Interpersonal Positioning in English as a Lingua Franca Interactions

Svitlana Klötzl, Birgit Swoboda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367244897
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000769340
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a critical reflection on interpersonal positioning across both large- and small-scale contexts and highlights the multi-faceted nature of intercultural communication in today's global world. The volume establishes positioning primarily as the negotiation of interpersonal relationships, and draws on concepts from across disciplines by way of reappraisal before applying them to two specific domains: MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) and private ELF couple interaction. While acknowledging and showcasing the unique features of positioning in these two contexts, Klötzl and Swoboda point to their commonalities by looking at how language and specifically English is used as a communicative resource in lingua franca situations. The book also identifies new directions for future methodological innovations in that it demonstrates how the same interaction can be looked at in methodologically-different ways and how the authors' own positions projected on to such interaction create an integrated tri-partite perspective on the two domains. Shedding light on interpersonal positioning in different contexts and in turn on global communication more generally, this book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in discourse analysis, pragmatics, computer-mediated communication, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.

1
Introduction

From Text to Discourse

In these times of constant extension of global interaction networks, there is a corresponding need for the promotion of awareness of how people relate to each other across cultures and communities in the process of their communication. The purpose of this book is to raise this awareness by reflecting on the process of human communication as interpersonal positioning. Such positioning is understood as people’s relating to each other by mediation of their languages, whereby any language use is interpersonally motivated by a particular communicative purpose. The book identifies this process of positioning – the negotiation of interpersonal relationships – as central in any communication by focusing on the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). It does so by looking at two seemingly very different communication situations in which English is used as a lingua franca: computer-mediated MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) and private couple interaction. Moving from the large scale of in-the-game interaction (henceforth ingame) to the small scale of ELF couple talk, the book contributes to contemporary thinking about how one can establish effective communication interculturally in a widening global net of interaction. While showing differences between such interactions, the book also explores their essential similarities and how these have implications for understanding pragmatics of language and discourse in general. This book, therefore, aims not only at showing how English is used as a communicative resource in particular lingua franca situations, but also at shedding light on the nature of social interaction as the negotiation of interpersonal relationships. This process of positioning – whereby particular communicative purposes and effects are achieved interpersonally – is placed centre stage in this book. Before providing a more detailed explanation of the book’s approach to positioning, in the following brief account we outline the scope of the study and provide preliminary definitions for the notions most relevant to this research, specifically ELF, ingame and intimate interaction. We also justify why two different empirical studies have been brought together by arguing that the use of ELF in both domains is a function of the relationship between text and discourse in general.

Why English as a Lingua Franca?

This book is about positioning in English as a lingua franca. One of its purposes, then, is to contribute to ELF research by investigating ELF at the macro level of ingame communication as well as at the basic level of communication between two individuals in a romantic relationship. This, in turn, has to do with two questions. The first concerns the issues related to the global spread of English. The second question regards the general nature of language and communication as expressed in the macrocosm of the global gaming network and the microcosm of ELF intimate interactions. In the following, we clarify what one might understand of the term Global English, and what bearings our own understanding of it can have on its exploration as ELF.

At least two kinds of factors related to globalization make it possible for people from different parts of the world to meet and communicate in either virtual reality or a face-to-face relationship. On the one hand, there are developments in telecommunications and the Internet as well as increased mobility. On the other hand, the global spread of English has come about as a result. As Jenkins, Cogo and Dewey (2011, 303) claim, English has become “at once a globalized and globalizing phenomenon”. Naturally enough, discussion of the unprecedented spread of English has yielded a confusing multiplicity of terms. To list few of them: English as a foreign language (EFL), World Englishes (WEs), English as an international language (EIL) and Global English (GE). All these terms refer in one way or another to English as a variety, as the language conventionally associated with particular well-defined lingua-cultural communities. However, people all over the world now, more often than not, use English as a means of communication between/among rather than within such communities. The main objective here is not to interact with members of specific communities or to conform to their norms but rather to “make use of the (only) language shared by all interactants, the lingua franca, in order to achieve the fullest communication possible” (Seidlhofer 2011, 17–18).

