Building a corpus of ELF (English Lingua Franca) user negotiated interactions

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This is the first attempt to collect spoken data in Model United Nations simulations in order to prepare a corpus for linguistic research. Much was learned in the process of doing this research from methodological and technical standpoints. Despite a number of difficulties (such as, the move to online events during COVID that rendered it difficult to collect spontaneous multiparty speech data) the efforts so far have made it possible to do several qualitative analyses in order to ascertain the comparability of the English as a LIngua Franca produced by the speakers in this corpus (MUNCE--Model United Nations Corpus of English) with other ELF corpora such as ACE (Asian Corpus of English) and VOICE (Vienna Oxford Corpus of English). The areas compared thus far include, the use of repair strategies for accommodation, and the production of non-standard forms by ELF speakers that are also seen in native speaker language. Analyses still underway and pending publication include a comparison of creative instances of metaphor and hybrid idioms found across ELF corpora, and accommodation strategies used by native speakers when interacting with ELF speakers, as well as a comparison of the use of redundancy for mutual intelligibility. Several book chapters, journal articles and conference presentations have been produced on the basis of these preliminary qualitative analyses with plans for a continuation of this research (including further data collection, transcription, coding and eventual quantitative analyses) even after and beyond the conclusion of the grant period.