoulder/sb’s shoulders (CALD). Both idiom and noun have the meaning of something being someone’s responsibility, which is expressed by the transparent embodied image of something being on sb’s shoulders. We also seem to be looking at an instance of metonymy or synecdoche here, since the person whose shoulders we are talking about is also the person who is responsible – in codified usage and also in (6.10) and (6.11). Example (6.12) presents a slightly different use of shoulders since the image being evoked and the meaning being conveyed have nothing to do with something being on sb’s shoulders and hence with the speaker’s or addressee’s responsibility. *English has the idiom to be looking over your shoulder which means “to be anxious and have the feeling that someone is going to do something unpleasant or harmful to you” (OALD9: s.v. shoulder). Yet, the expression have a

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look over the let’s say shoulders of in (6.12) seems unrelated to this *English idiom, since it is entirely different in meaning and crucially refers to someone else’s rather than the speaker’s shoulders. There is, however, an L1 *German expression which makes use of this image, i.e. jemandem über die Schulter schauen (literally: look over sb’s shoulder), which means being able to observe someone who is an expert in their field in order to learn from them. For someone who is familiar with *German, (6.12) would thus evoke a familiar saying and metaphorical image (see Chapter 7 for a more detailed discussion of the multilingual dimension of metaphorical creativity in ELF). For ELF listeners who do not know the *German saying, the overt metaphor nevertheless seems transparent enough to interpret the embodied image of looking over sb’s shoulders as intended by the speakers. An interesting observation in this respect, pointed out to me by Cornelia Hülmbauer (p.c.), is that there is an implicit link between the two different metaphorical uses of shoulders in (6.10) and (6.11) and the one in (6.12). The people over whose shoulders one wants to have a look (6.12) are usually people who have a certain amount of responsibility on their shoulders (6.10 and 6.11), a meaning that is conventionalized and codified in *English. It has been mentioned above that idiom researchers comment on the high number of conventional idioms that employ vocabulary of body parts. One of these conventional idioms that is rather frequent in VOICE is the expression hand in hand, which can be found seven times in the corpus. (6.13) […] just personally i think the two things should go hand in hand (POwgd12:61; S6=L1:English (P209); plain style) (6.14) […] and it kind of all works hand in hand if we’re gonna fight the wide picture we need to make sure that […] (POwsd256:61; S6=L1:English (P340); plain style) (6.15) that requires more resources as well it it has to get hand in hand and it can’t just be given to youth organizations erm […] (POwsd376: 238; S5=L1:English (P340); plain style) (6.16) it goes very much hand in hand with what er [S3] said that’s good er [S11] (POwgd14:243; S1=L1:Swedish (P97); plain style) (6.17) […] that sense er er a joint venture could go hand in hand with what you want to make the profile of your department er (POwgd14:730; S1=L1:Swedish (P97); plain style) (6.18) […] we had the ability to get out and to participate in the national struggle hand in hand with with the men with the palestinian men […] (PRpan1:22; S5=L1:Arabic (P413); plain style)

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(6.19) […] these have been moving practically together hand in hand for the past thousand of thousand years (EDint331:222; S1=L1:Maltese (P167); plain style) It is interesting to observe that the chunk hand in hand seems to have the tendency to remain intact in ELF interactions and is never varied in VOICE. From the point of view of idiomatic creativity, all of the occurrences in (6.13) to (6.19) are conventional. They contain no creative variation of forms. I would tentatively propose that this might be because the conventional structure hand in hand, although codified, is in fact overtly metaphorical with a relatively high degree of domain incongruity (see Chapter 2) and a rather transparent embodied image that is evoked. What is varied to a small degree, however, is the morphosyntactic structure that surrounds the idiom. An interesting observation in this respect is that three of these seven occurrences are uttered by L1 *English speakers: the two things should go hand in hand (P209), it kind of all works hand in hand (P340), and it has to get hand in hand (P339). Interestingly, the other four occurrences all include prepositions either immediately before or after hand in hand. Two instances are uttered by an L1 speaker of *Swedish (P97: it goes very much hand in hand with what; could go hand in hand with what), one instance by an L1 speaker of *Arabic (P413: in the national struggle hand in hand with) and one by an L1 speaker of *Maltese (P167: moving practically together hand in hand). Particularly the preposition together might be added by the speaker to emphasize the semantic content and the meaning of being connected expressed by the phrase hand in hand.

6.3.2 Faces and eyes Extremities are not the only parts of the body which are used metaphorically in VOICE. Examples discussed previously like turn a blank eye on you (4.5), came into the public eye (4.35), preserve their face (4.2), it will explode hopefully not in our faces but it will explode (4.24, see also 6.4) and save the face if you wish of the old disciplines (5.16) all refer to eye and face(s) metaphorically to some extent. These concepts, used conjointly also with the embodied concept of rebirth, can also be seen to be in operation in (6.20) and (6.21), which occur in the course of one speech event, but are uttered by two different speakers. (6.20) […] during that era (.) women (.) who b:egan to show their faces to the world? (.) to look at the world through their own eyes (.) and to experience their own potential? (.) were as if REborn. (.) […] turkish women

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characters (.) whether they were in readers or in other textbooks? (.) were depicted (.) as self-confident citizens who took part in a rebirth of a country. (.) […] (PRpan1:15; S4=L1:Turkish, female (P412); voice style) (6.21) […] the JUDGE himself he has this notion OF fairness. of justice WITHIN the context of (.) very small tiny city (.) which is called gaza city. and that was (.) an an EYE opening (.) for me. (.) […] (PRpan1:112; S5=L1:Arabic, female (P413); voice style) Example (6.20) begins with a use of faces that is not metaphorical, since S4 is talking about women discarding forms of clothing, which cover their faces. So here, S4 is literally talking about women’s faces. The subsequent use of eyes might be considered to be somewhere between literal and metaphorical, since the phrase look at the world through their own eyes can be interpreted both literally and figuratively at the same time. Looking at the context, S4 seems to want to convey more than the literal act of looking at something through their own eyes (which is what we all do all the time). S4 here uses the phrase to describe a particular significant event and so it seems that she intends for the expression to have some metaphorical resonance and expressive meaning, in addition to its literal sense. The conceptual pattern of using terms of embodiment and referring to embodied experience then shifts to the concept of rebirth and being reborn, which the speaker first applies to the women talked about (so to human beings who are literally born), and then to the country they live in. By shifting from humans to country, she thus increases metaphoricity by increasing domain incongruity. While both, rebirth and reborn are conventional in the sense that they are codified as metaphors, they would nevertheless seem to have a rather high degree of metaphoricity and stick out from the remaining text. Thus, within the scheme of different types of metaphor proposed in Chapter 2, rebirth and reborn are probably best classified as conventional overt deliberate metaphors. Similar to rebirth and reborn, the speaker in (6.21) makes use of a conventional metaphor, but she does so in an instance of linguistic creativity, since the conventional form is being used with some morphological variation. The codified noun eye-opener, which is a conventional metaphor referring to “an event, experience, etc. that is surprising and shows you something that you did not already know” (OALD9: s.v. eye-opener), is being modified to eye opening. The metaphorical concept inherent in the codified expression once again is rather transparent and remains unaffected by the morphological alternation.

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Another use of eyes that is partly metaphorical can be observed in (6.22), in which a speaker expresses the difficulty of getting the attention of university representatives. (6.22) […] the rectors of the univer- [org1] (.) members they have to sort of (1) try to decide (.) where to put their @@ their eyes (.) an- and e:r (.) to promote that (.) to make the [org1] network something special (.) e:r different from some of the other networks. hh (POwgd325:819; S1=L1:Norwegian, female (P214); voice style) Similar to other examples above, the speaker prefaces her expression where to put their eyes with the hedge and discourse marker sort of and laughs when she talks about the university representatives’ eyes, which would seem to indicate metaphor awareness. In contrast to some of the other examples discussed above, the phrase where to put their eyes seems to be a dynamic metaphor and is not conventionally codified. Yet, in terms of domain incongruity, the university representatives have eyes which they need in order to read emails, so the metaphoricity of the expression in fact is probably lower, i.e. more covert, than the metaphoricity of the rebirth of a country in (6.20). What these examples illustrate is that overtness/covertness of a metaphor, i.e. how much an expression sticks out from the rest because of perceived domain incongruity, does not necessarily correspond with conventionality, i.e. if an expression is codified as a metaphor/idiom or not. Conventional metaphors can be quite overt if the vehicle terms are semantically very remote from the topic of discussion. And some dynamic metaphors can be rather covert, if the vehicle terms used are fairly close to what speakers are talking about literally. The third dimension of deliberateness (i.e. intentional use as a metaphor) versus opaqueness is again another parameter which is best considered independently, since a deliberate metaphor does not necessarily have to be an overt or a dynamic metaphor (although very often it is likely to be at least one of the two). In the case of example (6.22), I would argue that the two indicators of metaphor awareness, namely laughter and the discourse marker sort of, suggest that the metaphor is coined deliberately and dynamically by the ELF speaker, even though it is actually rather covert in terms of domain incongruity.

6.3.3 Head, brain and mind Another group of lexical items denoting body parts that has been present in quite a number of examples discussed so far concerns the word head and also the related

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terms mind and brain. Particularly head occurs rather frequently in expressions such as to my head (4.8), keep in the head (4.9), come to their head (4.10), and comes into your head (4.11), where the word mind is substituted with the embodied term head (see Section 4.1.1.3; cf. Seidlhofer 2009a: 204–205). Additionally, the concept is used in phrases like i remember from the head (4.29) and i don’t know it m- from my head (4.30) (see Section 4.2.2.3) and adapt this sort of head and tails (6.1). As shown in the examples below, two particularly salient patterns that are used several times in VOICE are the phrases in my head in (6.23) to (6.26) and in your head in (6.27) to (6.35). (6.23) erm i think i don’t see it in my head how all the groups er will are doing different things i’m sorry […] (EDwsd242:249; S11=L1: Macedonian (P148), female; plain style; Seidlhofer 2009: 204) (6.24) this is just a sh- little scheme that is now in my my head it’s a co- this conference is about er students and citizens […] (EDwsd499:779; S12=L1:Czech (P596), male; plain style) (6.25) i s- sort couldn’t sort of find anything in my head about that (POmtg403:194+197; S5=L1:Finnish (P500); plain style) (6.26) […] of course i can i have to make the plan plan in my head what do we have what do we want and so on […] (POwgd243:321; S7=L1:Swedish (P97), male; plain style) (6.27) we we thought we thought about this kind of chip | just the pouring everything in your head (EDwsd15:391+393; S18=L1:Bulgarian, female (P115); plain style) (6.28) […] but it’s an old theory i mean the they they made a lot of progress on on how brain works when you have different languages in your head (EDwsd15:472; S16=L1:Macedonian (P148), female; plain style) (6.29) and it’s not matter that we have to put like in machines grammars and whatever but that we’ve got a product who work in business or whatever afterwards it is a matter of of openness and openness of ear and structured in your head (EDwsd306:1460; S2=L1:German (P153), female; plain style) (6.30) you know it’s never that strict but this is an easy way because now you have the concepts clear in your head and now you can try to merge them […] (EDwsd590:171; S1=L1:Dutch (P114), female; plain style)

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(6.31) there’s no place in your head to to remember his face (LEcon229:120; S1=L1:German (P895), female; plain style) (6.32) yeah because it’s like you look at it all the time so somehow you will just put it in your head (LEcon560:1780; S1=L1:Polish (P683), female; plain style) (6.33) but it’d be good if you thought it in your head what would be the minimum that it’s worth all the effort (POmtg444:1095; S5=L1:English (P494), female; plain style) (6.34) put it in your head (POmtg444:1111; S5=L1:English (P494), female; plain style) (6.35) […] i think that i- in in practice er things don’t work that way i mean that you first you you you you brood something in your head and you you have a wonderful er th- er program and then you you you start out to to s- look for a partner things are much more intertwine […] (POwgd243:104; S7=1:Swedish (P97), male; plain style) This list of examples shows that creativity and conventionality are closely linked with a relatively frequent word and concept like head. Some expressions like brood something in your head (6.35) or pouring everything in your head (6.27) clearly have a much higher degree of metaphoricity than others. As we could observe in the previous sections, certain ELF speakers seem to be particularly prone to the use of metaphorical expressions. The sentence i s- sort couldn’t sort of find anything in my head about that (6.25) is uttered by a speaker who is part of the ELF-TIG examined in Section 6.2. Speaker P499, who is the chair person of the meetings involving the same group of speakers on the same day, has a particular tendency of using creative and conventional metaphors to express himself. Example (6.36) shows another instance of metaphorical creativity coined by this speaker. (6.36) […] if quite a lot of central and eastern euro- -pean hh agencies apply and just get a knock on their heads again sent home to do their work somewhere better we we need to get into some kind of proc- proactive process to (POmtg404:208; S1=Danish, male (P499); plain style) In this statement, P499 expresses the idea that agencies from parts of Europe (central and eastern european) sometimes tend to be rejected from participating

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in certain networks and are sent home to do their work. In his phrase get a knock on their heads, P499 uses heads metaphorically, since agencies do not have literal heads, which they could get a knock on. At the same time, the notion of heads is partly metonymical, since the representatives of the agencies are actual people, who do have physical heads. The meaning expressed by P499’s get a knock on their heads is nevertheless metaphorical, since it is clear that no one would be giving agency representatives a knock on their heads literally. An embodied image is evoked in order to convey the notion of rejection or possibly reprimand. There is a considerable degree of domain incongruity involved here, which is not only created by head but also by get a knock on, which makes the phrase an overt deliberate dynamic metaphor. It is not just the concept of head which appears in different conventional and creative metaphorical expressions in ELF, but also the concept of brain that gives rise to linguistic creativity. In (6.37), the metaphoricity of the phrase it’s fresh air in the brain is dependent on both the embodied concept brain and the accompanying concept of (fresh) air. (6.37) don’t forget one point if somebody’s coming from the outside if it’s [org11] outside or whatever | it’s fresh air in the brain we all are in tracks (PBmtg27:1192+1194; S1=German, male (P73); plain style) While the expression seems to be semantically transparent and is likely to be coined in the moment by P73, it is equally possible that the idiom a breath of fresh air influenced the creation of the overt and deliberate metaphor it’s fresh air in the brain. From the point of view of interpreting the speaker’s meaning in situational context, I would argue that whether or not the phrase/metaphor was triggered or influenced by an existing idiom is actually not relevant for his ELF interlocutors. What P73 intends to convey with his metaphor is that hiring new people from the outside can provide intellectual stimulus or innovative potential for a company, since long-term employees (we) are all in tracks, i.e. they tend to repeat existing patterns of thought or behavior. P73’s fresh air in the brain expresses this idea metaphorically. It is also important to point out that with regard to metaphorical creativity multilingual ELF users do not stand in opposition to L1 *English users in ELF situations, who also make use of similar metaphorical images. Example (6.38) is produced by an L1 *English speaker and makes use of similar source domain vocabulary. Example 6.38 (P0wsd372) S12=L1:English, male (P331); voice style (modification: bold print)

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474 S12: and (in) also the member states (1) er sorry i’m having a brain block right now 475 SS: @@@ (1) Similar to P499’s knock on their heads and P73’s fresh air in the brain, P331 seems to create the image of a brain block ad hoc, i.e. as an instance of a dynamic deliberate overt metaphor. In the case of (6.38), this metaphor is immediately followed by laughter (@@@) from other speakers (SS) in utterance 475. The interlocutors seem to appreciate the speaker’s humorous way of expressing that he has lost his ‘train of thought’. How closely linked the concepts head, brain, mind and thought are can be seen below. The phrases used in (6.39) and (6.40) employ the conventional idiom food for thought, which occurs twice in VOICE: (6.39) political statement then this is of course food for thought to fuel the debate (EDwsd464:71; S4=L1:German, male (P276); plain style) (6.40) and then we will look at the transparencies that i have prepared that just show er some some food for thought the things that have arrived er in in your emails […] (POmtg314:165; S1=L1:Polish, female (P179); plain style) While these two instances of food for thought are not creative (in the sense that the idiom is used by ELF speakers in its conventional form and meaning), (6.41) and (6.42) demonstrate that the same metaphorical image also appears in newly coined creative expressions that make use of brain as an embodied concept. (6.41) certainly but his brain had to be feeded you know with with something huh (EDsed251:451; S1=L1:German, male (P464); voice style) The speaker in example (6.41) seems to have in mind the same concept that is essential to the codified idiom food for thought, but he refers to this in a way that clearly provides an instance of linguistic creativity. Once again, this linguistic creativity becomes possible and interpretable through metaphoricity. In (6.42), the metaphorical concept of food for thought or rather of knowledge as food for the brain is also very deliberately made use of by a group of young ELF speakers in a workshop discussion about languages in Europe. In this speech event (EDwsd15), which takes place during a student conference on the future of *English in Europe, four groups of students present previously assigned and