As for the more general term of English as a global language (EGL), sociolinguistic research provides for two ways of understanding it (Mufwene 2010; Schneider 2011). The first connects it to World Englishes as varieties of particular local communities. The second sees English as an international language that serves the purposes of various (often professional) global networks. Both focus on particular linguistic features that make such Global English a variety used by a particular group of people with a shared (primary or secondary) socio-cultural background. The first can be traced back to the processes of colonization and has to do with the development of English as a consequence of outside foreign intervention. Such English is adapted by groups of people for their local communicative and communal needs and has resulted in what Kachru (1992) refers to as World Englishes of the Outer Circle. The Kachruvian model of World Englishes is based on distinctions between the countries/regions where English is used. The Inner Circle refers to countries where English is a native/first language (e.g. Great Britain, the USA), the Outer Circle to countries where it is used as a second language (e.g. India), and the Expanding Circle to the countries where it is taught as a foreign language (e.g. Ukraine, Austria). The varieties of the Outer Circle (like Nigerian English) normally serve the needs of a particular local community and are endonormative (creating their own norms ‘from within’ for the purposes of the particular community) and independent (Schneider 2011, 35). Thus, the term World Englishes describes globally scattered varieties evolved from Inner Circle English that serve the everyday social needs of a particular primary ‘local’ community. It seems quite obvious that, by definition, those varieties cannot be treated as a global means of communication. What was globally spread has become subject to local constraint and control.

The second understanding of EGL has to do with EIL that is associated with particular communities of professional and institutional use. Such English serves as a means of communication outside one’s primary social/cultural space and relates to global rather than local communities, to domains of use and areas of knowledge and expertise such as medicine, engineering, commerce, technology, politics or gaming that often transcend national boundaries and are global by their very nature. So, EIL is often used for the description of the globally scattered varieties that people use inter-nationally for global purposes in institutional and professional or other public domains. Here again, English is considered as a language variety associated with particular relatively well-defined communities.

Clearly, English conceived in this way no longer accounts for its use in the world of extending networks of digital communication and migrating populations. In most EGL interactions, users cannot rely on a pre-conceived, shared familiarity with socio-cultural knowledge and conventions but instead engage in the process of negotiating for common ground to relate to strangers. In the contemporary world, there are many kinds of general uses of English all over the globe that cannot be accounted for by the categories of local or global–‘native’, ‘national’, ethnic, institutional or otherwise – community. Here, one has to do with communication without a community, so to speak, or socialization without a society (Seidlhofer 2011; Widdowson 2003, 2015). Such situations and uses, in our view, require the languages to be conceived as a lingua franca, a process of language use that is, as Seidlhofer (2011, 25) notes, “functionally and not formally defined: it is not a variety of English but a variable way of using it – English that functions as a lingua franca”. In other words – in Seidlhofer’s words – ELF can be defined, as “the underlying encoding possibilities that speakers make use of” (ibid., 111) and exploit in various ways to meet their communicative needs. These encoding possibilities are inherent in what Widdowson refers to as virtual potential or virtual language, which is the “resource for making meaning immanent in the language which simply has not hitherto been encoded and so is not, so to speak, given official recognition” (Widdowson 2003, 48–49).

In understanding EGL as ELF, we take the communicative process rather than community as a starting point for exploration. The virtual potential of ELF (or any other language), by definition, cannot be used exclusively within the limits of whatever variety as confined within a particular community. It is realized through variation at the individual level in numerous globally scattered interactions. Such virtuality, however, is not ELF-specific: the encoding possibilities of English are not the only resource for variation in ELF. In ELF interactions, this of course results in extensive linguistic hybridity (Klötzl 2014, 2015, 2016) that comprises both the virtual resources of EGL and other available languages within it. Our suggestion, however, is that ELF is not so much about formal variation and the ways it differs from other language uses, but rather about how such formal features are put into pragmatic effect: how the various forms of ELF are symptomatic of the general communicative process.

Such a communicative process, of course, is enacted by and through people, by ELF users. Here, the term “ELF users” must be clarified. In Seidlhofer’s (2011, 7) definition, ELF is taken to mean “any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option”. ELF is defined as the only shared language for all interactants with different first languages: English native speakers are not an exception in this respect. As in Seidlhofer’s definition, the participants discussed in this book are speakers of different first languages, and English is the only possible medium of communication for them. Despite the fact that for the purpose of exploring one of the domains, namely couple discourse, we recruited only non-native speakers of English, we follow Seidlhofer’s argument for the appropriateness of such inclusion of native speakers for any ELF setting description. As we have suggested, any ELF interaction is symptomatic of the general communicative process and so is similar rather than different from any other language use. What is specific about gamers and intimate partners as ELF speakers is that they find themselves in a unique lingua-cultural situation in which the dynamic interplay of the different factors and the pragmatic functioning of language become more apparent and noticeable.

