A Rich Domain of ELF – the ELFA Corpus of Academic Discourse

Abstract

The academic field has used English as a lingua franca widely for a long time, and is a good choice for an ELF corpus. It is useful to restrict the scope of exploratory research in one way or another, mode and domain offering themselves as clear and reasonably unproblematic limiters in language sampling. What makes the academic domain suitable for ELF research is that it is demanding, deeply influential, and largely constituted by its own specific genres. This paper discusses the compilation principles of the ELFA corpus (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) of spoken language, and outlines the kind of research it has already produced and that is going on with the data.