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prepared (hypothetical) future scenarios concerning language use in Europe. One of these groups has been given the scenario of diversity and multilingualism in Europe. The group uses an overt deliberate metaphor, namely that of a European salad bowl, in order to describe this scenario. First the group introduces the metaphor of the European salad bowl and establishes its relation to multilingualism in Europe (see example (7.1) in Chapter 7 for this passage of the speech event). After this short interactive presentation of the group, other speakers and the chair person ask questions to which the group members (S18, S19, S20, S21, and S22) respond. In their responses, they make use of the embodied concept head, as seen in the phrase pouring everything in your head (see Example 76 above), and then make explicit the metaphor that knowledge is food for the brain (u 435) and link this humorously to their main metaphor of the salad bowl. Example 6.42 (EDwsd15) S9=L1:Spanish, male (P116), S18=L1:Bulgarian, female (P115), S19=L1:Slovak, female (P118), S22=L1:Slovenian, female (P151), SX-f=unidentified female speaker; voice style (modification: bold print) 336: S18: the name of our plan is european salad bowl erm […] […] 435 S22: at this point we don’t use our brain we use it only for (.) twenty or thirty per cent (.) there is still a capacity (.) 436 SX-f: @@ 437 S9: (e:r) 438 S19: an- and we also think that knowledge is: er (1) food brain (2) 439 SX-f: hh @ 440 S19: it’s a (1) 441 S9: yeah yeah yeah yeah but 442 S19: so (.) 443 S18: it’s the salad for the brain (.) 444 S9: really 445 S9: @@@ 446 SS: @@@@ @@@ The notion of knowledge being salad for the brain (u 443) is quite deliberately creative and humorous by S18. It triggers laughter from the other speakers (u 446) and is very overtly saturated with co-textual innuendo to the group’s preceding use of the salad metaphor in their presentation (see Chapter 7). While the two expressions by S18 in (6.42) are therefore certainly part of a bigger

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metaphorical pattern in this particular speech event, they are interesting and noteworthy also without the co-text of the preceding discussion – and in relation to examples from other speech events presented in this section. What seems to happen with both brain block, the brain had to be feeded and it’s the salad for the brain is that ontological concepts linked with human embodied experience are metaphorically employed in order to create concrete images. In all three instances, the speakers are talking about abstract processes of human thought. By using brain together with block, feeded, food and salad, they ground this abstract process of thinking in the physical reality of embodied experience and create visual images that express the semantic content of the intended meanings metaphorically. The physical object brain can, theoretically, be blocked or fed, just like in (6.43) where the mind is blown. (6.43) yeah it was mind-blowing they put this kind of things in front of the opera (POmtg439:1413; S8=L1:Rumanian, female (P497); plain style) Looked at in isolation, (6.43) seems uncreative, since the conventional codified metaphorical adjective mind-blowing is inconspicuous in its form – and, so it seems at least, also in its meaning. Taking a look at the preceding context and cotext of this example in (6.44), however, a different picture emerges, since mindblowing in the context of this ELF conversation does not have a positive connotation, but is actually used by the speaker to emphasize her disapproval of a situation. Example 6.44 (POmtg439) S1=L1:Dutch, male (P258), S2=L1:English, female (P494), S3=L1:English, female (P495), S8=L1:Rumanian, female (P497); voice style (modification: bold print) 1408 S8: yeah yeah we’re lucky about the opera because they took out the they (.) the (.) gruene partei {green party} this green people thing they put in front of the opera toilets 1409 S1: o:h 1410 S8: you know this plastic toilets (.) they put like 1411 S3: @@@ 1412 S2: o:h how awful 1413 S8: yeah it was mind-blowing they put this kind of things in front of the opera 1414 S3: in front of the opera? 1415 S2: @@

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1416 S8: and people protested and it was a big thing and now they took them away (.) yesterday actually 1417 S3: all right 1418 S8: but they were there for one month i think 1419 S3: yes (.) how strange (.) 1420 S2: @@@@ @@@ 1421 S8: yes What seems to happen here is that S8 actually (re-)coins the metaphorical image of her mind being blown ad hoc. What happens in this dynamic process is that the now figuratively-compositional adjective mind-blowing is assigned a negative connotation by S8, which it does not have (and maybe never had?) in its conventional *English form. Noticeably, the two interlocutors, who are L1 *English speakers, accept S8 compositional metaphorical use and seem have no trouble to interpret the emphatic, albeit negatively connoted, nature of mindblowing. The speech event POmtg439 has at this point run over an hour and is about to end. It is part of a cluster of speech events involving the same people. The L1 *English speakers seem to be an integral part of this ELF-TIG, which involves not only the speakers from Belgium and Rumania (S1 and S8) featured in (6.44), but also multilingual ELF speakers from Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Lithuania and Slovakia.

6.3.4 What lies at heart: A case study of metaphorical creativity The previous sections have illustrated how the metaphorical use of terms denoting body parts leads to all kinds of linguistic and metaphorical creativity in ELF and that the boundaries of creative and conventional use are far from clear in this respect. By means of illustration, the final section of this chapter will focus on one particular lexical item as a case study of metaphorical creativity in ELF. The embodied term heart occurs a total of 14 times in VOICE. Taking a close look at these occurrences, we find a whole range of creative and conventional uses. All of these make more or less overt or covert metaphorical use of the word heart. Example (6.45) contains the only occurrence of heart in VOICE in which the word is used more or less literally. (6.45) we had great success at [org31] with sort of necklaces | with something here | like er flower or heart or something so i was thinking maybe with some er (PBmtg463:713; S2=L1: Serbian, female (P524); plain style)

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Although not referring to the heart of an actual person, here the speaker refers to a concrete physical object, i.e. a heart(-shaped) piece of jewelry, using the lexical item heart. This is in contrast to all the other examples below where no physical referent of heart can be identified. In many examples, ELF speakers rely on the meaning of heart as the core of the human body and map this notion of heart as the center of something on another topic of conversation, thereby creating a metaphor. Yet, the resulting ELF uses involve a range of different conventional – and less conventional – wordings. Starting with some of the more conventional wordings, we find three occurrences in examples (6.46), (6.47) and (6.48), with the last two being uttered by the same speaker in the same speech event. (6.46) […] now the at heart of this difficult relationship between islam and modernity (.) lies the question of women’s rights. […] (PRpan1:8; L1: Persian, English, female (P411); plain style) (6.47) but I think it is much better to talk about this in some detail because this this issue objectives and backgrounds seems to me at the very heart of the whole thing curriculum structure and content will follow from this mobility will follow from this er language policy of course […] (POwgd243:290; S1=L1:German, male (P176); plain style) (6.48) […] so far the joint master courses and other european master courses have been on the fringes of departments they were not at the heart of departmental activities and if these things are not to remain worn off things but are to become mainstream activities you need a different sort of approach (POwgd243:337; S1=L1:German, male (P176); plain style) All of these examples are fairly similar since they make use of heart in its conventional codified metaphorical meaning of being the center or “the most important part of something” (OALD9: s.v. heart). In addition, in terms of formal similarity, all three occurrences involve the preposition at which is combined with heart either directly (at heart) or with a definite article (at the heart of, at the very heart of). Syntactically, example (6.46) introduces the concept at heart of at the beginning of a clause that is uttered in the middle of a long statement by the speaker in a panel discussion (PRpan1). In contrast, (6.47) and (6.48) both feature at the (very) heart of + obj. at the end of a sentence in a rather interactive working group discussion. All three instances provide a genitive that links heart to the topic of discussion: this difficult relationship between islam and modernity, the whole thing and

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departmental activities. Although all three expressions are relatively conventional uses of the conventional metaphor heart, I would argue that there is a certain degree of domain incongruity between heart and these topics through which some metaphorical resonance is retained in these three expression (see Chapter 2). It is this conventional metaphorical meaning which also seems to be referred to in (6.49) below. In the context of this working group discussion, the ELF speaker tries to make a point about what is important and central for him concerning the tasks that lie ahead of the group. Example 6.49 – The whole heart (POwgd325) S13=L1: German, female (P19), S14=L1:Finnish, male (P178); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 2795 S14: not only that it’s also for example (.) timi- timing of things (.) hh how do we what questions need to be asked and WHEN? hh WHO answers these questions 2796 SX-f: yah 2797 S13: setting priorities = 2798 S14: = exactly this sort of the whole heart this this sort of you know setting up teams of academics and students and blah blah blah hh what kinds of meetings should be held hh (.) 2799 SS: mhm 2800 SX-f: mhm hm 2801 SX-f: yah 2802 SX-f: mhm 2803 SX-f: mhm Having enumerated a couple of questions which S14 thinks need to be considered (u 2795), S13 supplies setting priorities to which S14 immediately reacts with exactly and apparently searching for an appropriate expression to emphasize S13’s suggestion. The expression which S14 comes up with is the whole heart, which here, notably, is used without genitive and preposition, but is combined with an emphatic adjective (whole). Summarizing his own previous enumeration and emphasizing S13’s suggestion of setting priorities, the expression the whole heart used as an interjection in this utterance is overtly metaphorical, in spite of its relation to the conventional meaning of the heart as the center of something. Like with many other examples before, the metaphor co-occurs with the discourse marker sort of, which the speakers seems to repeat while searching for a fitting formulation, but which at the same time suggests awareness of metaphoricity and non-literal use.

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The most frequent collocational pattern that is found with heart in VOICE is the phrase by heart, which makes up more than half of the occurrences, i.e. 8 out of 14. Yet, it would be much too hasty to assume that all these uses of by heart are simply instances of the conventional idiom. Although we do find conventional idiom uses of know/knew/learn by heart in examples (6.50) to (6.53), there is more to this expression than conventional use. (6.50) […] there were a lot of of information that we knew and we knew by heart and we could actually do each other’s presentations […] (POmtg404:881; S4=L1:Danish, female (P503); plain style) (6.51) […] as we usually treat q and as ready-to-go answers. okay you never learn by heart this answers […] (PBmtg269:959; S3=L1:Polish, female (P541); plain style) (6.52) […] on tuesday i cannot be here on the morning and on wednesday i don’t know | so i don- don’t know by heart of course the timetable | i sha- i have to ask (POmtg542:351+353+356; S2=L1:Hungarian, male (P505); plain style) (6.53) actually you you have to learn them by heart (LEcon562:906; S8= L1:Serbian, female (P168); plain style) All four instances in these examples are conventional uses of the codified idiom by heart, which seem to be understood by the other speakers in the specific contexts in which they are being used – or at least there is no explicit evidence in the transcripts that they are not being understood. Yet, this is not necessarily always the case, as (6.54) illustrates. Here, the same idiom learn sth by heart is used according to L1 *English conventions, which actually triggers an indication of non-understanding (cf. e.g. Pitzl 2005, 2010; Cogo & Dewey 2012) on the part of S2. Example 6.54 – Learn by heart (non-understanding) (LEcon560) S1=L1:Polish, female (P683), S2=L1:Spanish, Catalan, female (P684), S5=L1: Dutch, male (P687); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 2011 SX-2: i had one year 2012 S5: an- an- and four years of like (.) old greek 2013 S1: i was like (.) and the funniest thing was we had to learn (.) poems by heart (1) in my class (.) 2014 S2: what? (.) 2015 S1: er poems by heart it’s memorize

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2016 2017 2018 2019

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S2: S5: S2: S1:

2020 S2: 2021 S5: 2022 S2:

x yah? nein? {no} poems yah (.) and NOW i remember the poems but i don’t remember what they mea:n how cruel a:h @@ how cruel they are they m:ake you learn poems how cruel they are (1)

Although the non-understanding is cleared up immediately through the paraphrase memorize (u 2015), the example illustrates that conventional use of existing L1 *English expressions may not be effective at all times in ELF interactions. Nevertheless, this is also not to say that speakers should refrain from using them. The short negotiation sequence illustrates that the unfamiliarity with the idiom is quickly resolved by the speakers and causes no severe disruptions in the interaction. The story of the collocation by heart in VOICE does not end here, however, but also includes two instances in which the phrase is invested with a meaning that is different from the conventional and codified meaning of “using only your memory” (OALD9: s.v. by heart). The first of these two occurrences is represented in (6.55) below. In the course of a working group discussion, that is part of a larger cluster of speech events in an ELF-TIG, S9 talks about making a list of all subjects that are already part of existing curricula at universities and could thus be used for designing joint degrees and establishing collaborations at a European level. Example 6.55 – Invent it by heart (POwgd325) S1=L1: Norwegian, female (P214), S9=L1:Slovenian, male (P252); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 847 S9: also at the (.) at the bachelor level. and (.) you know i jus:t u- underlined some of them (.) environmental protection which deals with (.) traffic (.) drinking water (.) and (.) and (.) all this kind of thing. consumer protection (.) urban studies (.) language teaching (.) social studies (.) comparative studies (.) planning (.) 848 S1: hm hm 849 S9: e:r and (.) th- there could be plenty of (.) of those. but (.) e:r (.) you know e:r (.) er i should think that we we could (.) d:o it (.) really from the bottom-up level (.) you know (.) we cannot invent it by (.) 850 S1: hm (.) hm 851 S9: by heart.

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852 S1: yeah 853 SX-f: yeah 854 S1: that’s right (.) yes […] After having listed a number of different subjects, S9 adds a personal comment by saying that he thinks that we could do it really from the bottom-up level you know and goes on to say we cannot invent it by (.) by heart. This use of by heart, albeit being identical in form, departs from the conventional meaning of doing something ‘from memory’ that was intended by speakers in the examples above. In (655), the L1 *Norwegian ELF speaker clearly means something else. Yet, there is also a certain degree of similarity. What seems to be shared by both the conventional use of learn/know by heart and S9’s creative invent by heart is the idea of being able to do something on your own, i.e. without any aid. This is what the conventional idiom expresses with regard to memory and this is what S9 seems to convey with his expression, namely to make use of existing structures instead of trying to invent a joint degree program by heart, that is, without using existing infrastructure. The last occurrence of by heart in VOICE is the most explicitly creative and compositional one, since its meaning is considerably different from the conventional idiom. Example 6.56 – By heart against (POwsd372) S4=L1: Maltese, male (P323), S5=L1:Norwegian, male (P324); voice style (modification: bold print) 782 S5: er about quotas in the the boards er in norway a law was passed er some years ago er giving the enterprises a deadline (.) within this year i think it’s two thousand and seven (.) erm the relationship men and women er in all enterprise boards sh- should be forty to sixty. (1) er that allows some flexibility there could be one guy more or one f- f- e::r woman more (.) 783 SX-f: hm 784 S4: yeah a woman (more) 785 S5: er but still er and er i’m (.) er erm er by heart er aGAINST quotas e:r but er at the same time (.) 786 SX-f: mhm 787 SX-m: mhm 788 S5: er if we er would never er FORCE a change as you said (.) it would take what three thousand years {someone coughs} until er we had as many women as er men in the boards so (.) […]

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Example (6.56) occurs shortly after a stretch of interaction in which another speaker utters the expression knife with double blade also in relation to the topic of establishing fixed quota for employing women (see Chapter 7, cf. also Pitzl 2016b: 303–304). S5 contributes to the discussion of this topic and wants to add his personal opinion after having presented a more factual account of the situation in Norway. In order to express his position, S5 says i’m er erm er by heart aGAINST quotas. The considerable amount of hesitation that precedes the expression by heart suggests that S5 takes some time to ponder what to say in order to express his position. The expression by heart thus seems to be coined as an overt deliberate dynamic metaphor that is compositional in the sense that it seems to make much more use of the semantic properties of by and heart than the other occurrences. What heart as a metaphorical concept seems to express in (6.56) is S5’s strong personal conviction AGAINST quotas. The speaker is not simply against quotas, but by heart against quotas, which emphasizes his personal view and gives the content of his utterance a more expressive and emotional contour. So although, formally, by heart and by heart look identical, in terms of semantic content, compositionality, metaphoricity and creativity, the examples discussed cover a wide spectrum. Turning to the last of the 14 occurrence of heart in VOICE brings us back to the realm of embodied experience and overt deliberate metaphors that have no formal resemblance to existing idioms. Example 6.57 – My heart attack was visible (PBmtg27) S1=L1:German, male (P73), S3=L1: German, male (P74), S5=L1:Spanish, male (P76), S7=L1:German, female (P78); voice style (modification: bold print) 708 S1: he was FEARING yesterday [S7] and me we have to talk a little bit hh and then i by the way there are rumours you will hire [first name45] (.) 709 S5: a:h yeah yeah that’s right there’s a rumour going yeah 710 S3: yeah these rumours are in yeah (.) 711 S1: e:r (.) 712 S5: i know 713 S1: my heart attack was visible @ 714 S7: @@ @@@@@ = 715 S1: = hey what do you think from me i mean @@ i’m a bastard in lot i’m a bastard in lot of things but er hey (.) ready [first name45] we don’t need 716 S3: these rumours are are ticking yeah 717 S1: yeah forget it (.)

