Reviewed by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira

This book draws on his doctoral research to offer the first account of idiomaticity among successful users of English as a lingua franca (ELF).

In Part 1, ‘Background’, Ch. 1 addresses the usability of corpora in studies of authentic language use, particularly interaction in a lingua franca in culturally diverse settings. Ch. 2 analyzes six articles by Jennifer Jenkins and Barbara Seidlhofer that provide a ‘representative “ELF-writers’ corpus”’ (16) to uncover semantic prosodies of the term ELF. Ch. 3 discusses idiomaticity from diverse perspectives (cognitive, pragmatic, phonological) and in Ch. 4 P relates it to differential fluency in first language (L1) and second language (L2). Ch. 5 surveys studies of non-native competence, which is typically viewed as deficient native competence, to argue for an approach to ELF interactions on their own terms. Ch. 6 then outlines in Bakhtinian terms the dialogic framework of the analysis that follows.

In Part 2, ‘Foreground’, Ch. 7 presents the study’s database, 160,000 words of spontaneous L2 conversations involving forty-two speakers from twenty-four countries that were analyzed through ‘discourse analysis in an ethnographic framework’ (107). The next six chapters compare idiomatic uses in this corpus to different L1 corpora. Ch. 8 identifies the most common two-word lexical phrases in the L2 corpus. Noting that sort of occurs less frequently than in L1, P investigates uses of this phrase in each corpus in Chs. 9 and 10. Ch. 11 compares you see across corpora and Ch. 12 accounts for its use in L2 terms.

Ch. 13 focuses on longer idioms, e.g. back to the drawing board, for which two types of idiomaticity are typically distinguished. As ‘unilateral idiomaticity’ (misunderstanding by L2 users, p.215) is unattested in the L2 corpus, discussion draws on data from other sources. ‘Creative idiomaticity’—‘non-canonical versions of idiomatic phraseology’ (221)—prompts an informal matched-guises experiment (236) that reveals that acceptability judgements decrease with assumed non-native authorship. Ch. 14 provides a summation and argues for the teaching of English as ‘a process of acquiring maximum “linguistic capital”’ (254) rather than as a ‘model’.

P’s case for a focus shift towards authentic, flexible ELF uses is forceful and timely. Careful account of methodological choices and assumptions facilitates replication and expansion of results, although P’s analyses appear contrived at times. For example, it is unclear why the idiomatic ‘ripple effect’—‘collocations and prosodies’ (45–46)—attributed to ‘sort of’ cannot be argued for its collocates instead (e.g. thing).

Idiomaticity in ELF is the topic of the book, which neither its title nor subtitle makes clear. P’s thesis that competent idiomaticity hinges on socio-cultural values explains differential uses of one language as (presumably monolingual) L1 vs. lingua franca. Analysis is native-centered, despite well-founded criticism of this practice in Part 1: the core research questions concern misuse/avoidance of idiomaticity (241), that is, deviation from a norm. The related assumption that idiomaticity ‘facilitat[es] rapport’ (97) might apply to L1 interactants or to their views of interaction with L2 users, but whether it extends to ELF contexts is moot: several informants expressed unwillingness to emulate L1 users. Whether idiomaticity is a feature of authentic ELF and its socio-cultural correlates, are empirical issues whose investigation this book encourages.