Micro-diachronic analysis of interaction: Tracing emergent practices in ELF conversations

Description

The situationally-emergent, dynamic, and multilingual nature of communication in English as a lingua franca (ELF) has led scholars to emphasize the importance of transience in recent years. Moving away from the more established notion of community of practice, research has focused on studying and describing communication in short-lived settings, in particular in so-called Transient International Groups (TIGs, see Pitzl 2018). Investigating group conversations in TIGs comes with a number of theoretical and methodological implications. For this purpose, the ongoing research project on ‘English as a lingua franca in transient international groups’ has developed a micro-diachronic approach to the study of spoken interaction. Drawing upon and combining a range of established research traditions, micro-diachronic analysis of interaction seeks to describe emergent – rather than existing – linguistic practices.
Making use of qualitative as well as semi-automatic data coding and QDA software, micro-diachronic analysis of interaction aims to provide in-depth discussions as well as novel visualizations that help us reveal how different groups of multilingual speakers develop different kinds of multilingual practices, for example. In addition to different ways of using multilingual elements, the presence (or absence) of metalinguistic discussions about language (and/or particular languages) certainly plays a role in the creation of shared transcultural territory and the formation of group identity. The processes revealed through micro-diachronic analysis of interaction are indicative of how multilingual speakers negotiate and develop pragmatic conventions more generally. The methodology might thus be of use for a wide range of interactive data as well as for a wide range of linguistic phenomena.

Period	12 Nov 2025
Held at	Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Anglistik, Austria
Degree of Recognition	Local