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Although P73 is certainly not the first speaker to ever employ the image of a heart attack in order to express shock and indignation about something, his wording my heart attack was visible makes for a more humorous effect than a more conventional ‘I almost had a heart attack’ would have. It seems that S1 deliberately uses the expression to express and emphasize how shocked he was to hear about the rumours about the new person he supposedly was hiring. By saying my heart attack was visible, S1 relates the physical sensation of having a heart attack, which is overtly metaphorical, not only to himself (being the one who experiences the heart attack) but also to his interlocutor at the time, who could see how shocked he was since his heart attack was visible.

6.4 Summary This chapter has explored dimensions of metaphorical creativity in ELF by means of analyzing a range of examples that are found in VOICE. Starting with instances that expand and elaborate metaphorical images, the analysis in this chapter has gone beyond the traditional dichotomous distinction of idiom vs. metaphor and has put the focus on the exploitation of metaphor as a shared resource in ELF, drawing attention to potential links with conventional idioms only when these seemed particularly salient. The focus of analysis in this chapter has thus moved away from creative idioms as expressions with metaphoric potential (as discussed in Chapter 4) towards different types of metaphors that may be more or less closely related to conventional idioms. The analysis in this chapter started by examining instances of metaphor that make use of concrete images like physical objects (e.g. locking the wheels) and embodied concepts (e.g. head and tails). Continuing on the theme of concrete imagery, the chapter has then explored metaphorical patterns that may emerge in interactions within Transient International Groups (TIGs) of ELF speakers. Making use of Cameron’s (1999b: 16) notion of “local systematicity” of metaphors and choice of vehicle terms, the examples discussed have shown that such local systematicity may eventually develop into what we might call regional systematicity of metaphors in some ELF-TIGs. The final sections of this chapter have then focused on some instances of metaphorical expressions in VOICE that utilize vehicle terms from the domain of embodiment, one of the – if not the – most basic domain of human experience shared by all people across the globe regardless of their linguistic and regiocultural backgrounds. Different realizations of metaphorcial creativity that make use of terms and concepts like feet, toes, shoulders, hands, faces, eyes, head, brain, mind and finally heart were analyzed. Applying the theoretical framework

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of parameters for determining metaphoricity developed in Chapter 2, the analysis examined how expressions in VOICE differ not just with regard to linguistic creativity, but also in their degree of metaphoricity. Finally, a case study of the term heart mapped out the range of metaphorical creativity in ELF. The different uses of heart in VOICE included one more or less literal use (necklaces with something like er flower or heart) and several conventional metaphorical uses of heart in expressions with different degrees of conventionality or creativity in form (at heart of, at the very heart of, at the heart of vs. the whole heart). Additionally, the expression by heart was used a number of times with different degrees of conventionality and creativity. Four conventional occurrences of the idiom by heart appeared to be immediately understood by ELF interlocutors, while one conventional occurrence triggered a short negotiation sequence. In addition, the expression by heart was re-coined and invested with a different metaphorical meaning in two instances (we cannot invent it by heart, i’m by heart against quotas) and the notion of heart attack was used in an overt deliberate dynamic metaphor (my heart attack was visible). This chapter has shown how complex and multifaceted the use of metaphors in ELF is and has explored dimensions of metaphorical creativity, i.e. linguistic creativity that becomes possible through metaphor. While metaphor as a phenomenon is certainly complex and multifaceted also in L1 interaction, the chapter has illustrated that it deserves a special place in a descriptive framework for spoken ELF. Metaphor is a universal (psycho)linguistic mechanism and hence a (psycho)linguistic and pragmatic resource that is shared by all ELF speakers, irrespective of their L1 and regio-cultural backgrounds. The capability of metaphor encoding and decoding, of metaphor production, metaphor processing and metaphor interpretation unites ELF speakers across language boundaries and gives rise to a considerable range of linguistic creativity and variation that tends to be effective and intelligible in spite of its novelty.

7 The multilingual dimension of metaphorical creativity Although in the early years of ELF research only relatively few studies were concerned with the use of ‘other languages’ in ELF settings (e.g. Pölzl 2003; Pölzl & Seidlhofer 2006), the multilingual dimension has been part of ELF research for quite some time. For many years, ELF has been seen as a “partner language” that is “only one of several components of the multilingual repertoire of speakers [. . .] [and] often combines with other languages as appropriate to the intercultural communicative situation” (Hülmbauer, Böhringer & Seidlhofer 2008: 29). Early ELF studies tended to examine more established sociolinguistic phenomena such as code-switching (e.g. Klimpfinger 2007, 2009) or the effectiveness of cognates as “true friends” in ELF interactions (Hülmbauer 2009: 341). More recent ELF publications like Cogo’s (2012, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c) focus on multilingual practices and build on and extend translanguaging research (e.g. García & Li Wei 2014). In this way, multilingualism and multilingual practices have become more central and foregrounded and studies focusing on ELF speakers’ multilingual resources have multiplied (e.g. Klötzl 2014; Pietikäinen 2014; Pitzl 2016a, 2018b; Franceschi 2017). Commenting on the relationship between ELF and multilingualism, Jenkins (2015: 57) proposes that “the need for further retheorisation” of ELF in light of multilingualism might well constitute a central third phase in ELF research. As was discussed in Chapter 1, Jenkins argues that this should involve, among other things, “a rethink of the terms/notions of ‘multilingual repertoires’, ‘shared repertoires’, and ‘multilingual resources’” (Jenkins 2015: 76) and “an alternative to CoPs that is able to characterize transient, ad hoc, and even fleeting ELF groupings” (Jenkins 2015: 76). Concerning the second point, I have proposed a first outline of the notion of Transient International Groups (TIGs) in Chapter 1 (see also Pitzl 2016b, 2018b) and explored this notion further in relation to patterns of metaphorical creativity in Chapter 6. In this chapter, we turn specifically to the multilingual dimension of idioms and metaphorical creativity in ELF interactions and elaborate on the idea of ELF-TIGs in relation to language contact. Before giving an overview of the chapter, I would like to start with an illustration of what young ELF speakers themselves have to say on the subject of multilingualism. The following passage was recorded during a European https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-008

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student conference in 2004. Having been asked to present the outcomes of a group work on the fictional scenario of what multilingualism in Europe might mean in twenty years, the young ELF speakers in 2004 use the metaphor of the european salad bowl to illustrate the advantages of linguistic diversity in a multilingual Europe. The utopian and fictional character of their future scenario in which all europeans will be speaking all european languages (u 336) is obvious when reading through the passage. Yet, the image of the salad bowl allows the speakers to convey the value and importance of each taste (u 336, u 356) and contribution (i.e. different languages and regio-cultures), with multilingualism being the oil (u 354, u 356) that is essential in bringing the different ingredients together. Example 7.1 – Multilingualism and the European salad bowl (EDwsd15) S1=L1:Dutch, female (P114), S9=L1:Spanish, male (P116), S18=L1:Bulgarian, female (P115), S19=L1:Slovak, female (P118), S22=L1:Slovenian, female (P151), SX-f=unidentified female speaker; voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 336 S18: the name of our plan is european salad bowl (1) erm (2) and er we’re going to present it in a form of a conference of the european ministers of culture? because (.) we do believe that in two two thous- er twenty-one or four there will still be national states and there still will be er ministers? of er: (.) different countries? not (.) er common cultural policy? (1) and er why we chose to do this is because (.) that er:m (1) we believe that in this year all europeans will be speaking all european languages (.) so. at this conferences we will be able to understand each other in our national languages and tha- that’s what we consider multilinguism {multilingualism} of all europeans? (1) and er the thing about diversity is that erm (.) it’s no point of being DIverse if you stay isolated and er just don’t know what the others are doing and that’s why we believe that er the thing about diversity is intercultural exchange (.) hh and (.) now er every member er every minister of every country is going to say what is er his or er what is her contributi- what is her country’s contribution to the european salad bowl in which everything is mix- everything is mixed in this salad but still every piece has its own taste (.) okay? (.) so (.) first (.) i give the floor (.) to er (.) slovakia (.) to (.) er put the tomatoes 337 S26: @ (7) {S19 prepares for her speech (7)} 338 S19: dobry den {good day}

7 The multilingual dimension of metaphorical creativity

339 SS: 340 S18: 341 S20: 342 SX-f: 343 SS: 344 S18: 345 S21: 346 SS: 347 S18: 348 S22: 349 SS: 350 S22: 351 SS: 352 S18:

353 354 355 356

SS: S18: SS: S18:

357 SS: 358 S1:

191

(gap 00:00:20) {non-e; S19 talks slovak}

and (.) NOW i give the floor to POland to introduce its cuisine (.) it’s me. (1) as cucumber. (.) great. (3) xxx xxxxxxxxx

@@ (gap 00:00:22) {non-e; S20 talks polish}

and now we have switzerland and education (6) {S21 prepares for her presentation (6)} bonjour {good day} (gap 00:00:21) {non-e; S21 talks french} @@@ and now slovenia will present the parsley which is SPECIAL (3) so the slovenian contribution to the european salad i’m parsley (1) @@@@ xxx xxxxx er (gap 00:00:18) {non-e; S22 talks slovenian}

and finally bulgaria will give its contribution which is (.) customs (3) xxxx (gap 00:00:27) {non-e; S18 talks bulgarian}

and (.) er (.) what just er mix the whole salad is er the OIL @@@ (.) which is in fact multilinguism because we are able to understand each other and yet this oil doesn’t spoil the taste of each er x- er of each vegetable (1)

are there any questions?

In addition to making use of an extensive metaphorical analogy to express the idea that multilingualism and linguistic diversity are valuable for Europe, the ELF speakers make very deliberate use of their L1s and consciously engage in multilingual practices to illustrate their point. Although longer contributions in *languages other than *English are not transcribed in full in VOICE, the extent to which speakers use them is indicated in the transcript via gaps and comments, as can be seen in example (7.1) (see Pitzl 2016a for a more detailed discussion of this transcription practice).

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I have included this example of intentional metaphorical creativity to set the scene for the present chapter, which looks at the multilingual dimension of idioms and metaphors in spoken ELF. Although the ELF speakers in (7.1) do not make use of idioms, they clearly play with the metaphor of the european salad bowl and liken different European countries (slovakia; poland; slovenia) to different ingredients of a salad (tomatoes; cucumber; parsley). Multilingualism becomes the oil that is necessary for mixing the salad but doesn’t spoil the taste of each vegetable. In doing so, they do not only make extensive use of the european salad bowl as an overt deliberate metaphor (see Chapter 2), but they also draw on their individual multilingual repertoires for illustration. The different languages in this passage are in all likelihood not intended to be understood by the entire audience, which is comprised of about thirty ELF speakers from all across Europe. Rather, the switches to other *languages seem to serve as symbolic representations of multilingualism in Europe in this passage. Looking at the multilingual dimension of idioms and metaphorical creativity in ELF in this chapter, Section 7.1 will begin by revisiting the notion of multilingual repertoires/resources and introducing the basic conceptual distinction between individual multilingual repertoire (IMR) and shared multilingual resources pool (MRP). In Section 7.2, these concepts will be applied to the topic of idioms and metaphors, proposing the relevance of a multilingual idiom and a multilingual metaphor resource pool for ELF interactions. This idea will be explored with examples from VOICE that illustrate how idioms and images can be shared between *English and other *languages (Section 7.2.1) as well as how idioms and images can be borrowed from other *languages into ELF, without having corresponding expressions in *English (Section 7.2.2). Section 7.3 will examine examples where ELF speakers display awareness of multilingualism or their multilingual identities in relation to metaphorical creativity. Finally, Section 7.4 will present some examples where idioms are rendered as code-switched elements in their original *languages. These can be used by ELF speakers to display affiliation with their own L1 (and/or regio-culture), but can also serve to display an ELF speaker’s closeness with other regio-cultures and/or *languages.

7.1 Individual multilingual repertoires and multilingual resource pools in ELF interactions Building on Hülmbauer’s (2009: 339) notion of a “shared situational resource pool”, this section introduces a basic conceptual distinction between the

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individual multilingual repertoire (IMR) of a single ELF speaker and the shared multilingual resource pool (MRP) of a group of ELF speakers (as first introduced in Pitzl 2016b). In her work on ELF and multilingualism, Hülmbauer (e.g. 2009, 2011b, 2013, 2016) examines how cross-linguistic similarities between ELF speakers’ L1s may be drawn on in order to enhance ELF communication in some situations. Among other aspects, Hülmbauer describes how ELF speakers make use of cognates like Greek chartis, Italian carta and German Karte as “true friends” (Hülmbauer 2009: 341) in ELF interactions, thus achieving shared understanding of a term through cross-linguistic similarities in *languages other than *English. With her term “true friends”, Hülmbauer alludes to the concept of ‘false friends’ in (E)LT. In doing so, she alerts us to the fact that drawing on one’s L1 is not necessarily negative. Clearly, the potential for such processes to occur is characteristic of language contact situations in a lingua franca setting, with ELF interactions being a particularly widespread kind of language contact.

7.1.1 Language contact via ELF With regard to conceptualizing language contact in ELF contexts, Mauranen (2012: 28–30) introduces the notion of “similects” and “second-order language contact” to describe the characteristics of language contact in ELF situations. Having outlined the sociolinguistic complexity of ELF as being embedded in multilingual environments (Mauranen 2012: 29), she proposes the following: Second-order contact means that instead of a typical contact situation where speakers of two different languages use one of them in communication (‘first-order contact’), a large number of languages are each in contact with English [in ELF situations], and it is these contact varieties (similects) that are, in turn, in contact with each other. Their special features, resulting from cross-linguistic transfer, come together much like dialects in contact. To add complexity to the mix, ENL speakers of different origins participate in ELF communities. The distinctive feature of ELF is nevertheless its character as a hybrid of similects. (Mauranen 2012: 30)

This notion of second-order language contact captures part of the complexity that is characteristic for language contact in ELF interactions. But although Mauranen (2012: 29) points out that ELF settings and their wider environments are typically multilingual, the central notion of similect seems to be somewhat *English-focused, since “the hybrid similects that come together in ELF are related through being kinds of English” (Mauranen 2012: 30, emphasis mine).

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Mauranen’s conceptualization of ELF as second-order language contact is certainly useful in prompting us to further examine the complex factors of language contact in ELF situations. Yet, I would argue that we need to push the argument concerning the complexity of language contact via ELF even further. ELF interactions do not just bring into contact different “kinds of English” (Mauranen 2012: 30) as “similects, i.e. the lects that arise from speakers with a shared first-language background” (Mauranen 2012: 248). ELF interactions always bring into contact different ELF speakers’ entire individual multilingual repertoires, not just their individual similect *Englishes.1 Conceiving of the linguistic – and hence multilingual – resources that are in contact, and thus available to a group of ELF speakers in a particular ELF interaction involves a number of challenges. Proposing ways of addressing these challenges is likely to be part of ELF research in the years to come. In the following, I will briefly expand an initial conceptualization of ELF as a site of transient language contact (first proposed in Pitzl 2016b).

7.1.2 ELF as transient language contact: IMR and MRP Figure 7.1 below provides a very simple schematic representation of a hypothetical ELF interaction that brings into contact three ELF speakers with different L1 backgrounds. In the diagram, each ELF speaker’s individual multilingual repertoire (IMR) is represented by a circle. Crucially, each speaker circle represents “all the linguistic resources a person has at their disposal” (Pitzl 2016b: 298), not just their *English. When ELF speakers interact, it is not only their similects that

IMR (S1) IMR (S2) IMR (S3)

Figure 7.1: Multilingual Resource Pool (MRP) (adapted from Pitzl 2016b): Three speakers (S1, S2, S3) in hypothetical ELF context.

1 See also the ALAAT (i.e. all language at all times) principle discussed, for example, in Hülmbauer (2011a: 60–61, 2011b: 154–155) and Hülmbauer and Seidlhofer (2013: 400).

