{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.027475375842405392, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005702436495593572, 'mean_word_length': 5.367986798679868, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Exploring idiomatic creativity in English as a global language

Research on English as a lingua franca (ELF) has evolved remarkably as a linguistic subdiscipline over the past two decades, gaining importance and popularity in an increasingly multilingual world. Pitzl’s book enriches this line of research by exploring how one conventional part of English is vigorously adapted in intercultural communication. Based on the Vienna–Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) data, it investigates linguistic creativity in the use of idiom and metaphor in spoken ELF. This monograph, given its wide-ranging data collection, valuable theoretical insights and formal-functional approaches, is a worthy addition to advancing studies of English as a global language. The book consists of a short introduction and eight chapters. Following the research background established in the Introduction, Chapter 1 brings in the two main issues addressed in this book: ELF and linguistic creativity. The author points out the ‘hybrid’ nature of ELF, and reveals its inherent variability as an original thrust for creativity to take place. A form-focused definition of linguistic creativity is then put forward to highlight the necessity of norms for conceptualizing creativity. The author makes a further distinction between norm-following and norm-transcending creativity. While the former refers to creative linguistic realizations that stay within the normative systems they originate from, the latter covers those that extend beyond the boundaries of existing norms and stretch current conventions (see also Pitzl, 2012). This distinction helps associate the topic of creativity with ELF. It is claimed that creativity, as an ‘essential driving force of language change’ (p. 38), offers a welcoming entry point into describing and analyzing the central characteristic of variation in ELF. Chapter 2 concretizes ‘creativity in ELF’ by focusing on idiom and metaphor. The author reviews relevant literature, and more impressively, coordinates metaphor and ‘idiomatic creativity’ (see Langlotz, 2006; Prodromou, 2007) with a number of innovative ideas. For instance, a synchronic-diachronic link is found between idiom and metaphor. As a shared linguistic resource, it is the semantic dimension of metaphor that serves to motivate various uses of idioms in ELF. Following this logic, the author delineates the core processes of dynamic idiom re-creation, formulating ‘re-metaphorization’ as a principal mechanism to ‘re-awaken’ dormant metaphors and ‘re-enliven’ conventional idioms (p. 72). In order to synthesize the theoretical part, this chapter concludes with a framework for interpreting linguistic creativity in ELF idiom usage. Chapter 3 proceeds to the author’s empirical investigation of creativity in ELF. It provides explicit descriptions of her research methodology and of VOICE. Concerning VOICE per se, focus is placed on those features that are rarely seen in non-ELF corpora, including the ethnographic dimension of data collection and the conversational details of the transcripts. The author specifies how she manually annotated the creative idioms and metaphors, so as to justify the ‘qualitative’ method that she adopted as a VOICE compiler. In concert with the book’s interest in both a descriptive approach and one rooted in pragmatics, this chapter also stresses the importance of analyzing both creative linguistic forms and communicative functions in ELF. Chapters 4 to 7 constitute a VOICE-based qualitative study of creative idioms and metaphors in ELF. Each chapter, with a rich supply of data, pinpoints a specific aspect of analysis. Chapter 4 concentrates on the forms of creative idioms. Three distinctive types of idiom variation (i.e., lexical substitution, syntactic and morphosyntactic variation) are identified and illustrated with