I think and I don’t know in English as lingua franca and native English discourse

Abstract

The article investigates the high-frequency collocations I think and I don’t know as markers of stance-taking by native and non-native speakers of English in L1 and English as lingua franca (ELF) interaction. The study starts from the assumption that the expression of stance through I think and I don’t know constructions differs in ELF and L1 English discourse because of the specific nature of the ELF communicative situation, i.e. the speakers’ different L1s and the characteristics of their respective learner varieties in interaction may evoke ELF-specific patterns of stance-taking. The analysis of I think and I don’t know and their co-occurrences with syntactic and discourse phenomena in a corpus of elicited conversation data shows that while these collocations are among the most frequent stance-marking devices in both the English L1 and the ELF data, they show almost complementary distributions and only partially overlapping functional profiles.