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are in contact; it is the speakers’ entire individual multilingual repertoires (IMRs), which contain all languages/varieties, dialects and registers and all the links and connections between them. It would go beyond the scope of this chapter (and this book) to theorize the cognitive and psycholinguistic dimension of speakers’ individual multilingual repertoires more extensively (but see, for example, Hülmbauer 2011a, 2013; Seidlhofer 2011; Jenkins 2015; Li Wei 2016; Schaller-Schwaner 2017: 9–50). The main purpose of referring to speakers’ individual multilingual repertoires (IMRs) here is to emphasize the importance of a holistic conceptualization – and thus also a holistic representation – of each ELF speaker’s linguistic resources. Taking such a holistic view, we can move from an individual speaker’s IMR to the social dimension of what happens when ELF groups interact and thereby bring their IMRs into contact. Building on Hülmbauer’s (2009) concept of situational resource pool, the three circles in Figure 7.1 together make up a schematic (shared) multilingual resource pool (MRP) in a hypothetical ELF situation in which three ELF speakers with different L1 backgrounds interact. When we visualize a transient language contact situation via ELF in this way, it becomes clear that ELF speaker’s IMRs are likely to overlap in some aspects (i.e. contain similar multilingual resources) as well as be distinct from each other in other aspects, i.e. contain multilingual resources that are different from those of other speakers.2 For any given ELF context, we can in this way think about ELF speakers’ IMRs making up a multilingual resource pool (MRP) in which multilingual resources are ‘shared’ by speakers. Crucially, the word shared has three distinct meanings in relation to this MRP (see also Pitzl 2018b): 1. what is shared by ELF speakers to begin with; 2. what can be shared by an ELF speaker with the other speakers; 3. what becomes shared by a group of ELF speakers over time. The first of these meanings refers to shared as ‘passive’ and is intended to describe the initial state of overlap between speakers’ IMRs in the MRP, i.e. the overlapping areas in the center of Figure 7.1. These are the multilingual resources that ELF speakers forming a TIG share to begin with, i.e. when they first meet. As

2 The visualization of speakers‘ IMRs as circles has obvious limitations, especially if the number of ELF speakers whose IMRs need to be represented in a diagram for an ELF interaction increases. The diagrams included in this chapter are first attempts to make visible some of the situational and sociolinguistic differences across ELF contexts in order to explore the multilingual dimension of metaphorical creativity.

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depicted schematically in Figure 7.1, there will be multilingual resources that are shared by all speakers participating in an interaction (i.e. the sort-of triangle in the middle) and multilingual resources shared only by some speakers (i.e. the overlapping areas between S1 and S2, between S2 and S3, and between S3 and S1). These resources contain part of speakers’ *English repertoires as well as ‘bits and pieces’ of other *languages in their IMRs. It is important to note that even though the middle area shared by all speakers will certainly contain *English linguistic resources in an ELF context, it will never contain an ELF speaker’s entire *English repertoire. For a number of reasons, individual ELF speakers’ *Englishes (including L1 *English ELF speakers’ *Englishes) will never fully overlap. For one, speakers are likely to have different similects (to use Mauranen’s term) as well as different degrees of traditional proficiency/competence in *English (e.g. according to CEFR scales and descriptors). Secondly, ELF speakers’ *Englishes will have been influenced and shaped by different *English *varieties and/or dialects throughout their biographies (cf. e.g. Kohn 2011: 78–83 and what he refers to as the My English condition). Their lives are likely to have included a range of learning situations both inside and outside institutional contexts. In institutional learning contexts, different *varieties might have been encountered as learning ‘targets’. In situations outside language classrooms, people are likely to have been/be in contact with different *Englishes (e.g. through time spent in international settings, personal or professional contacts, reception of media, music, entertainment etc.). Thirdly, depending on the context, ELF speakers participating in an interaction might be more or less familiar with specialized lexis relevant to a particular profession or topic, including content-related abbreviations and acronyms. Thus, their IMRs may overlap more or less extensively concerning the LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) aspect relevant to a particular context. The extent to which multilingual resources in *languages other than *English are shared by (some) speakers when an ELF-TIG first forms will also depend on a number of factors. The two most obvious aspects that determine the extent of initial ‘sharedness’ in the center of an MRP (see Figure 7.1) are the constellation of speaker’s L1 backgrounds and the size of the group. In many situations, these two aspects will (more or less) coincide, in that the number of L1s brought into contact in an ELF interaction is likely to increase as the number of interactants increases (see, for example, the situation in example 7.1 above). Yet, these two factors (L1s and group size) do not necessarily correlate. A small group of ELF speakers can be rather diverse (e.g. five speakers with five different L1 backgrounds). In contrast to

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this, also a larger group of ELF speakers may be what I have elsewhere referred to as “bilateral” (Pitzl 2016a: 25, 2018b), i.e. it may bring into contact two groups of speakers with two different L1 backgrounds (see Figures 7.4 and 7.5 in Section 7.2). A third factor influencing the extent of initial sharedness of an MRP is the interacting ELF speakers’ (shared) knowledge of (‘bits and pieces’ of) other *languages, i.e. the speakers’ multilingual repertoires in addition to their *Englishes and L1s. Among other things, these ‘bits and pieces’ might be influenced by the “habitat factor” (Pölzl & Seidlhofer 2006). If ELF interactants have been living in the same non-*English speaking environment for some time, they are likely to share knowledge of at least some local lexis such as place names. I am aware that this account of what is shared in a MRP initially, i.e. when a group of ELF speakers first meets (see Figure 7.1.), appears to separate *English, speakers’ L1s and other *languages to a certain extent. For the purpose of discussing and describing the potential facets of speakers’ IMRs and how these might shape the initial MRP of a group, such a seeming separation appears unavoidable. Nevertheless, I do not wish to suggest that these different factors are in fact separate in ELF speakers’ IMRs. As has been emphasized above, the opposite holds true: The conceptual position taken and visualized in the diagrams is that speakers‘ IMRs (and thus also the shared situational MRPs) are holistic and that the *languages/*varieties/*dialects contained in them are interlinked and do not have clear boundaries between them. Turning to the second meaning of shared in relation to the MRP refers to sharing as a speaker activity, whereby an ELF speaker draws on and makes use of linguistic resources that are part of her/his IMR – but not (yet) part of (some of) the other ELF speakers’ IMRs. A visual representation of this second meaning is attempted in Figure 7.2, in which speakers S1 and S3 are depicted as sharing linguistic resources from their IMRs with the other speakers. As will be illustrated in the next sections, such instances of ELF speakers sharing linguistic resources from their IMRs with other ELF speakers can

IMR (S1) IMR (S2) IMR (S3)

Figure 7.2: Multilingual Resource Pool (MRP): Speakers S1 and S3 actively share linguistic resources.

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happen in a range of different ways in an interaction. Active sharing may happen, for example, through flagged (or implied) multilingual relevance of expressions, through explicit metalinguistic comments that indicate speaker’s intention of sharing multilingual elements or through code-switching to a speaker’s L1 or other *language (LN) (see Section 7.4). Yet, sharing will also often take place by means of unconscious cross-linguistic transfer that is largely invisible and might go unnoticed by everyone involved (see Section 7.2 for a more detailed account). The third meaning of shared in relation to the MRP in ELF contexts arises as a consequence of the second type of sharing and is represented in Figure 7.3.

IMR (S1) IMR (S2) IMR (S3)

Figure 7.3: ‘What becomes shared’: Gradual expansion of overlap of IMRs in MRP.

Instances of intentional or unconscious sharing of linguistic resources of an individual speaker with the other ELF speakers (i.e. the second kind of sharing as illustrated in Figure 7.2) lead to a gradual expansion of the central part of the MRP that is – or rather becomes– shared by ELF speakers in Figure 7.3. At the same time, there is also a corresponding expansion of each speaker’s IMR (as shown by the arrows in the white circles). The expansion of what becomes shared by a group of ELF speakers in the central area of their MRP takes place continuously and will last as long as the same group of speakers communicate and interact with each other. The extent of expansion is therefore, among other things, dependent on the longevity vs. ephemeral nature of an ELF-TIG. The process of expansion might be as short as the duration of a single (short) speech event if these ELF speakers only communicate on one particular occasion. Yet, it might be as long as a number of months (or even years), if the same ELF speakers repeatedly interact with each other. In case of a more long-term (professional or private) language contact situation via ELF the group might eventually become an ELF-CoP as described by Ehrenreich (2009, 2018), Smit (2010), Kalocsai (2014) and others (see Chapter 1). Exploring the multilingual dimension of idioms and metaphorical creativity in ELF, the focus in this chapter will be on instances of sharing – and

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thus on the process of becoming shared – of expressions that have multilingual relevance, i.e. that draw on or relate to *languages other than *English. Nevertheless, it needs to be emphasized that the same kind of sharing also happens intra-lingually, for example, when speakers share an (existing or invented) *English word from their IMR that is not part of (some of) the other speakers’ IMRs. This new word, once understood by the other speakers present, expands the shared central area of the MRP of the group in much in the same way as an other-language idiom expands the shared MRP (see, for example, the use of endangered discussed by Seidlhofer 2011: 139 and in Chapter 6). In the following, I will focus on the multilingual dimension of IMRs and shared MRPs in relation to creative idioms in VOICE. In doing so, I suggest a differentiation between a (shared) multilingual idiom resource pool and a (shared) multilingual metaphor resource pool that are both relevant to ELF contexts.

7.2 Multilingual idiom and multilingual metaphor resource pool in ELF interactions In multilingual ELF contexts, ELF speakers will not only share idioms, but also metaphors across different languages, varieties and dialects that are part of their IMRs. Adapting the notions of IMR and MRP (as described above) to the level of idioms and metaphors, we might conceive of each ELF speaker’s IMR as including an individual multilingual idiom repertoire (short: idiom-IMR) as well as a (partly corresponding) individual multilingual metaphor repertoire (short: metaphor-IMR). A speaker’s idiom-IMR would comprise idiomatic wordings and conventional idioms in *English as well as all other *languages, *varieties and *dialects known by the speaker. Correspondingly, the speaker’s metaphor-IMR would comprise the metaphorical images that relate to the conventional wordings in the respective languages. Additionally, it also includes salient metaphors and images that are not tied to specific idioms. Individual multilingual idiom repertoire and individual multilingual metaphor repertoire would thus be sub-components of an ELF speaker’s overall IMR. Moving from the individual to the social dimension of ELF, each ELF interaction brings into contact these two subcomponents, i.e. ELF speakers’ idiom-IMRs and metaphor-IMRs. In doing so, the transient language contact situation via ELF gives rise to an initial multilingual idiom resource pool (idiom-MRP) as well as an initial multilingual metaphor resource pool (metaphor-MRP) that are specific to the particular ELF situation. Speakers’

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idiom-IMRs, and thus the resulting idiom-MRP of the group, would be centrally tied to the conventional linguistic forms of idioms in various *languages, *varieties and *dialects. In contrast to this, speaker’s metaphor-IMRs, and thus the resulting metaphor-MRP, would be comprised primarily of concepts and visual images, rather than of precise wordings and expressions. Metaphor-IMR and metaphor-MRP are thus more independent of individual *languages, and of language in general. Both ELF speakers’ idiom-IMRs as well as their metaphor-IMRs can therefore give rise to instances of metaphorical creativity in ELF interactions. If the resulting creative expressions are comprehensible and interpretable for the ELF interlocutors in the particular context, they can become part of the expanding shared idiom-MRP and metaphor-MRP (as shown in Figure 7.3) for this particular group of (ELF) speakers.

7.2.1 ‘Waking up dogs’: Metaphors with corresponding *English and other *language idioms An example where an ELF speaker integrates a metaphorical image inherent in his first language but also in a corresponding *English idiom is the expression we should not wake up any dogs (see Pitzl 2009). As shown in example (7.2), the expression appears to be used successfully in this BELF context by S4 (an Austrian ELF speaker with *German as L1). The speaker seems to suggest that his interlocutors, primarily S1 and S2 (both L1 *Korean), should refrain from a certain course of action since this might create problems for both the Korean and the Austrian company. Example 7.2 (PBmtg3) S1=L1:Korean, male (P1), S2=L1:Korean, male (P2), S3=L1:German, male (P3), S4=L1:German, male (P4); voice style (modification: bold print) 2020 S4: you have it in the stores since WHEN? since a couple of MONTHS (.) 2021 S1: only e:r one and a half month. 2022 S2: x months 2023 S4: yeah then (1) i think in THAT case we should not wakeup any (.) any DOGS by going now 2024 SX-m: xx x 2025 S4: NOW since it’s in the 2026 S1: okay 2027 S4: in the trade 2028 SX-3: yeah (.)

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NOW to the licenser and ask for permission because if they say no you have to remove everything mhm i think that’s (.) for three hundred displays not (.) not relevant. mhm

The metaphor conveyed via the creative idiom by S4 helps the speaker to make a potentially risky suggestion (‘Do not remove the displays from the stores although, strictly speaking, you would need to’) in an indirect manner. As I have argued elsewhere, since the displays should never have been put in stores by the Korean company without prior approval, this indirect proposition, making use of a metaphor, allows the Korean meeting participants to save face (see Pitzl 2009: 307–310 for a more detailed discussion). Relating this instance of metaphorical creativity to the previous discussion of IMRs and MRP, Figure 7.4 below attempts a rough representation of the idiomMRP of the speakers involved in the speech event. As an ELF speech event, meeting PBmtg3, in which the phrase we should not wake up any dogs is coined, is “bilateral” in the sense that “representatives of the visiting company with the same L1 background [. . .] meet with representatives of the host company who all have the same L1 background” (Pitzl 2016a: 25). In this speech event, the five participants’ IMRs would need to be represented in two overlapping clusters, with S1’s and S2’s IMRs overlapping more with each other than with S3’s, S4’s and S5’s IMRs. (Of course, no speaker’s IMR will be identical to that of another speaker.) There will be an area of overlap between all five speakers, i.e. the central area of the MRP that is shared by these ELF speakers when they first meet (see Figure 7.4). When S4 (L1 *German) utters the newly coined idiom we should not wake up any dogs, he makes use of his IMR, possibly drawing on two conventional idioms

S1

S4 S5

S2

S3 Figure 7.4: Idiom-MRP (PBmtg3): we should not wake up any dogs.

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in the process: schlafende Hunde soll man nicht wecken as well as let sleeping dogs lie. Since S4’s IMR largely overlaps with S3’s and S5’s IMRs, both these conventional expressions are likely to be part of their idiom-IMRs as well. By uttering the creative idiom we should not wake up any dogs, S4 actively shares this novel expression with all participants, thus bringing it into the central area of the shared idiom-MRP. In coining the phrase, S4 is likely to rely not only on his idiom-IMR but even more so on his metaphor-IMR. He renders the visual image inherent to both conventional expressions in a newly created ELF wording. S4 does not, in fact, provide an exact translation of the *German expression. As is shown in Figure 7.5, the metaphorical image is likely to be shared by S3 and S5, but might also be shared by S1 and S2 (e.g. via the conventional *English idiom). The image might already be part of the central shared area of the metaphor-MRP in this bilateral ELF meeting.

S1

S4 S5

S2

S3 Figure 7.5: Metaphor-MRP (PBmtg3): we should not wake up any dogs.

Although we should not wake up any dogs might be partly the result of transfer or “language leakage” (Jenkins 2015: 75), the phrase appears as a ‘normal metaphor’ in interaction. Its multilingual relevance is not commented on by S4 or any of the other speakers. It may have gone unnoticed as a language contact phenomenon by speakers and listeners, either because the metaphor is already part of speakers shared MRP – or because the metaphorical image is transparent enough to be interpreted appropriately in context. What we see in examples like we should not wake up any dogs is how speakers gradually expand the multilingual resource pool of what is shared linguistically as well as conceptually in ELF situations by relying on their own IMR in a way that enhances communication. We see how the metaphors inherent in conventional expressions in several *languages – not just *English – contribute to this process. A continuation of this process of linguistic creativity for the same metaphor can be observed in a very different context, far removed from the original ELF

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speech event. In 2015, Martin Dewey published an article entitled “Time to wake up some dogs! Shifting the culture of language in ELT”. On the first page of this article, Dewey (2015b: 121) states: The most durable perception of English in the ELT profession seems to be that “we should not wake up any dogs” (see Pitzl 2009 for discussion of this example of metaphor in ELF). In other words, languages have always been taught in relation to a NS [native speaker] target, so why unsettle matters now by implementing change?

