Analysing English as a Lingua Franca in Video Games: Linguistic Features, Experiential and Functional Dimensions of Online and Scripted Interactions (Linguistic Insights)

This book examines the English Lingua Franca (ELF) uses in a corpus of online and scripted video-game interactions. While research generally explores the playful and technological aspects of computer-mediated communication, this study focuses on the strategies of cooperation, language simplification and authentication, lexical creativity and meaning negotiation that are generally activated within the «community of practice of gamers» to facilitate cross-cultural conversations. The scripted exchanges, instead, are examined by means of the ALFA Model (Analysis of Lingua Franca in Audiovisual texts), which is devised to enquire into the extent to which the non-native participants’ language variations are part of the multimodal actualisation of the cognitive construct of «non-native speakers», to which authors resort in order to prompt specific reactions on the part of the receivers. Finally, since the participants’ turns in both online and scripted interactions are visually represented as written messages on screen, this research also contributes to the development of the description of written ELF variations, so far not thoroughly explored in the literature. Contents 7 Introduction 9 1. Exploration of English as a Lingua Franca 17 2. Human dimension of Computer-Mediated Communication 29 3. An introduction to the analysis of the selected corpus of interactions 41 4. Analysis of typographic deviations from standard norms 53 5. Analysis of lexical and structural deviations 65 6. Analysis of speakers’ behaviour 81 7. In-game scripted interactions 97 8. Analysis of in-game scripted interactions 107 Conclusions 127 References 131 This book focuses on the English lingua-franca uses in video-game interactions. The typographic and linguistic deviations from the standard norms are investigated, along with the cooperation strategies and status asymmetries of the participants in the online interactions, and the role of language in creating ideological representations.