Anything but the ideal speaker listener in anything but a homogenous speech community: a study of communication through the medium of lingua franca English

Abstract

This thesis characterizes the English spoken as a lingua franca by a community of asylum seekers, none of whom spoke English as a native language, and it examines how they use this lingua franca to interact with the English-speaking staff and with one another in the reception centre in which they live. The methodological tools and techniques of ethnography, corpus linguistics and conversation analysis are harnessed in a synergistic, cyclical blend. The ethnography, influenced by the work of Goffman and Hymes, highlights the troubled histories of the residents, including accounts of alleged persecution in their native countries, their flight to perceived safety in Ireland, and their new institutionalized lives, all which impacted on their daily communicative behaviour. Newly-arrived residents made a bigger effort to talk, but the routine of everyday life gradually undermined their communicative efforts. However, this routine and daily social practice also led to the manipulation and economization of language. For example, adjacency greeting pair parts, routinized through daily social practice, were manipulated for use as requests. The analysis of recorded and transcribed data, using methods associated with corpus linguistics, and following parameters set by McCarthy (1999), presents a picture of a notably reduced language system - the lingua franca used by the residents. The last two chapters focus in detail on the pragmatic use of the language at the disposal of the residents. It is argued that at the micro level, the residents exploited to the maximum, discoursally and semantically, yeah and okay and other minimal responses in combination with pauses, silences, intonational contour, pitch and intensity, to negotiate their way through difficult interaction with the staff of the centre, and that at the macro-level such strategy camouflaged the lexicogrammatical limitations, minimized the impression of disfluency, and allowed the residents to maintain subliminal control over the trajectory of talk. It is argued that the residents, in interaction with one another, maintained the orderliness of turn-taking, principally due to mutual collaborative support and recourse to the natural to and fro of communication.