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Barbara Seidlhofer

 

Barbara Seidlhofer is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna. She has published mainly in the fields of pragmatics and discourse analysis, phonetics and phonology, sociolinguistics and intercultural communication. Her research and teaching focus on English as a lingua franca communication, its global significance and its implications for teacher education. She is the founding director of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE, which was recently released as VOICE 3.0. Her books include Controversies in Applied Linguistics and Understanding English as a Lingua Franca (Oxford University Press). She is past editor of the International Journal of Applied Linguistics (Wiley Blackwell) and founding and honorary editor of the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca (De Gruyter).

Keynote Lecture: Exceptional English

English that is used as a lingua franca is in many cases exceptional in the sense that it does not conform to the conventions of the standard language. In this respect it resembles other kinds of exceptional English, exemplified in first and second language acquisition and also in verbal art, especially in poetry, under the name of creative writing. In this talk I argue that all these apparently quite different uses of exceptional English are essentially creative but that the creativity is activated by different purposes.