Lexical Bundles in ELF Business Meetings

• It is widely accepted that lexical bundles can provide useful insights into the characteristics of different types of discourse. However, studies have tended to focus on native speaker or language learner use, and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), English used as a common means of communication among speakers from different first-language backgrounds, has received limited attention in this respect. Given that ELF is widely used in a business context, the research reported in this paper is an initial attempt to characterize ELF used in one business community of practice by identifying the frequency and function of lexical bundles in a small corpus of ELF business meetings. It draws on a subcorpus of business meeting transcripts from the Vienna-Oxford Corpus of English (VOICE) to identify the most frequent two-, three- and four-word bundles used, and compares these to lexical bundles used in ELF in other domains and in ENL business meetings (Handford, 2010). Results showed similar levels of use of frequent bundles in ELF business meetings to the comparative data, and a high degree of overlap. Many of the bundles used in ELF business meetings were the same as those used in general contexts, suggesting that there are there are stable core features in spoken ELF, although key bundles indicated certain differences. Furthermore, a number of the ELF business bundles corresponded to frequent ENL bundles. Many of the bundles used in ELF business meetings were associated with developing relationships, such as providing verbal feedback (yeah yeah yeah, mhm mhm mhm) hedging (I don’t know, I think that), and making interpersonal references (you know, you can see), and vague expressions (more or less, and so on) were also common. Idiomatic expressions tended to be avoided, with the exception of at the end of (the day) which had a high frequency in ELF, as in ENL business meetings.

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