부산대학교 도서관

English participates in an unusually multilingual and complex language contact: it is in contact with virtually any other language in the world, and from these contact varieties with traces of the other language, “similects”, arises English as a lingua franca (ELF), a higher-order contact between contact varieties. This chapter presents a conceptualisation of ELF from three perspectives: the macro-social, the micro-social and the cognitive. The author derives a series of hypotheses from theoretical assumptions about ELF and from previous research in related fields. The hypotheses are then examined in the light of data from the corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA). The results highlight tendencies towards both simplification and complexification in ELF. The principal processes involving all three perspectives of analysis (the macro, the micro and the cognitive) are approximation and fixing, which also drive change across each of these levels.