8. Speaker stances in native and non-native English conversation: I + verb constructions

In lingua franca communication the participants operate under the assumption of mutual intelligibility despite the fact that they are often unable to know whether their interlocutors’ variety of English in fact provides the same repertoire of linguistic expression and hence the context to decode utterances in the sense intended by the speaker. The article investigates the expression of speaker stance in English L1 and English as a lingua franca (ELF) discourse, examining in particular the use of I+verb constructionsin order to establish whether EFL (English as a foreign language) speakers’ talk patterns of subjectivity typically differ from those in L1 English discourse. Findings suggest that ELF discourse differs indeed from English L1 discourse in the use of verbtypes, speaker-specific patterns of the expression of stance and speakers’ preference for expressing prototypical rather than grammaticalized and pragmaticalized meanings.