This paper explores the cognitive and communicative strategies involved in the use of ELF in situations of unequal encounters between non-western supplicants (i.e., African immigrants and asylum seekers) and western immigration officials in authority (in this case, Italian mediators – i.e., experts mediating between immigrants and institutions). Evidence from the case studies indicates that each contact group uses ELF with reference to different linguacultural conventions associated with their use of English, as the interactants come from the ‘outer’ and the ‘expanding’ circles respectively (cf. Kachru 1986). In consequence, each party in the encounters tends naturally to transfer the structural features and the meaning conventions of their L1 into the English that they use, each appropriating and ‘authenticating’ the language in accordance not with native speaker norms but with those of their own L1. Since these norms are not shared, there is the need for accommodation for communication to be achieved, but unequal power distribution in these encounters is not favourable to such accommodation – which, instead, normally obtains in relatively ‘equal’ encounters. The case studies show how the lack of recognition of these variable versions of English may have critical consequences in contexts involving political and ethical questions concerning human rights. It is contended that only a ‘mutual accommodation’ of variable usage would safeguard the participants’ social identities and foster successful communication in cross-cultural immigration encounters.

This chapter concerns ELF used in unequal encounters between ‘outer-circle’ immigrants and ‘expanding-circle’ immigration officials in positions of authority. Evidence from case studies shows that contact groups transfer their respective L1 typological, syntactic/semantic and pragmatic structures into their ELF variations, thus ‘authenticating’ (Widdowson 1979) English not in accordance with native-speaker norms, but through processes of individual cognitive appropriation and mutual pragmatic accommodation aimed at achieving communication. Yet, while this easily obtains in ‘equal’ encounters (Seidlhofer 2011), it proves problematic in migration encounters where unequal power distribution often justifies the officials’ unawareness of different native linguacultural identities and experiential schemata reflected in immigrants’ ‘outer-circle’ endonormative English varieties (Guido 2008, 2012). This would challenge Kachru’s (1986) theory of English varieties since, in today’s globalized world, ‘outer-circle’ varieties, once displaced from their original locations and communities of users (e.g., from former British colonies), become actual ELF variations used for intercultural communication, exactly like the officials’ ELF variations conventionally defined as ‘expanding-circle’ varieties. Fieldwork data show that officials often consider migrants’ ELF variations ‘defective’ by exonormative reference to native-speaker norms of usage, thus causing misunderstandings (i.e., in legal/forensic/medical contexts, sometimes ‘hybridized’ with inconsistent domains, like tourism and religion) often with serious political and ethical consequences.

This paper explores ELF misunderstandings in the domain of Responsible Tourism (a hybridization between Voluntary-Work and Place-Marketing discourses) promoted by local administrators of Italian seaside resorts negatively affected by migrant arrivals. Tourists are offered holidays in voluntary-work camps in contact with migrants and asylum seekers to enhance their ‘sympathetic understanding’ of the migration experience, thus actualizing the ‘social Utopia’ archetype of ‘the place of good and harmony’ into a more light-hearted ‘recreational Utopia’. Conversely, immigrants consider such places as a Dystopia (anti-utopia) imposing unfamiliar roles upon them, as they are indeed expected to promote tourism – hopefully in return for easier social and legal assistance. A case study shows how tourists’ and immigrants’ ELF variations are initially aimed at co-creating successful communication, but then they often turn into a ‘dystopian manipulation’ of semantic meanings (e.g., migrants’ ‘resigned desperation’ misinterpreted as ‘intimate serenity’), ultimately leading to ELF accommodation failure.

