English as a Lingua Franca in Intercultural Email Communication, a corpus analysis

This dissertation investigates the use of English as a Lingua Franca as a vehicular language in academic email communication among International and Erasmus students. A corpus of student-initiated emails messages addressed to professors and university officials was collected and through a tag-based annotation procedure a classification of ELF occurrences from a linguistic, pragmatic and cultural point of view was carried out. ELF is characterized by high variability as it differs from standardized conventional linguistic systems and stable norms. Nevertheless, a series of recurring patterns can be identified in terms of linguistic variability and other linguistic resources according to the context of use. Based on previous theoretical contributions, a quantitative analysis of recurring features was conducted, from which a consequential qualitative evaluation is developed. The objective is to classify these features in order to determine whether they are employed to reach communicative effectiveness. Furthermore, the analysis also considers differences in the management of this particular type of institutional communication considering the cultural diversity of the interlocutors.