In beginning his article, Dewey actively shares the Austrian ELF speaker’s creative idiom with his academic readership, by means of referring to the publication in which this phrase was first discussed (i.e. Pitzl 2009). Some of his international readers might have come across this article and hence the expression before. But for most readers of Dewey’s text the creative idiom is likely to be new. In spite of this, Dewey judges the metaphor to be transparent enough to be understood also by the second group of readers. Presumably he would not have used it otherwise, especially since the written mode of an academic text does not allow for immediate clarification and negotiation of meaning between author and readership. His motivation for using the metaphor will have been, among other things, to provide salience and emphasis to his main point that there is a particular longlasting “perception of English in the ELT profession” (Dewey 2015b: 121) that he wants to argue against in his article. In order to express his own position, Dewey varies the metaphor used by S4. Most crucially, he changes the negation to an imperative. Both the creative variant Time to wake up some dogs! in Dewey’s title and wake up the dogs in the concluding paragraph of the article (Dewey 2015b: 133) change the illocutionary force and intended perlocutionary effect of the expression: What used to be a warning in the conventional idiom (in several *languages) as well as in the creative ELF idiom coined in PBmtg3 is re-shaped into a request for action by Dewey. What this instance of metaphorical creativity illustrates is that the mechanisms that allow creative variation of the wording of a particular metaphor are the same, whether they are used deliberately or unintentionally by a speaker. Just like the concept/word ‘sleeping’ can be substituted with the notion of ‘(not) waking up’ (as was done by S4), the determiner slot can be flexibily filled by words like any, some or the (as shown by Dewey 2015b), especially once it has been established in a text or interaction what the metaphorical dogs actually symbolize. The two contexts of use are extremely different: a face-to-face BELF meeting and an academic publication. Yet, both involve the use of language for international interlocutors/ readers and expand the shared MRP through creative use.

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7.2.2 Borrowing images: Non-*English idioms and the metaphor-MRP Expressions like we should not wake up any dogs, Time to wake up some dogs and wake up the dogs are part of speakers’ IMRs (and eventually of the MRP), but also have a conventional *English idiom that corresponds or is similar to them. There are, however, also instances where transfer seems to lead to newly created expressions, which do not have a corresponding *English counterpart.3 Examples (7.3) to (7.6) below all illustrate this phenomenon. (7.3) put my hands into the fire for it (PBmtg300:1033; S1=L1:Dutch (P506); plain style) (7.4) so that they really can make themself a picture of the whole market and how er yes the future might be (PRpan294:87; S3=L1:German (P397); plain style) (7.5) so stereotyping is you put them all in one pot and say austrians are (EDsed31:802; S1=L1:German (P16); plain style) (7.6) don’t praise the day yet (POmtg314:37; S1=L1:Polish (P179); plain style) The expression put my hands into the fire for it (7.3) seems to be transferred from *Dutch (‘de hand voor iemand in he vurr steken’) into ELF without having a corresponding *English idiom. It has, however, a corresponding idiom in *German, which is the L1 of S1’s interlocutors in the speech event (‘die Hand für jemanden/etwas ins Feuer legen’, see Pitzl 2009). Through the typological similarity of *Dutch and *German, example (7.3) is part of the idiom-MRP and metaphor-MRP that participants share in the particular interaction, although the expression does not exist in *English. Examples (7.4) to (7.6) are uttered in different ELF interactions and can also each be paired up with almost an identical idiom in *German. The phrase make themselves a picture (7.4) is likely to be a more or less ad-hoc translation of the *German ‘sich ein Bild machen’. The phrase put them all in one pot (7.5) seems to be inspired by the *German ‘alle/alles in einen Topf werfen’ (which literally translates ‘to throw everyone/everything in one pot’). This matches the ELF speaker’s expressions almost verbatim, except for the speaker’s use of the general verb put instead of the literal translation

3 Parts of this section are based on Pitzl (2016b).

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‘throw’. (The expression put us all in one pot is used a second time by the same speaker in the same speech event.) The idiom don’t praise the day yet (7.6) also has a rough equivalent in *German. It closely resembles the saying ‘Du/Man sollst/soll den Tag nicht vor dem Abend loben’ (literally: ‘you/one should not praise the day before the evening’). Notably, this last phrase is not uttered by an L1 *German speaker, however, but by an L1 speaker of *Polish. The *Polish expression that the speaker probably draws on in uttering don’t praise the day yet is Nie chwal dnia przed zachodem słońca (literally ‘Don’t praise the day before the sunset’).4 The *Polish idiom is almost identical to the *German expression and thus part of the idiom-MRP that is shared by L1 *Polish and *German ELF speakers, although the saying does not exist in *English. The phenomenon of transferring idioms from speakers’ L1s (or other *languages) into *English is, of course, not unique to ELF and VOICE. Modiano (2003: 39) mentions expressions like he is blue eyed or referring to a bill as having been salted as examples of what speakers with knowledge of *Swedish might say. Although also Modiano’s two examples have no corresponding *English idioms, both are relatively easy to interpret for a reader like myself, i.e. someone familiar with *Austrian German. There are informal dialectal expressions in *Austrian German that mirror the *Swedish meanings (see Pitzl 2016b for details), thus making it possible to draw upon the shared idiom-MRP for *Swedish and *German with regard to these particular phrases when reading or hearing them. What these examples serve to illustrate is that non-*English idioms and metaphors that are part of speakers’ IMRs can be made relevant in ELF interactions at any point. The examples discussed in this and the previous section all show instances where speakers do not flag these creative phrases for their multilingual relevance at all. Looking at the data, one does not know if the speakers are aware that there is a multilingual dimension to these expressions. In some cases, the creative idioms are part of the idiom/metaphor-MRP that is initially shared by several speakers on a particular occasion (e.g. *Dutch*German in (7.3), *Polish-*German in (7.6)). In other cases, they are likely to be part only of a single speaker’s IMR, who shares the expression (in the sense of Figure 7.2.) with the other speakers present, who seem to have no trouble interpreting them. It would clearly be premature to claim that any of these creative idioms analyzed are on the path to becoming “a part of the core of Euro-English”, as

4 Thanks to Kamil Kazmierski for providing the *Polish idiom and the translation.

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Modiano (2003: 39) tentatively suggests for his examples. In fact, I would argue that the concept of a ‘core of Euro-English’ is in itself problematic and debatable. But what the examples show is that IMRs – and shared MRPs – are relevant for the use of idioms in ELF. Cross-cultural conceptual mappings, non-*English idioms and new expressions like the ones cited above may enter into ELF at any point during any interaction. They provide linguistic evidence that ELF always is a site of transient language contact that is potentially very complex. Although these individual occurrences are unlikely to spread beyond local contexts, they can nevertheless be taken up and re-used or creatively reshaped by speakers, as we have seen in Dewey (2015b).

7.3 Idioms as displays of multilingual identity In contrast to the previous two sections, the next two sections will look at examples where ELF speakers display some awareness of multilingualism and thereby draw attention to their multilingual identities in relation to metaphorical creativity in some way. This awareness can be indicated via metalinguistic comments and/or explicit references to other *languages and/or regiocultures, which ‘flag’ the relevance of these *languages and/or regio-cultures in some way.

7.3.1 Shared images and metalinguistic comments As shown in (7.7), some ELF interactions include short episodes in which the multilingual relevance of an idiom and its corresponding metaphorical image are alluded to by speakers. In a workshop discussion that involves more than ten representatives of youth organizations in different European countries, speakers talk about the rights young people have in the labor market.5 In the course of their discussion, they address pros and cons of fixed quotas to ensure the employment of women. Immediately after one speaker (S5, L1 *Norwegian) has expressed his opinion on the subject in the utterance preceding (7.7), S10, a female L1 *Serbian speaker, adds the following comment (u 791, u 793).

5 Parts of this section are based on Pitzl (2016b).

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Example 7.7 (POwsd372) S4=L1:Maltese, male (P323); S10=L1:Serbian, female (P329); SX-f=unidentified female speaker; SX-m=unidentified female speaker; voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 791 S10: yeah that’s the point of the whole things about quotas it’s a very good idea but in the same time it’s (.) 792 SX-m: hm 793 S10: {S1 starts writing} how to say it in english like knife with double blade? 794 S4: double-edged sword 795 S10: okay {S1 stops writing} yes thanks 796 SX-f: hm 797 SX-m: hm 798 SX-f: mhm 799 S10: @@ (2) Prefacing her own rendering of the idiom (knife with double blade) with the metalinguistic comment how to say it in english, S10 draws attention to the fact that the expression that is to come is created at hoc and likely to be different from the codified ‘correct’ *English idiom. Although S10 does not explicitly comment on the multilingual relevance of knife with double blade (she does not say ‘we have a saying/an expression in language X’), the pronoun it suggests that the speaker draws on her multilingual repertoire – and not just her knowledge of *English – to coin the phrase. Her remark about not being sure how to say it in english suggests quite strongly that she has a concrete non-*English idiom in mind when producing the phrase knife with double blade. Similar to the examples above, the speaker seems to draw on her L1 in coining the phrase. The *Serbian expression mač sa dve oštrice literally means ‘sword with two blades’. A variant of this idiom (i.e. nož sa dve oštrice) translates as ‘knife with two blades’ – which is almost identical to S10’s expression.6 As the speaker indicates with her comment, *English has a corresponding idiom (a double-edged sword) and, although the speaker might not be aware of this, *German also has the idiom ein zweischneidiges Schwert, which is semantically equivalent to the *English and *Serbian idiom/metaphor. The image of a sharp object with a blade that has two edges (knife with double blade/double-edged sword) exists in several *languages in order to express that something has both advantages and disadvantages.

6 My thanks go to Michael Radeka for supplying the *Serbian idiom and providing a translation.

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The metaphor that corresponds to the *English/*Serbian/*German idiom seems to carry/evoke a particular meaning, regardless of the particular *language or the exact wording in which it is rendered. What S10 does in her paraphrase is to describe the physical object the idiom refers to. So her wish to add an expressive contour to her own statement by means of adding this metaphorical image via a simile (like knife with . . . ) overrides any potential insecurity she may (or may not) feel because she does not know the ‘proper’ *English phrase. What we see in this example is thus more than a case of implicit transfer. It seems to be a conscious choice made by the speaker to produce a metaphor that she knows is relevant in both her L1 *Serbian and *English and that she wants to employ in order to emphasize a particular point in the discussion. Although another speaker (S4) also supplies a conventional version of the idiom (doubleedged sword), it seems that whether or not this version is actually provided is not essential. The communicative function of emphasizing and expressing her point is fulfilled already by the metaphor and the concrete image in S10’s first utterance; the conventional idiomatic wording is optional.

7.3.2 Cultural stereotypes, humor and wordplay As we have seen Chapter 6, ELF speakers may develop their own patterns and local systematicities of metaphors and creative idioms in the course of an interaction. In building and expanding their shared MRP, references to regioculture(s) tend to play a role on different occasions. Speakers may make reference to the regional ‘culture’ of the town or country where an interaction takes place and be influenced by the habitat factor (cf. e.g. Pölzl & Seidlhofer 2006) or they may reference characteristics of their professional culture or area of business, for example. With regard to BELF interactions, Ehrenreich (2009: 141) reports that most business people she interviewed for her ethnographic study prefer a “multicultural mix” and actually like the “authentic mess of the local cultures involved”. (Regio-)cultural diversity is the backdrop against which every ELF encounter takes place. What varies is the degree to which participants are aware of this (regio-)cultural diversity and the degree to which they appreciate (or disapprove of and struggle with) it. In addition, ELF interactions differ in the degree to which interactants explicitly address regio-cultural backgrounds (and/ or regio-cultural diversity) and the degree to which they make ‘culture’ overtly relevant (see, for example, Baker 2011, 2015b; Zhu Hua 2015). The shared and borrowed metaphorical images discussed thus far in this chapter were not used for signaling ‘culture’ but for various other communicative purposes. The non-*English idioms discussed in Section 7.2 were –

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intentionally or unintentionally – transplanted into *English without this being explicitly indicated. We then saw an example where a speaker alludes to her multilingual identity by adding a metalinguistic comment. Yet, regio-culture or (inter)cultural awareness (in the sense of Baker 2011, 2015b) play no overt role in the use of knife with double blade (7.7). As we shall see below, borrowing and transplanting a non-*English idiom into *English can also be performed quite intentionally and be linked explicitly to a discussion of perceived shared ‘cultural’ traits. Example (7.8) happens in a business meeting.7 The topic of conversation at this point in the is the participants’ perceptions of different ‘national cultures’. The speakers talk about regio-cultural peculiarities and put forward a number of stereotypes about their own ‘national cultures’ and the ‘national cultures’ of the companies they work for. The prime focus of conversation is on matters of ‘culture’ at this point in the meeting. Example 7.8 (PBmtg300) S1=L1:German, male (P73), S2=L1:Dutch, male (P506), S8=L1:Spanish, male (P76), S9=L1:French, male (P75); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 2410 S2: [. . .] but again they are like the DUTCH we are very KEEN on MONEY ? 2411 SX-m: @@ 2412 S2: and the chinese @@ the chinese are even MORE keen on moneys (1) they er want to 2413 SS: @@ 2414 S1: as you know we have a lot of DUTCH in the company and we work a lot with chinese so NO worries er hhh for understanding you. 2415 S2: o:h 2416 S2: i say i say i’m dutch myself. so er i can say it as a ≤@≥ dutch guy ≤/@≥ (1) 2417 S1: @@@ 2418 S2: dutch particully {particularly} we are famous about moneys i believe 2419 S1: we er i forgot one point. 2420 S2: huh? = 2421 S1: = we are a swiss company.

7 The first portion of this example is also discussed in Pitzl (2009).

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2422 2423 2424 2425 2426

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S2: S1: S2: S1: S2:

mhm = =er so for ≤@≥ money no no need to discuss with us @@ @@@@@ no but i say it’s a sort of HABIT you know the (.) yeah (.) they say that’s it’s a saying in holland that er (.) we don’t have savings but under the bed we have a lot of er (.) money in the sock. but i checked my sock lately but (.) 2427 S1: yeah 2428 SX-8: @@@ 2429 S8: @@@ @ 2430 SS: @@ 2431 S2: @ no moneys (.) @@ 2432 SS: @@ 2433 S1: @@ @@ 2434 S2: no but er well there is particular saying. (.) i say that’s the english word there is also the dutch treat? (.) you know that they say YOU pay actually? 2435 S1: mhm: 2436 S2: it’s a it’s a saying in english? (.) er (1) hh but again if if i have some more information about australia = 2437 S9: = then just let us know yeah Nationalities are very prominent in this extract, as can be seen in the repeated and dense occurrences of the words dutch and chinese. S2 is from the Netherlands and works for a Chinese company. The ‘cultural’ stereotype being talked about in this extract by S2 is that certain cultures and peoples, like the dutch and the chinese, are similar in that they are keen on money. S1 contributes to the topic of ‘cultural’ affinities to money by saying that they, i.e. he and his colleagues S8 and S9, work for a swiss company (u 2421). Therefore, S1 concludes: for money no need to discuss with us (u 2423), implying that the interest in ‘making money’ is part of Dutch, Chinese and also Swiss ‘culture’. Though reinforcing a stereotypical view of ‘culture and money’, S1 aligns with S2 and thus strengthens the perception that they are all in the same boat/bus/train (see Section 5.4), creating at least a superficial feeling of commonality and sameness. In this relaxed and communal mood, focused on regio-cultural characteristics, S2 puts forward a creative idiom transplanted (i.e. intentionally transferred and translated) from *Dutch. S2 says we don’t have savings under the bed but we have a lot of money in the sock (u 2426). By using the first person plural we twice in this creative idiom, he affiliates himself

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with ‘his’ regio-cultural group quite strongly in this phrase. This is a continuation from before, where S2 already talks about the DUTCH as we (u 2410) and positions himself very strongly as a spokesperson about Dutch qualities: i say i’m dutch myself so er i can say it as a dutch guy (u 2416), dutch particully we are famous about moneys i believe (u 2418). In a subsequent speech event (PBmtg27), S1 actually commented on S2 emphasizing his nationality quite strongly: for [first name10] i think she knows very well i am dutch i am dutch i am dutch (.) i am dutch (PBmtg27:1295). (Here [first name10] refers to S2 and the comment is addressed to the researcher (she) who has recorded the speech events.) Crucially, S2 does not just utter this creative idiom by drawing upon his multilingual resources in passing (like we have seen in the previous examples in this chapter). He prefaces the creative idiom with what Cogo and Dewey (2006) call a “key clue”, namely “a frame, which is intended to influence the interpretation of what follows [. . .] [and] allows the participants to make inferences about the use of the idiom and place it into context” (Cogo & Dewey 2006: 69). By making use of the key clue it’s a saying in holland (u 2426), S2 explicitly signals that he is borrowing and translating a *Dutch idiom into *English. In doing so, he produces an overt comment on his own national culture, but also on the fact that he is engaging in multilingual creativity intentionally. How ‘correctly’ S2 translates the *Dutch idiom into *English is impossible to say for someone not familiar with *Dutch. But it would appear that the correctness of the translation is irrelevant, because the expression (prefaced with the key clue) is in itself effective in creating a rather vivid and transparent metaphorical image. The general practice of transplanting L1 idioms is, of course, not only relevant to this one particular ELF context, but has been observed in many contexts. Thus, “culturally enriching the language by spontaneous translations of mother-tongue metaphors and idiomatic expressions” (Ehrenreich 2009: 140) seems to be an ELF practice commonly engaged in business contexts. The transcript clearly shows that S2’s coining of the new expression money in the sock is not accidental. S2’s creativity continues when he elaborates on the mental image by saying that he checked his sock lately but found no moneys. This image triggers laughter (@@@) by the participants involved in the meeting, as seems to be intended by S2. And it has also triggered laughter on several occasions whenever I have shown this example during conference presentations. So quite clearly, the metaphorical image transplanted from *Dutch (i.e. part of S1’s idiom- and metaphor-IMR) also works independently of the specific context of the speech event. It is transparent not just for S2’s interlocutors, but

