A Corpus-Based Study On Linguistic Features Of Chinese ELF Speakers In China-ASEAN Communication Setting

The term lingua franca means any lingua medium of communication between people of different mother tongues, for whom it is the only choice of communication. English has inevitably become a global lingua franca in terms of the number of users, and it is widely used by various communities in different regions throughout the world. Also there is a growing momentum of English as a lingua franca (ELF) with the process of globalization.The research on ELF began during 1980s, and has been prosperous since 2000. In the first decade of the 21st century, research on ELF has attracted the attention of the applied linguistic academia. The studies are largely conducted in contexts that take English as a foreign language and have gained remarkable achievements, especially the studies conducted in Europe and Asian. Also, corpora of spoken data over one million words are completed, such as VOICE and ELFA. The current trend of ELF study has turned from describing linguistic features to probe into the universal regularity inside them, their underlying motivations, and how they are affected by the users’ mother tongues.In recent years, China’s status is rising in the world, and the Chinese language is popular around the world. Thus English carrying Chinese characteristics caught the eyes of English users, and some of the usages are received by different varieties of English. Moreover, the importance of Asia-Pacific area has been recognized. The China-ASEAN Expo and China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit have been held annually since 2004, which strengthen the cooperation on economy, trade and culture between China and ASEAN countries. It is of significance to conduct research on linguistic features of Chinese ELF speakers in China-ASEAN communication setting.In this study, the transcriptions of the corpus data were studied individually, extra mark-ups were added to the text files where lexicogrammar usages and syntactic features were innovative. When all the mark-ups were done, the text files were imported into AntConc 4.3.3. Thus the features of the corpus data could be demonstrated and counted.The findings include:(1)innovative words; (2)zero inflection of verbs, especially on third person singular; (3)confusing reference of singular and plural nouns; (4)ellipsis of articles and confusing usages of indefinite articles; (5)ellipsis and redundant use of prepositions; (6)adjacent default tense; (7)null-subject/object utterances; (8)inversion in subordinate finite wh-clause; (9)subject pronoun copying; (10)invariant tag questions. Some of the features such as (2), (3),(4), (7) and (9) reveal linguistic transfer from the Chinese language, and thus show the influence that Mandarin Chinese has on Chinese ELF.