(Core) common ground and the role of metapragmatic expressions: A comment on Liu and Liu (2017)

Abstract

Under the socio-cognitive approach, Liu and Liu (2017) explore the role of metapragmatic expressions (MPEs) in business English as lingua franca (BELF) meeting interactions, and maintain that four types of MPEs, viz., commentaries, speech-action descriptions, message glosses and evidentials, are employed to activate shared sense and current sense to construct emergent common ground of knowledge and affiliation. They also repeatedly claim that BELF interactions lack common ground, core common ground in particular. In this paper, we argue that (i) their claim does not really hold water because the very fact that relevant parties are ready to have a meeting together shows that they already obtain adequate information on the meeting as well as other parties, and hence have shared knowledge (i.e., common ground) of the upcoming event and of one another; and (ii) the functions of MPEs they have highlighted are actually not specific to BELF contexts but applicable to other contexts as well, especially English as lingua franca (ELF) contexts.