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also for a much wider group of ELF speakers with diverse L1 backgrounds and diverse IMRs. Just like Dewey (2015b) does with the image of ‘waking up dogs’, S2 engages in what we might regard as an instance of wordplay, described by Carter as the strategy [. . .] to play with these larger patterns [i.e. proverbs, idioms, formulaic language] by deviating from what is expected, creatively disfiguring them to produce and play with perspectives and ways of seeing it. (Carter 2004: 95)

Within the framework proposed in this book, wordplay is not seen as different from linguistic creativity, but rather considered a special type of creativity – namely an instance of deliberate metaphorical creativity that is brought about intentionally by a speaker. As similar position is held by Langlotz concerning L1 use, who points out that “idiomatic creativity is defined by a cline between two poles of strikingly conspicuous wordplay, on the one hand, and inconspicuous lexicogrammatical adaptations, on the other” (Langlotz 2006: 195). Thus, formal changes in idioms are made in accordance with underlying metaphors and are thus fairly systematic at this level of metaphoricity (cf. Langlotz 2006: 195), irrespective of whether they are small lexicogrammatical or morphological changes (see Chapter 4) or deliberate instances of wordplay. In instances of intentional metaphorical creativity like the one above, the listeners are “invited to join in a game of deriving a number of implicatures that add communicative spice to the use of the expression” (Langlotz 2006: 197), which in this example clearly adds humor to the interaction. In fact, it appears that S2 wants to continue with this humorous ‘cultural banter’ in example and next mentions a conventional *English idiom that fits the theme, namely the dutch treat (u 2434). Although this second idiom is canonical in form, its main purpose for S2 in this context does not seem to be signaling closeness to *English or ‘*English culture. On the contrary, S2 seems to utter the idiom dutch treat to once again emphasize and mock stereotypical ‘Dutch stinginess’. Similar to money in the sock, S2 introduces the conventional idiom dutch treat with a key clue: there is particular saying; that’s the english word (u 2434). In this ELF context, it seems that the codified *English idiom dutch treat might be perceived as more ‘foreign’ (and certainly less transparent) than the previous creative expression. The dutch treat is definitely less effective than the metaphorical image of money in the sock. In contrast to the image of money in the sock, which triggers laughter and is played with, the dutch treat elicits virtually no reaction from the other ELF speakers. Whereas the metaphor money in the sock is never actually explained, the conventional idiom is paraphrased by

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S2 after it is uttered: you know that they say you pay actually? (u 2434). It is also succeeded by a second metalinguistic comment that repeats the ‘Englishness’ and conventionality of the phrase: it’s a saying in english (u 2436). Yet, the conventional idiom still elicits no reaction from the other ELF speakers, except for an inconspicuous mhm (u 2435) from S1. One might even argue that it constitutes an instance of “unilateral idiomaticity” (Seidlhofer 2009a: 200; see also Seidlhofer 2002, 2011: 135–138). With the idiom not being reacted to by his interlocutors, S2 steers the conversation back to content-oriented topics after a short pause and offers some more information about australia (u 2436), which S9 reacts to immediately and the conversation continues on business matters.

7.4 Non-*English idioms and code-switching in ELF interactions The previous section has illustrated how non-*English idioms may enter ELF interactions as instances of metaphorical creativity that are explicitly signaled and function as representations of multilingual and/or regio-cultural identities of ELF speakers. In doing so, speakers draw attention to the multilingual and multi/transcultural nature of ELF as a site of language contact and emphasize that ELF is always more than just *English or ‘Anglo.’ The examples discussed so far have been ‘Englishized’ versions of non-*English idioms that were created by ELF speakers’ drawing upon their IMRs. We will now turn to instances of metaphorical and multilingual creativity that involve code-switching, i.e. “cases in which the juxtaposition of two codes (languages) is perceived as a locally meaningful event by participants” (Auer 2010: 21). I am using the term code-switching – as opposed to code-mixing or language mixing – here, because the latter two tend to be associated with the more extensive and recurrent ‘mixed’ use of (two or more) languages (cf. e.g. Auer 2010: 21). Although more extensive multilingual practices of code-mixing also occur in some ELF speech events, only very few speech events in VOICE exhibit extensive code-mixing (see Pitzl 2016a: 19–23 for details on data selection and transcription practices concerning non-*English elements in VOICE). Most instances of other *language use in VOICE can thus be described as more localized code-switches. The first example of a code-switched idiom to be discussed in this section happens in the course of a discussion on academic mobility during a one-day seminar in Vienna and involves an L1 switch to *German. Although the seminar

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and the speech event (EDsed251) involve twenty ELF speakers, the MRP of this situation is less diverse than the number of people might suggest. The speech event is not bilateral, but two L1 groups are dominant in terms of speaker numbers: nine speakers out of 20 have *Austrian German as their L1 and six participants are L1 *Slovak speakers. The other five speakers’ L1s are: *German/*English, *French, *Turkish, *Russian and *Ukrainian/*Russian. With most of the participants currently living and studying in Vienna and some in Bratislava (i.e. very close to the Austrian border) and the speech event taking place in the *German-speaking context of Vienna, some familiarity with *German can be assumed for most speakers, not just for the L1 *German speakers. This is evidenced by the fact that the number of LN-switches to *German is considerably higher during the two-hour discussion than switches to *German performed by L1 *German speakers. Especially S9, whose L1s are *Ukrainian and *Russian, repeatedly uses individual *German words like Praxis, Zoll, ost, Quadrat, anders, kennen, Fachmann in the stretch of conversation that precedes (7.9) (u 354, u 384). Taking the floor after S9, S13 begins to make an additional point (u 389) that adds to S9’s elaborate contribution. In doing so, S13 makes use of the conventional *German metaphor orchideenstudien as an instance of L1 codeswitching. Example 7.9 (EDsed251) S13=L1:German, male (P476), SX-f=unidentified female speaker; voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 396 S13: or (.) to so- er to something else (.) i don’t know erm (.) economics (.) let’s say: (.) erm hh in an in (.) a:n (.) insurance company? (.) they need e:r (.) they say (.) okay? as a (.) base (.) of our company? (.) w:e er we employ e:r people who have (.) the bachelor in: hh business administration with (.) insurance (.) er topic or something like that (.) hh and (.) at the same time hh we are cutting down? erm: (.) ed- e:r branches of education? hh which ARE not (.) e::r (.) that requested. (.) you know? hh in austria it was it wa- running under the term hh orchideenstudien {literally: orchid studies; derogatory term for small humanities subjects because they are beautiful but useless} (1) which means hh an orchidee {orchid} is a: is a very (.) rare flower? (.) which is just growing in the jungle? hh erm (.) 397 SX-f: @@ 398 S13: which meant (2) nobody has a use for it so nobody has to study it. hh and i think (.) at THIS point? (.) we can’t speak of reintegration an- any more. (1) [. . .]

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In his long turn, S13 discusses how societies tend to value students who have received broad education, while the job market prefers graduates of particular subjects like economics or business administration. With reduced university budgets, he argues that we are cutting down certain disciplines which are not that requested. In order to emphasize this point, he introduces the *German idiom orchideenstudien as a code-switch. Although the idiom only contains one word, the compound noun combines two concepts metaphorically, namely orchid and study. The resulting expression is a conventional metaphor that is codified in *German reference works (usually under the term ‘Studienfach’) and thus can be considered a one-word idiom. S13 prepares listeners for the code-switch with an implicit key clue (see Section 7.3.2), namely in austria it was it wa- running under the term orchideenstudien. Since he is addressing a group of students in Vienna, he does not feel the need to mention *German (i.e. the language switched into) explicitly, but takes for granted that his addressees know that this is the main language used in Austria. As has been mentioned above, most participants in the discussion have *German as L1 and many others have some knowledge of *German. So S13 seems to assume that his switch will be intelligible to the majority of the ELF speakers present. For those who might not know *German, S13 explains the meaning of orchidee as a very rare flower which is just growing in the jungle and then the meaning of the idiom by saying: which meant nobody has a use for it so nobody has to study it. With this use of orchideenstudien he seems to emphasize his point that there is a danger of certain disciplines being cut down due to reduced budgets. In addition to providing emphasis and helping S13 make his main point, the L1 conventional metaphor orchideenstudien may have the function of “signaling culture” (Klimpfinger 2009: 352), which can involve switching to another *language “in order to explicitly refer to concepts associated with a specific culture” (Klimpfinger 2009: 352). Although Klimpfinger (2009: 352) mentions city names or greetings as examples of this type of code-switching, it seems obvious that more elaborate metaphorical concepts that have become conventionalized over time (see Chapter 2) are also prime candidates for this type of code-switching. S13’s reference to the notion of orchideenstudium seems to be an instance of this. Signaling regio-culture via code-switching does not only occur via speakers’ use of L1 idioms and metaphors, however. Occasionally, ELF speakers also choose to switch into a *language that is not their L1 in order to provide an idiom or metaphor that they believe will be meaningful at least for some of the other ELF speakers present, i.e. overlap with at least one other speaker’s IMR. Signaling regio-cultural knowledge as well as multilingual and multicultural

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expertise seem to be the main reasons which motivate the type of salient, but rare LN code-switch shown in (7.9). The meeting that example (7.10) is taken from is part of the sequence of interactions involving the same ELF-TIG discussed in Chapter 6 (in particular see examples in Section 6.2). The topic being talked about at this point is the presence and outspokenness of women in official meetings in Islamic countries. The participants have just discussed the fact that women also hold important public positions in some Islamic countries, such as being ministers of education or university representatives. This topic of conversation seems to trigger in S1, whose L1 is *Danish, the concept embedded in the *German expression Kinder, Küche, Kirche (literally: children, kitchen, church). The socio-political idea that is contained in the *German idiom is an emblematic representation of social realms that are traditionally/conservatively associated with ‘female expertise’, i.e. raising children, providing nutrition for the family (hence: kitchen), and conveying moral values (hence: church). The use of this idiom by P499, who we have already seen as a very active speaker making frequent use of metaphorical creativity in previous chapters, seems to be a comment on the fact that women tend to be ministers of education rather than, for example, ministers of finance. Example 7.10 (POmtg403) S1=L1:Danish, male (P499), S2=L1:Finnish, male (P502), S3=L1:Catalan, female (P501), S4=L1:Hungarian, male (P505), S5=L1:Finnish, female (P500), S6=L1: German, female (P20); voice style (modifications: bold print; underlining) 103 S1: is still what the germans call erm of course the kitche {non-existent word resembling the word for kitchen} (.) kitchen 104 S2: (.) 105 S1: kitchen er kirche (.) kinder (.) kirsche kinder {church children cherry children} 106 S5: hm 107 S1: no what was it ku- . Example: SX-m: but you NEVER KNOW when it’s popping up you never kno:w S3: 19. NON-VERBAL FEEDBACK

If it is deemed important to indicate the length of the noise (e.g. if a coughing fit disrupts the interaction), this is done by adding the number of seconds in parentheses after the descriptor.

Whenever information about it is available, non-verbal feedback is transcribed as part of the running text and put between pointed brackets < >.

Example: If it is deemed important to indicate the length S3: but i think if you structure corporate of the non-verbal feedback, this is done by governance appropriately you can have every- adding the number of seconds in parentheses. thing (1) S7: mhm 20. ANONYMIZATION A guiding principle of VOICE is sensitivity to the appropriate extent of anonymization. As a general rule, names of people, companies, organizations, institutions, locations, etc. are replaced by aliases and these aliases are put into square brackets [ ]. The aliases are numbered consecutively, starting with 1. Whenever speakers who are involved in the interaction are addressed or referred to, their names are replaced by their respective speaker IDs.

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Example: S9: that’s one of the things (.) that i (1) just wanted to clear out. (2) [S13]?

A speaker’s first name is represented by the plain speaker ID in square brackets [S1], etc.

Example: A speaker’s last name is marked [S1/last], etc. S6: so: (1) ei:ther MYself or mister [S2/last] or even boss (.) should be there every year Example: S8: so my name is [S8] [S8/last] from vienna

If a speaker’s full name is pronounced, the two tags are combined to [S1] [S1/last], etc.

Example: Names of people who are not part of the S2: that division is headed by (1) [first name3] ongoing interaction are substituted by [first [last name3] (1) name1], etc. or [last name1], etc. or a combination of both. Example: Companies and other organizations need to be S5: erm she is currently head of marketing anonymized as well. Their names are replaced (and) with the [org2] (1) by [org1], etc. Example: Names of places, cities, countries, etc. are S1: i: i really don’t wanna have a: a joint degree anonymized when this is deemed relevant in e:r with the university of [place12] (.) order to protect the speakers’ identities and their environment. They are replaced by [place1], etc. Example: Other names or descriptors may be S8: he get the diplom {diploma} anonymized by [name1], etc., as in e.g. Charles of [name1] university (.) and french university University. can give him also the diplom {diploma}

Example: Products or other objects may be anonymized S3: erm i- in the [thing1] is very well explained. by [thing1], etc. so i can pa- er pass you this th- the definitions. S4: aha S4: okay okay 21. CONTEXTUAL EVENTS {mobile rings} {S7 enters room} {S2 points at S5} {S4 starts writing on blackboard} {S4 stops writing on blackboard} {S2 gets up and walks to blackboard (7)} {S3 pours coffee (3)} {SS reading quietly (30)} …

Contextual information is added between curly brackets { } only if it is relevant to the understanding of the interaction or to the interaction as such. If it is deemed important to indicate the length of the event, this can be done by adding the number of seconds in parentheses.

Appendix A1 Mark-up-conventions

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Example: The pause in the conversation occurs because S3: one dollar you get (.) (at) one euro you get of the contextual event. one dollar twenty-seven. (.) S4: right. {S5 gets up to pour some drinks} S3: right now at this time (3) S1: er page five is the er (4) {S5 places some cups and glasses on the desk (4)} S1: i think is the descritip- e:r part of what i have just explained (.) 22. PARALLEL CONVERSATIONS Example: S1: four billion u s dollars. (.) S4: quite impressive (.) S1: er not quite isn’t it (.) i understand some other countries we handle Example: S7: i’ve i’ve found the people very stressed SS: @@@ S7: that’s (.) i don’t know how many of you study here but it’s VERY important to push the close the door button in that elevator. this is something i’ve never seen in sweden {parallel conversation between S1 and S3 starts} or anywhere else but it’s very important to push this button SS: @@@@ SS: @@@@@@@@ @@ S7: i never even saw this button in another el- elevator SS: @@@@@@@@@@ {parallel conversation between S1 and S3 ends} @@@ 23. UNINTELLIGIBLE SPEECH Example: S4: we xxx for the supreme (.) three possibilities S1: next yeah Example: S7: obviously the the PROCESS will x θeɪŋ (.) w- w- will (.) will take (.) at least de- decade

To indicate that a speaker is addressing not the whole group but one speaker in particular, the stretch of speech is marked with (e.g.) , choosing the speaker ID of the addressee. Wherever two or more conversational threads emerge which are too difficult to transcribe, as a general rule only the main thread of conversation is transcribed. The threads which are not transcribed are treated like a contextual event and indicated between curly brackets { }.

Unintelligible speech is represented by x’s approximating syllable number and placed between tags. If it is possible to make out some of the sounds uttered, a phonetic transcription of the x’s is added between tags.

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24. TRANSCRIPTION BORDERS

The beginning of the transcript is noted by indicating the CD number, the track number and the exact position of the respective track in minutes and seconds.

The end of the transcript is noted in the same way.

(gap 00:06:36) {multiple parallel conversations, hardly intelligible}

A gap in the transcription is indicated in parentheses, including its length in hh:mm:ss. Curly brackets { } are used in order to specify the reasons for or the circumstances of the gap.

