Zero Marking in English as Lingua Franca Interactions: Corpus IST-Erasmus

Abstract

This study introduces the marking system for 3 rd person present tense in English as Lingua Franca interactions. It is a corpus study which is compiled as part of a PhD study to investigate the lexico-grammatical characteristics of ELF. The corpus, Corpus IST-Erasmus, consists of 10 hours 47 minutes of recorded ELF interactions. It is compiled by means of 54 speech events with the participation of 79 Erasmus students in Istanbul, representing 24 diverse L1s. The focus of this paper is to present whether there are variations from standardized ENL forms with respect to the 3 rd person present tense marking, as proposed in previous ELF research. The results indicate that the use of 3 rd person zero in place of 3 rd person -s is becoming an emerging pattern in ELF interactions.