Politeness Aspects of ELF Interaction

micro-analysis of a conversational encounter in which English is used as a contact
language, or lingua franca (ELF). e analysed conversational data are taken from
the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) and represent a common
ELF setting, viz. an interaction of two international students who share their experience
of and/or concern with safety as an important aspect of their student life. In order
to understand the nature of norms to which the participants orient, it is necessary
to look at the status of ELF vis-à-vis other “Englishes” in the classic Kachruvian
modelling of World Englishes. e paper argues that, rather than being another
regional and/or social variety of English, ELF is a functional variety (register), a
principal communicative resource which users creatively employ and forge to ensure
mutual intelligibility and sociality, i.e., warrant both communicative and social
goals. It is further argued that, while engaged in the interaction, participants carry
out relational work in which they negotiate their mutual relationships and construe
norms of appropriateness “here and now”, i.e., within the immediate community of
practice. It is against the background of this normality, or unmarkedness, that they
evaluate each other’s behaviour as (non/im/over)polite, rude, etc. In accordance
with the post-modernist/constructivist politeness modelling it is also argued that
politeness is subject to discursive negotiation and covers that slice of the spectrum of
relational work which is evaluated by the hearers as going beyond the appropriate
(unmarked, non-polite) behaviour. As to their politeness aspect, the analysed ELF
situation is characterized by the participants’ effort to accommodate each other and
to establish and maintain a mutually cooperative environment.