(nrec 00:00:45) {change of minidisk}

An interruption in the recording is indicated in the same way, but abbreviated as “nrec” (i.e. non-recorded). The length you indicate will normally be a guess.

Appendix A2 Spelling conventions

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Appendix A2 Spelling conventions Available at: http://www.univie.ac.at/voice/documents/VOICE_spelling_conventions_v2-1.pdf

Spelling conventions Version 2.1 June 2007

1. CHARACTERS abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

2. DECAPITALIZATION Example: S8: so you really can control my english

3. BRITISH SPELLING British spelling

4. SPELLING EXCEPTIONS center, theater behavior, color, favor, labor, neighbor defense, offense disk program travel (-l-: traveled, traveler, traveling) Example: S2: we are NOT quite sure if it will REALLY be (.) privatized next year

Only alphabetic Roman characters are used in the transcript. No diacritics, umlauts or non-roman characters are permitted in the running text.

No capital letters are used except for marking emphasis (cf. mark-up conventions).

British English spelling is used to represent naturally occurring ELF speech. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), 7th edition, is used as the primary source of reference. If an entry gives more than one spelling variant of a word, the first variant is chosen. If there are two separate entries for British and American spelling, the British entry is selected.

The 12 words listed on the left and all their derivatives are spelled according to American English conventions (e.g. colors, colorful, colored, to color, favorite, favorable, to favor, in favor of, etc.). In addition, all words which can be spelled using either an -is or an -iz morpheme are spelled with -iz (e.g. to emphasize, organizations, realization, recognized, etc.).

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5. NON-ENGLISH WORDS Example: S1: wieso oesterreich? {why austria}

Example: S3: c’est ferme? {is it closed}

Non-English words are rendered in the standard variant of the original language (i.e. no non-standard dialect). The roman alphabet is always used, also in the case of languages like Arabic or Japanese. No umlauts (e.g. NOT österreich), no diacritics (e.g. NOT fermé) and no non-roman characters are permitted.

6. FULL REPRESENTATION OF WORDS

Example: S7: the students that (.) decide freely to enter (.) this kind of master knows (.) for example that he can (.) at the end achieve (.) sixty credits 7. FULL REPRESENTATION OF NUMBERS, TITLES & ABBREVIATIONS oh/zero, two, three, … one hundred, nineteen ten, eighteen twenty-seven, … missis (for Mrs), mister, miss, mis (for Ms), doctor, professor, … et cetera, saint thomas, okay,…

8. LEXICALIZED REDUCED FORMS cos gonna, gotta, wanna

9. CONTRACTIONS i’m, there’re, how’s peter, running’s fun, … i’ve, they’ve, it’s got, we’d been, … tom’ll be there, he’d go for the first, … we aren’t, i won’t, he doesn’t, …

Although words may not be fully pronounced or may be pronounced with a foreign accent, they are generally represented in standard orthographic form. S7 is Italian and pronounces the he in he can as /ɪ/, swallowing the initial h. Nevertheless, this is regarded as a minor instance of L1 accent and therefore represented in standard orthography (he).

Numbers are fully spelled out as whole words. British English hyphenation rules apply. Titles and terms of address are fully spelled out. Forms that are usually abbreviated in writing, but spoken as complete words are fully spelled out.

Lexicalized phonological reductions are limited to the four on the left. All other non-standard forms are fully spelled out (e.g. /hæftə/ = have to).

Whenever they are uttered, all standard contractions are rendered. This refers to verb contractions with be (am, is are), have (have, has, had), will and would as well as not-contractions.

Appendix A2 Spelling conventions

what’s it mean, where’s she live, how’s that sound … let’s

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Additionally, ’s is used to represent does when reduced and attached to a wh-word. It is also used to represent the pronoun us in the contracted form let’s.

10. HYPHENS Example: Hyphens are used according to British English S3: more than thirteen years of experience er hyphenation rules. The OALD, 7th edition, is working in (.) er (.) design and development (.) used as the primary source of reference. er of (1) real-time software (.) er for industrial (.) implications Example: S2: we would allow that within er an international cooperation (.)

If an entry gives more than one spelling variant of a word, the first variant is chosen.

11. ACRONYMS Example: Acronyms (i.e. abbreviations spoken as one S10: for the development of joint programmes word) are transcribed like words. They are not within the unica networks. highlighted in any way. 12. DISCOURSE MARKERS All discourse markers are represented in orthography as shown below. The lists provided are closed lists. The items in the lists are standardized and may not represent the exact sound patterns of the actual discourse markers uttered. yes, yeah, yah okay, okey-dokey mhm, hm aha, uhu

Backchannels and positive minimal feedback

no n-n, uh-uh er, erm huh

Negative minimal feedback

yay, yipee, whoohoo, mm: haeh a:h, o:h, wow, poah oops ooph ts, pf ouch, ow sh, psh oh-oh:, u:h

(closed sound-acknowledgement token) (open sound-acknowledgement token)

Hesitation/filler Tag-question Exclamations joy/enthusiasm questioning/doubt/disbelief astonishment/surprise apology exhaustion disregard/dismissal/contempt pain requesting silence anticipating trouble

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ur oow Example: S3: he: Example: SX-m: ach ja {oh yes}

disapproval/disgust pity, disappointment What are clearly L1-specific discourse markers are marked as foreign words. Due to the wide range of these phenomena in different languages, the L1-list is open-ended. A translation is added whenever this is possible.

Appendix B: VOICE Corpus Header Text below available at: http://www.univie.ac.at/voice/page/corpus_information Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) Version 2.0 Online, January 2013 Project Director Barbara Seidlhofer Project Funding – VOICE is funded by FWF, the Austrian Science Fund (Project No. L448) – These funds were further supplemented by a contribution from Oxford University Press in 2008 and 2009. Supporting funds were also provided in the early pilot phase by Oxford University Press and by the Hochschuljubiläumsstiftung der Stadt Wien. Size 1,023,082 orthographically defined words, totalling 110 hours 35 minutes and 56 seconds of recording. Source Description VOICE is based on audio-recordings of 151 naturally-occurring, non-scripted, face-to-face interactions involving 753 identified individuals from 49 different first language backgrounds using English as a lingua franca (ELF), i.e. English used as a common means of communication among speakers from different first-language backgrounds. The recordings were carried out between July 2001 and November 2007, usually using portable mini-disc recorders with external microphones. Most of the audio-recordings are supplemented by detailed field notes including information about the nature of the speech event and the interaction taking place as well as about the participants engaging in these ELF interactions. The interactions recorded are complete speech events from different domains (educational, leisure, professional) and of different speech event types (conversation, interview, meeting, panel, press conference, question-answer session, seminar discussion, service encounter, working group discussion, workshop discussion). The audio-recordings were transcribed, checked and proof-read by trained transcribers and researchers in accordance with the VOICE mark-up and spelling conventions [2.1] (see http://www.univie. ac.at/voice/page/transcription_general_information). Details for each electronic text are given in the individual text headers. The principles and practices underlying the selection and design of the corpus are documented in the project and sampling description. Publication Statement Barbara Seidlhofer, Stefan Majewski, Ruth Osimk-Teasdale, Marie-Luise Pitzl, Michael Radeka Spitalgasse 2, AAKH Hof 8 1090 Vienna Austria Telephone: +43 1 427742446 Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.univie.ac.at/voice The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) was created by Barbara Seidlhofer (project director) and Angelika Breiteneder, Theresa Klimpfinger, Stefan Majewski, Marie-Luise

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Pitzl (project researchers). Minor revisions were gathered by Ruth Osimk-Teasdale and Michael Radeka and corrections were made by Ruth Osimk-Teasdale. VOICE 2.0 Online (which is based on VOICE 2.0 XML) is freely available at the VOICE Project’s website http://www.univie.ac.at/ voice conditional on compliance with the Terms of Use specified there. The original audio files are held at the Department of English, University of Vienna. 23 selected audio files are available as audio streams in the VOICE Online interface at the VOICE Project’s website http://www. univie.ac.at/voice. The recommended citation for VOICE 2.0 Online is: VOICE. 2013. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version 2.0 Online). Director: Barbara Seidlhofer; Researchers: Angelika Breiteneder, Theresa Klimpfinger, Stefan Majewski, Ruth Osimk-Teasdale, Marie-Luise Pitzl, Michael Radeka http://voice.univie.ac.at (date of last access). The short citation for VOICE 2.0 Online is: VOICE. 2013. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version 2.0 Online). http:// voice.univie.ac.at (date of last access). For further information about availability and copyright permissions, please see the Terms of Use. For further enquiries please contact the VOICE Project at [email protected]. Project and Sampling Description The most wide-spread contemporary use of English throughout the world is that of English as a lingua franca (ELF), i.e. English used as a common means of communication among speakers from different first-language backgrounds (see Seidlhofer 2005 and Seidlhofer 2011). Nevertheless, linguistic descriptions have as yet focused almost entirely on English as it is spoken and written by its native speakers. The VOICE project seeks to redress the balance by providing the first general corpus capturing spoken ELF interactions as they happen naturally in various contexts. VOICE was designed and compiled to make possible a linguistic description of this most common contemporary use of English by providing a corpus of spoken ELF interactions which is freely accessible to linguistic researchers all over the world. The corpus is stored in a TEI-based XML format and rendered into HTML online with a set of XSL Transformation stylesheets. The unit chosen for sampling data for inclusion in VOICE is that of the speech event. Speech events are (as far as practicalities allowed) included in their entirety. The speech events were selected for inclusion in the corpus on the basis of a set of seven external, i.e. non-linguistic, criteria, which therefore define the target population. Accordingly, VOICE captures speech events that fulfil the following criteria: – English as a lingua franca (operationally defined as any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option) – Spoken – Naturally occurring – Interactive – Face-to-face – Non-scripted – Self-selected participation (i.e. the speakers decided for themselves that they are capable of using ELF to accomplish specific participant roles in the speech event they are taking part in)

Appendix B: VOICE Corpus Header

265

As to the sampling method used, subgroups of the target population were identified on the level of domain and target proportions specified for these as follows: Educational 25%, Leisure 10%, Professional-business 20%, Professional-organizational 35%, Professional-research/science 10%. Short portions of some speech events were left untranscribed. Such gaps in the transcripts can occur for the following reasons: monologues exceeding ten minutes, scripted speech, sensitive content, non-English speech exceeding more than one utterance per speaker, unintelligible speech, longish explanations by VOICE researchers present. Such gaps in transcription are always indicated in the transcript, specifying the reason for the gap, the length of this untranscribed portion and some contextual information about what happens during the gap. Domains: definitions Domains in VOICE denote socially defined situations or areas of activity. ED (educational): The educational domain includes all social situations connected with institutions or people involved in teaching, training or studying. LE (leisure): The leisure domain includes all social situations occurring during the time that is spent doing something one chooses to do when one is not working or studying. P (professional): The professional domain includes all social situations connected with an activity that needs special expertise. PB (professional business): The professional business domain includes all social situations connected with activities of making, buying, selling or supplying goods or services for money. PO (professional organizational): The professional organizational domain includes all social situations connected with activities of international organizations or networks which are not doing research or business. PR (professional research and science): The professional research/science domain includes all social situations connected with the careful study of a subject, especially in order to discover new facts or information about it. Speech Event Types: definitions Speech Event Types (SPETs) in VOICE refer to particular types of speech events which are defined on the basis of purpose, type, and number of participants. con (conversation): A conversation is defined as a speech event at which people interact without a predefined purpose. int (interview): An interview is defined as a speech event at which questions are being asked and answered. mtg (meeting): A meeting is defined as a speech event at which a clearly defined group of people meets to discuss previously specified matters. pan (panel): A panel is defined as a speech event at which a group of specialists give their advice or opinion on a specified topic to an audience. prc (press conference): A press conference is defined as a speech event at which somebody talks to a group of journalists in order to answer their questions and/or to make an official statement.

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qas (question-answer session): A question-answer session is defined as a speech event at which members of an audience ask questions which are answered by specialist speakers. sed (seminar discussion): A seminar discussion is defined as a speech event at which a group of people meets for systematic study and/or work under the direction of one or more experts. sve (service encounter): A service encounter is defined as a speech event at which somebody seeks a service which is provided by somebody else. wgd (working group discussion): A working group discussion is defined as a speech event at which a (temporarily formed) subgroup of a larger group discusses a particular problem or question in order to suggest ways of dealing with it. wsd (workshop discussion): A workshop discussion is defined as a speech event at which a specific group of people exchanges views, ideas or information on a particular topic. Transcription The speech events included in VOICE are transcribed according to the VOICE Transcription Conventions [2.1], comprising the VOICE mark-up conventions and the VOICE spelling conventions. With the exception of four wide-spread lexicalized phonological reductions (cos, gonna, gotta, wanna) and all standard contractions, words are represented in full standard orthographic form. Specific mark-up, e.g. for lengthening, emphasis, speaking modes, rising and falling intonation, allows for selected prosodic features to be included in the transcripts. All false starts and repetitions are represented in the transcripts. Based on TEI Guidelines and for the purposes of this transcription, an utterance in a speech event is normally taken to be “a stretch of speech usually preceded and followed by silence or by a change of speaker”. The speech events in VOICE also include switches into non-English speech. Generally, one utterance per person in non-English speech is transcribed, but longer turns in non-English speech are left untranscribed. If the transcriber is familiar with the language, non-English utterances are transcribed in full standard orthographic form, but excluding diacritics, umlauts, and non-Roman characters. Whenever possible, an approximate translation into English is provided. Words are represented in British English spelling, following the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (7th edition), with the exception of 12 words (as well as their derivatives) which are spelt according to American English usage: center, theater, behavior, color, favor, labor, neighbor, defense, offense, disk, program, and travel (traveled, traveler, traveling). Additionally, all words (verbs, nouns, etc.) which can be spelt with either -ise or -ize are spelt with the -ize variant in the transcripts. For the rationale behind this decision see Breiteneder, Pitzl, Majewski and Klimpfinger 2006. In addition to manual checking and proof-reading, the individual transcripts were checked with the OpenOffice.org spellchecker. Furthermore, spelling in the entire corpus was checked against the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary lexicon. Minor revisions and corrections in some of the corpus texts were made in July 2012.