The general point we would want to make is that English, like any other language, can only be globally spread through contact on the basic interpersonal level, whereby people in various ways engage in the process of using virtual resources of English and other available languages to pragmatic effect in their actual behaviour (Klötzl 2015). The book’s primary concern, then, is not with how far ELF users conform to the attested/actual/encoded norms of usage of whatever community, but rather how they exploit virtual linguistic resources for making meaning and achieving their communicative purposes. Put another way, the focus is on how gamers and partners communicate through, with and in ELF.

Why Ingame (Disembodied) Interaction?

One of the book authors can look back on a long personal experience as a gamer, as she has been playing computer-games for 26 years. She soon realized that gaming is not a lonely activity but rather brings people together and provides topics for discussion. When she started playing World of Warcraft® in 2004 (Blizzard 2004) during her study of linguistics, she believed that language use ingame was different from that in other domains. However, the more she played, used and researched the gamers’ language, the more she discovered that although its formal features were strikingly peculiar and so undecipherable for outsiders, language itself functioned to the same pragmatic effect as in any other kind of human interaction. The author has been kept busy over the years with questions like: why is gaming discourse relevant when discussing communication? Is it not just a game and a leisure activity? What makes gaming discourse so special? Is it solely about the practical business of achieving gaming goals?

Indeed, the first associations that come to mind when thinking of (interpersonal) communication is that of face-to-face communication. It was, however, very early in the history of mankind that communication left the space of immediate personal proximity and made use of media to overcome the limits of bodily closeness. Messengers and writing freed communication from the cage of the body. Methods of both written and spoken distant communication have improved over time to today’s abilities, where online technology allows numerous forms of communication from synchronous chat (written), voice-chat (spoken) and video (visual) chat/calls to asynchronous communication like e-mail (written), pod-casts (spoken) and videos like twitch and YouTube (visual).

We shall use the term disembodied instead of digital communication or dislocated communication, as O’Driscoll (2011) called it. Dislocated communication appears to focus on the spatial dimension of communication. The more common term, computer-mediated communication, concentrates on the mediation of language through computers and other tools, like smartphones or tablet PCs. The technological developments of the few last decades have increased the importance of digital tools in our lives. Linguists realized early the importance of the influence of technologies on language, giving rise to research disciplines such as EMC (electronically mediated communication) and CMC (computer-mediated communication) that date back to the 1990s (Brock and Schildhauer 2017; Herring, Stein and Virtanen 2013). Such research often disregards the human body and its biological resources, such as the voice and the ears, as tools of communication. Dürscheid (2005), among other scholars, goes as far as arguing “that media allow for distance communication and, therefore, explicitly states that face-to-face communication does not need a medium” (Brock and Schildhauer 2017). Rather, media linguistics normally use the technological reading of the term medium with regard to media as tools for producing, storing and transmitting signs. Hence, pen and paper, printing and computers all fall under this definition (ibid.). Other scholars, like Luginbühl (2015), argue against such a strict technological reading of the term medium, as the concept offers several interconnected semiotic and pragmatic aspects that are of equal interest: for example, how the choice of a medium influences the sign systems (which systems can be used and how they are processed), but also how the speakers and social groups influence and are influenced by the medium. Luginbühl fuses the technological, culture-related and code-related readings of the term medium. The term media, in turn, is often used by the general public to refer to mass media, print media or social media and denotes certain social spheres or institutions that follow particular social patterns, norms and rules (Brock and Schildhauer 2017, 16).

In general, digital communication refers to the transmission of information in the form of digits. It deals with the code and transmission of language, not with the speaker. Even though the Latin root of digital (digitus, “finger”) provides a physical component to digital communication, the speaker is not normally the focus. We want to set the speaker centre stage in our work, and thus we use the term disembodied communication as the counterpart of embodied interpersonal communication. That said, disembodied communication allows for time and spac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: From Text to Discourse
• 2 The Discourse of ELF: Alignment of Factors in Two Domains
• 3 Communication as Positioning: Discourse as Interpersonally Motivated
• 4 Positioning as Methodological Approach: Polyphony of Perspectives
• 5 Disembodied Communication: Positioning in Computer-Mediated Gaming Discourse
• 6 A Love Affair With ELF: Positioning as Interpersonal Dynamics in ELF Couple Discourse
• 7 Conclusion: Positioning as a Universal Process of Human Communication
• Appendix: Selected Transcription Conventions
• Index