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

ISBN-13: 9783034321389 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 158 str.

Pietro Luigi Iaia

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Introduction - 1. Exploration of English as a Lingua Franca - 2. Human dimension of Computer-Mediated Communication - 3. An introduction to the analysis of the selected corpus of interactions - 4. Analysis of typographic deviations from standard norms - 5. Analysis of lexical and structural deviations - 6. Analysis of speakers' behaviour - 7. In-game scripted interactions - 8. Analysis of in-game scripted interactions - Conclusions - References

O autorze

Pietro Luigi Iaia is Researcher of English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Salento (Italy) and holds a Ph.D. in English Linguistics applied to Translation Studies. His research interests and publications focus on the cognitive-semantic and socio-cultural dimensions of audiovisual translation, and on ELF variations in cross-cultural audiovisual and computer-mediated communication.