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Index Accommodation 166, 231, 232, 237 Annotation 79, 85, 87, 88, 90–98, 100, 103, 224 Antonym 106 Awareness – Awareness of multilingualism 195, 206 – ELF awareness 239, 249 – Intercultural awareness 209, 222, 227, 244, 245 – Language awareness 230, 242 – Metaphor awareness 7, 151–153, 158, 159, 173, 182, 227, 228–230, 242–243, 247 BELF (English as a lingua franca in business) 1–2, 20–22, 82, 114, 140–141, 200, 202, 208, 211, 213–215, 235 Bilateralness 22, 197, 201, 202, 214, 220 Blending 118, 119, 138 Borrowing 117, 138, 204–206, 209, 211 British National Corpus (BNC) 70, 93, 94, 111, 132–137 Capability 77, 189, 243 Chair person 145, 148, 149, 161, 165, 175, 178 Chunks 40, 42, 83, 138, 171 Clarity 152, 223 Cluster 24, 112, 153, 156, 160–161, 164–167, 180, 184, 201, 225, 227, 235 COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) 93, 94, 111, 132–137 Co-construction 80, 88, 102, 227, 237 Code-switching 36, 88, 89, 190, 192, 198, 213–221, 226 Codification 61–64, 70, 76, 97, 111, 132, 133, 229 Coinage 28, 29, 88 Collocation 14, 42, 44–46, 137, 166–167, 183, 184, 228, 248 Comity 146–149 Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) 47, 196, 242–244, 247, 248 Communicative function 5, 40, 68, 94, 96, 98, 102, 106, 208, 223, 224, 247

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510083-012

Community of Practice (CoP) 20, 21, 24, 43, 61, 190, 236–238 Competence 68, 196, 219, 222, 241–243, 247 Compositionality 41, 50, 69, 71–76, 118, 123, 125, 138, 157, 186, 230 – Figurative compositionality 41, 73–76 – Metaphorical compositionality 123, 138, 157, 230 Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) 51, 53–59, 64, 67, 160 Contextual information 59, 65, 84, 85, 98, 100–102, 224 Conventionality 37, 41, 50, 67, 71, 75, 76, 97, 119, 168, 173, 175, 189, 213 Convergence 19, 131, 132, 231, 232, 237 Conversation analysis (CA) 6, 52, 80, 87, 224, 233, 234 Cooperation 43, 65, 154, 217, 223 Cooperative Principle 62, 65 Corpus 2, 5, 6, 11, 15, 26, 34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 48, 52, 58, 59, 65, 67, 68, 70, 75, 76, 79–103, 108, 110, 111, 121, 131, 133–138, 153, 154, 170, 224, 230, 233–235 Corpus compilation 79, 80, 83, 91, 93, 103 Corpus texts 81, 83–89, 92, 96, 101–103 Creative idiom 5, 6, 16, 40, 60, 76, 79, 83, 86, 90–95, 97–100, 103, 104, 105–139, 140–155, 156, 160, 164, 167, 187, 199, 201, 202, 203, 205, 208, 210, 211, 224, 225, 226–227, 229, 245, 247 Creative product 30, 31, 33–35, 37 Creative writing 28 Creativity – Combinational creativity 30, 51 – Deliberate linguistic creativity 240–242 – Everyday creativity 28, 30, 40 – Exploratory-transformational creativity 30, 32 – Idiomatic creativity 71, 72, 171, 212 – Intentional creativity 28, 35, 40, 62, 65, 67, 100, 106, 122, 150, 232–233 – Lexical creativity 28, 29, 90

284

Index

– Linguistic creativity 2, 4–6, 15, 16, 26–29, 33–35, 37–41, 50, 52–53, 60–61, 64, 65, 67, 69, 75, 77, 78, 79, 86, 88, 90–101, 103, 104, 106, 112, 119, 122, 135, 139, 150, 154, 156–160, 168, 172, 176, 177, 188, 202, 212, 223–226, 228, 230–232, 240–242 – Metaphorical creativity 6, 7, 25, 61, 91, 155, 156–188, 189–222, 223–249 – Norm-following creativity 33–37, 223, 226, 231, 240 – Norm-transcending creativity 33–37, 51, 223, 226, 231 – Rule-governed creativity 27, 29 – Semantic creativity 29, 49 – Unintentional creativity 28 Culture – Large culture(s) 23 – National culture(s) 11, 209, 211 – Professional culture(s) 209 – Regio-culture(s) 23, 25, 41, 43, 55–57, 61, 77, 160, 167, 188, 190, 192, 206, 208–211, 213, 215–218, 219, 222, 227, 244, 245 – Small culture(s) 23 Data-gathering 6, 85–87, 100, 238 Determiner 19, 108, 122, 126–130, 203, 225 Disapproval 179, 208 Discourse analysis 28, 79, 83, 102, 224, 234 Discourse functions 52, 67, 102, 140, 145, 151, 155 Discourse marker 81, 153, 158, 173, 182, 229, 230 Divergence 51, 231, 232 Diversity 16–19, 21, 25, 87, 178, 190, 191, 208, 233, 234, 245 Domain – Conceptual domain 58, 156 – Domain and field 31, 37 – Domain of experience 56 – Educational domain 82 – Leisure domain 82 – Professional domain 82 Domain incongruity 58–63, 67, 68, 96, 97, 114, 119, 171, 172, 173, 176, 182

Effectiveness 50, 67, 79, 98, 141, 190 ELF (English as a lingua franca) – Description of ELF 6, 15, 25, 78–104, 105, 229, 234, 236, 241 – ELF-CoPs 21, 24, 61 – ELF corpora 11, 15, 26, 34, 42, 79, 81, 82, 100, 235 – ELF discourse 140, 221, 226 – ELF findings 223, 235, 236, 249 – ELF groups 24, 33, 190, 195, 236, 238 – ELF interactions 3–7, 13, 15, 21, 23, 25, 34, 37, 39, 41, 43, 50, 52, 55, 66, 67, 76–78, 81, 85, 87, 95, 97–104, 105–139, 140–155, 156–189, 190, 192–206, 208, 213–221, 223–230, 235–237, 241, 244, 247 – Like other *languages 17–18, 39 – Not a variety 15 – Unlike other *languages 17, 18–20, 25, 34, 37, 223 Embodiment 55–57, 112–113, 129, 138, 156, 158, 167–187, 225, 248 Emphasizing 2, 66, 87, 105, 119, 124, 127, 150–153, 155, 158, 160–161, 169, 171, 179, 182, 186–187, 203, 208, 211–213, 215, 220, 222, 226–227, 231 Endonormative 24, 35, 36, 225 *English – *English only 9, 16 – Spread of *English 9 English Language Teaching (ELT) 5, 8, 9, 76, 121, 138, 203, 249 Ethnography of communication 6, 79, 80, 83–87, 100–103, 208, 234, 237 European Union (EU) 9, 127 Exonormative 35, 36 Explicitness 2, 143–145, 152, 155, 226 External criteria 81, 82 Face 109, 110, 112, 125, 145, 151, 153, 164, 168, 171, 175, 201, 226, 247 Face-threatening 142, 145, 155, 227, 231 Figurative 29, 41, 48, 63, 64, 71, 73–76, 117, 243 Figure of speech 28, 51, 74, 242, 244 Fixed expressions 44, 45, 69, 228

Index

Form and function 6, 40, 98–100 Formula 6, 44, 146, 148, 149, 243 Formulaic language 45, 46, 212 Frequency – High-frequency expressions 42, 43, 46 – Low-frequency expressions 42, 43, 244 Gradability 41 Group identity 22, 150 Habitat factor 197, 208 Hedging 144, 145, 153, 158, 173, 229, 247 Hesitation 81, 87, 103, 150, 186 Humor 2, 66, 116, 125, 140–143, 151, 155, 169, 177–178, 187, 208, 212, 221, 227, 244, 247 Hyperbole 125, 151 Hyponym 45, 110–111 Ideational 62, 66, 78, 154–155, 227 Identity 10, 22, 23, 43, 150, 192, 206–213, 219, 222, 227 Idiom – Conventional idiom 29, 71, 76, 107–112, 114, 115, 118–120, 124, 125, 129, 130, 132, 136, 142, 146, 149, 153, 155, 158, 159, 160, 164, 170, 177, 183, 185, 187, 199, 201, 203, 208, 212, 213, 224, 241, 243, 246, 248 – Core idiom 74, 75 – Corresponding idiom 91, 98, 116–119, 122, 204, 207, 224 – Creative idiom 5, 6, 16, 40, 60, 76, 79, 83, 86, 90–95, 97–100, 103, 104, 105–139, 140–155, 156, 160, 164, 167, 187, 199, 201–203, 205, 208, 210, 211, 224–227, 229, 245–247 – Narrow definition 45, 50, 75 Idiom decomposition 41, 73–76, 120, 121, 123, 125, 138, 157, 230 Idiom principle 39, 42–46, 75, 121 Idiom variation 5, 6, 41, 43, 49, 50, 72, 76, 93, 94, 98–100, 104–137, 156, 168, 224 Idiomatic expression 46, 89, 211, 243, 248 Idiomaticity 6, 39, 41, 42, 43–50, 95, 167–188, 213

285

Idiomatizing 6, 42–44, 48, 69, 77, 78, 166, 225, 228, 243 Illocutionary force 203 Implicature 145, 154, 212 Implicit conventions 39–41 Implicit indicator 229 IMR 13, 15, 21, 23, 25, 122, 138, 192, 193–199, 219, 221, 244. See also Individual Multilingual Repertoire (IMR) Individual Multilingual Repertoire (IMR) – Idiom-IMR 199, 200, 202 – Metaphor-IMR 199, 200, 202, 211 Inner Circle 12, 19 Interactional 4, 5, 28, 48, 57, 60, 66–68, 78, 103, 140, 154, 155, 222–224, 227, 234, 238, 241 Interactional pragmatics 5, 223 Intercultural communication 22, 238, 245 Interpersonal 5, 40, 62, 66, 78, 149, 153–155, 227, 247 Joke 84, 141, 150, 155, 227, 231 Key clue 211, 212, 215, 216–217, 218–219, 221, 247 L1 speaker 3, 13, 19, 28, 33, 40–43, 46–48, 62, 70 Language change 18, 29, 36, 38, 70, 223, 237 Language contact 11, 190, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 202, 206, 213, 221, 225 Language educators 7, 232, 239, 240–242, 243, 248, 249 Language leakage 202 Languaging 166, 189 Laughter 87, 89, 127, 141, 142, 143, 151, 169, 173, 177, 178, 211, 212 Lexical innovation 118 Lexical substitution 72, 105, 106–127, 129, 130, 137, 138, 140–143, 146, 150, 151, 156, 168, 225 Linguistic recklessness 2 Literariness 27–30, 232, 242, 247 Loanword 117 Mark-up 81, 87–91, 108

286

Index

Maximin communication 9 Meeting 1–2, 82, 114, 120, 141, 148–149, 157–159, 161–162, 165, 175, 201–203, 209, 211, 216, 217, 220, 246 Mental image 110, 113, 211 Metadata 84, 85, 100–103 Metalinguistic comment 159, 206–209, 213, 229, 230, 247 Metaphor – Active metaphor 64, 65–67, 71, 74 – Conceptual metaphor 51, 53–57, 59, 67, 68, 70, 71, 99, 160 – Conventional metaphor 41, 54, 63, 64, 70, 72, 74, 91, 97, 117, 161, 164, 172, 173, 175, 182, 188, 215, 225, 246 – Covert metaphor 63, 64, 97, 169, 180, 223 – Dead metaphor 64–66, 70–72, 74, 76, 97 – Deliberate metaphor 62, 65, 66, 100, 125, 130, 161, 166, 172, 173, 176, 186, 212 – Dynamic metaphor 63, 120, 169, 173, 176, 186, 188 – Historical metaphor 54 – Linguistic metaphor 57–60, 61, 65, 67, 68, 95, 96 – Live metaphor 64, 65 – Ontological metaphor 55, 144 – Opaque metaphor 45, 53, 65, 66, 97, 164 – Orientational metaphor 55, 57 – Overt metaphor 62–64, 97, 105, 119, 120, 125, 130, 138, 140, 156–160, 164, 166, 169, 170, 177, 180, 223, 225 – Process metaphor 57, 58 – Sleeping metaphor 71, 76, 77 Metaphor clines 228–230 Metaphor continuum 70, 230 Metaphor identification 60, 95–97 Metaphor processing 59, 65, 68, 77, 95, 99, 110, 114, 115, 120, 121, 188, 230, 248 Metaphoric potential 57–61, 95, 105, 106, 187, 225 Metaphorical extension 29, 53 Metaphorical pattern 125, 138, 156, 160–167, 179, 187, 225 Metaphoricity – Degrees of metaphoricity 41, 60–66 – Metaphoricity cline 61, 70 Micro-diachronic 238

Miscommunication 1–5, 103, 153–154 Mitigation 140–143, 155, 227, 247 MRP 13, 25, 192–206, 208, 214, 219–221, 235, 244, 245. See also Multilingual Resource Pool (MRP) Multicultural 18, 208, 215, 221, 227 Multifunctional 155, 227 Multilingual ELF speakers 23, 26, 43, 100, 121, 180, 219, 220, 222, 230, 241 Multilingual identity 192, 206–213, 219 Multilingual practices 36, 88, 89, 190, 191, 213, 237 Multilingual Resource Pool (MRP) – Idiom-MRP 199–202, 204, 205 – Metaphor-MRP 199–200, 202, 204, 205 Multilingualism 5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 178, 189–193, 206, 244–245 Multi-word units (MWUs) 43, 45, 46, 74, 228 *Native speaker 11, 12, 14, 15, 44, 46, 47, 48, 149, 239, 243 Nativelike selection 47, 48 Naturally-occurring 3, 4, 5, 28, 39, 41, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 66, 67, 76, 80, 81, 84, 91, 95, 96, 121, 126, 130, 223, 224, 226, 237 Negotiation of meaning 1, 4, 154, 203 Negotiation sequence 184, 189 Non-compositionality 50, 70–76, 121, 129, 138, 228 Non-conformity 32, 39 Non-decomposable 75 Non-*English idioms 43, 204–206, 208–209, 213–221, 225–227 *Non-nativeness 149–150 *Non-native speaker 12, 14, 15, 149 Non-understanding 1, 2, 4, 103, 154, 183 Norms – Breaking norms 30 – Codified norms 39 – Conventional norms 32, 41, 97, 154 – Generative norms 29 – L1 norms 17, 39 – Norms of morphology 29, 231 – Productive norms 29, 231

Index

Open-choice principle 42, 121 Open-choice processing 35 Outer Circle 19 Overlap 57, 87, 89, 146, 195, 196, 201, 202, 215, 220 Paraphrasing 42, 47, 72, 129, 152, 158, 184, 208, 212 Parenthetical comment 152, 153 Pedagogy 7, 228, 238–249 Penalization 154 Perlocutionary effect 145, 204 Phraseology 45, 46 Pluralization 19, 108, 126–127, 225 Poetic function 28 Politeness 145, 247 Post-task activities 246 Pragmatic annotation 90 Prefab 44–46, 49 Productivity 1, 17, 24, 27, 29, 36, 125, 231 Pronunciation variation and coinages (PVC) 88, 118 Proverb 6, 42, 44, 45, 49, 212, 219, 220, 229, 243 Psychology 4, 23, 30–32 Qualitative corpus linguistics 6, 68, 79, 94, 224 Rapport 141, 146–149, 155, 227 Re-contextualization 86, 100, 101, 103, 247 Re-metaphorization 6, 41, 76–77, 99, 105, 121, 122, 139, 156, 224, 227, 228–230, 241, 243 Reporting 152, 161, 208 Representativeness 82, 86 Resonance 63, 70 Restricted exchangeability 46 Sampling unit 81, 83, 84 Second-order language contact 193, 194 Semantic field 110 Semantic properties 72, 102, 105, 109, 186 Semantic relationships 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115, 121, 137, 140, 225 Shared *non-nativeness 149–150 Similect 193, 194, 196

287

Situational adaptability 19, 33 Situational endonormativity 80, 225 Situationality factor 19 Solidarity 149–150, 155, 227 Source domain 176 Speech act 84, 146, 149 Speech community 11, 19, 20, 29, 30, 33, 40, 42, 43, 47, 50, 60, 61, 65, 70, 219, 236 Speech event 2, 19, 24, 25, 79, 81–86, 88–90, 93, 101–103, 111, 112, 119, 125, 129, 145, 148, 156, 158, 160, 161, 165–167, 171, 177–181, 184, 198, 201, 203, 204, 205, 211, 213, 214, 219, 223–225, 237 Stance 143–145, 155, 227 Stereotype 204, 208, 209, 210, 212, 232, 245 Subjectivity 144, 155, 227 Substituted element 106–110, 112, 115, 121, 137 Summarizing 151–153, 155, 164, 182, 226, 234, 235 Superordinate 45, 46, 110 Synonym 45, 46, 54, 87, 106, 109, 131, 243 Systematicity 156–189, 208, 225 – Global 165 – Local 156, 160–167, 187, 208, 223 – Regional 166, 187 Target population 80–82 Task 240, 245, 246, 247 Teacher education 239, 240, 249 Territorial imperative 42, 43 Text header 85 Topic 58–60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 96–97, 114–115, 119, 120, 128, 138, 156, 164–165 Transactional 103, 149, 154, 155, 222, 226, 227, 247 Transcription 2, 6, 79, 80, 85–90, 92, 100, 191, 213, 238 Transcultural 10, 22, 23, 25, 43, 60, 78, 150, 213, 217, 221, 227, 235, 237 Transfer 23, 32, 33, 61, 122, 193, 198, 202, 204, 205, 208, 210, 226 Transient International Group (TIG) 20, 21–25, 36, 43, 61, 82, 165, 187, 189, 195, 198, 220, 225, 236–238

288

Index

Transient language contact 194, 195, 199, 206, 221, 225 Translanguaging 190 Translingual 237 Vague language 4, 153, 229, 230 Variability 15, 16, 19, 33–35, 39, 44, 49, 102, 116, 131, 223 Variation – Morphosyntactic variation 105, 108, 118, 122–137, 151, 156, 168, 225 – Prepositional variation 129, 131, 225 – Syntactic variation 105, 123, 124, 125, 128, 132, 133, 136, 146, 151 Variety 5, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 35, 37, 40, 55, 82, 219, 223, 248

Vehicle 58–61, 63, 66, 70, 71, 96, 97, 114, 115, 120, 138, 150, 156, 165, 167–169, 173, 187, 225 VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English) 1–3, 5, 6, 8, 11–13, 15, 16, 25, 34, 37, 52, 57, 58, 68, 78, 79–104, 105–108, 111, 114, 115, 118, 121–124, 126, 127, 129–131, 136–138, 140, 146, 148, 151–153, 155, 156, 165, 166–171, 174, 177, 180, 183, 184–187, 191–192, 199, 205, 213, 217, 221, 223–226, 229, 241, 246 Wordplay 99, 100, 137, 208–213 World Englishes 9, 10, 15, 47