Pragmatic and discourse-analytic approaches to present-day English (original) (raw)

2008, Journal of Pragmatics

Globalization and internationalization have had a tremendous impact on the form and function of present-day English in institutional and non-institutional contexts, where it has become the language of international communication, politics, science, commerce, travel, education and the media. There are an estimated 1680 million speakers of English. The global expansion of English comprises the inner circle, in which English is assigned the status of the first language, e.g. the United Kingdom and the United States of America, the outer circle, where English is assigned the status of (one of) the second language(s), e.g. India and Singapore, and the expanding circle, in which English is assigned the status of a foreign language, e.g. China and Russia (Crystal, 1997:54). As a consequence of globalization and social and international mobility, the rather simplistic differentiation between native and non-native speakers of English can no longer be upheld. Rather, the concept of a proficient speaker of English also needs to be adapted to the changing contextual constraints and requirements of a world becoming more global and more international while at the same time becoming more focussed on local values and more glocal. Present-day English, or rather present-day Englishes, has been examined from a number of different perspectives, namely as an international language (Trudgill and Hannah, 2002), as a global language (Crystal, 2004), as social, regional and functional varieties (Milroy and Milroy, 1993; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes, 1998), and as postcolonial English (Schneider, 2007). Against this background, the English language and English language use can never be a homogeneous construct, but rather needs to be conceptualized as heterogeneous in nature. This is reflected in research on grammaticalization (e.g. Traugott and Dasher, 2002) and pragmaticalization (e.g. Aijmer, 1997) as well as in grammars based on the premise that the language system and language use are connected dialectically (e.g.