This paper introduces an interdisciplinary research exploring the emotional experience of Italian seaside resorts whose geographical position in the Southern Mediterranean coasts has always determined their destiny as places of hospitality and hybridization of languages and cultures. A cognitive-pragmatic model of Experiential Linguistics and some strategies of Experiential Place Marketing will be applied to the ‘emotional promotion’ of Responsible Tourism in order to enquire into the effects of emotions upon the tourists’ perception of the holiday as an experience of ‘personal and cultural growth’. This is expected to develop from their appraisal of (a) non-western migrants’ dramatic narrations of journeys across the sea, reported in their variations of English as a ‘lingua franca’ (ELF), and (b) epic narratives of Mediterranean ‘odysseys’ towards ‘Utopian destinations’ belonging to the western cultural heritage, translated from ancient (Greek and Latin) into modern ELF variations. The target of the marketing plan are tourists playing the role of ‘intercultural mediators’ with migrants in one of the seaside resorts of Salento, a southern-Italian area affected by migrant arrivals. To facilitate the tourists’ process of ‘experiential embodiment’ of past and present dramatic sea voyages, the cultural project of Responsible Tourism is designed to introduce tourists and migrants to an ‘Ethnopoetic analysis’ of two corpora of modern and ancient oral sea voyage narratives – the former collected during ethnographic fieldworks in reception centres for refugees, and the latter including extracts from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. The purpose is to directly involve tourists and migrants as if they were ‘philologists’ and ‘ethnographers’ exploring how such ancient and modern oral narratives are organized into spontaneous ‘verse structures’ reproducing the sequences and rhythms of human actions and emotions in response to the traumatic experience of violent natural phenomena which, through the use of ergative syntactic structures, become metaphorically personified as mythological monsters, or as objects and elements endowed with an autonomous, dynamic force capable of destroying the human beings at their mercy. The Ethnopoetic analysis and translation, together with the subsequent multimodal rendering of such journey narratives into a promotional video for place-marketing purposes aim at making both tourists and migrants aware of the common socio-cultural values of the different populations that have produced them.

This paper explores the ways in which traumatic experiences of war and torture are first represented in the narratives of West African refugees through their ELF variations during crosscultural medical encounters, and then interpreted by Italian specialists with reference to their clinical-schema categories, and encoded according to the genre conventions which inform the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and textual features of the ELF which the specialists use. The case study investigates not only the different ELF linguacultural conventions of the two contact groups, respectively coming from the ‘outer’ and the ‘expanding’ circles, but also the register structures of the Italian specialists, transferred to their ELF, which do not account for the African refugees’ differently situated narratives, perceived by specialists as ‘deviating’. This is so because coherence and cohesion in such narratives reflect the refugees’ different L1 typological features transferred to their ELF variations, as well as their different knowledge systems and community values associated with traumatic experiences relating more to socio-political balance than to individual wellbeing. Four deviation levels between ‘conventional’ and ‘native’ trauma reports through ELF are investigated: transitivity vs. ergativity; generic vs. ethnopoetic patterns; epistemic vs. deontic modality; specialized lexis vs. native idioms of distress. The identification of divergent narratives has also a pedagogical impact on the training of community interpreters in contexts of transcultural psychiatry as it suggests alternative ways of textualizing, through ELF, different socio-cultural conceptualizations of the trauma experience, thus safeguarding the refugees’ social identities and fostering successful communication in the ‘expanding circle’.

Crucial to the line of enquiry introduced in this article is the notion of ELF as ‘language authentication’, which implies an appropriation of the English language according to its non-native users’ L1 parameters, and which justifies the case for the existence of ELF variability, depending on the particular groups of users from different lingua-cultural backgrounds who ‘authenticate’ English according to their own diverse native cognitive-semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and specialized-discourse parameters. Such a notion represents a challenge, on the one hand, to the view of ENL as the one and only ‘authentic variety of English’ to be used in every context of cross-cultural interaction and, on the other, to the widespread view of ELF as a unique and shared ‘international variety’ of English for efficient and economical communication in everyday interactions and specialized transactions – which is not expected to be ‘actively appropriated’ to the non-native speakers’ own lingua-cultural background, but rather to be ‘passively learnt’ by them as a ‘foreign language’ (as they do with ENL).

This volume is the result of a research project – carried out at the University of Salento with the contribution of the Cassa di Risparmio di Puglia Foundation – which aims to develop a series of studies to guide companies in strategic sectors of the Puglia economy (e.g. tourism, fashion, and alimentary products,) in the communication of their excellence internationally through the use of English as a 'lingua franca' for the promotion of luxury goods, highlighting their sustainability and appealing to consumer emotions. The justification for the research is that, in order to compete in the new global market, luxury companies need to offer quality products aimed at redefining the very idea of 'luxury', no longer considering it as the conspicuous display of the possessor’s wealth, but rather as the achievement of psycho-physical well-being on the part of the user. The studies presented in the chapters of the volume show how the re-semanticization of the concept of luxury can be brought about by developing internationally "Made in Puglia" brands through the elaboration of theoretical-application models that provide specific communicational mechanisms of luxury which are able to engage emotionally the consumer through pragmatic-discursive strategies. Such strategies should take into account the native language and socio-cultural specificities of consumers by transferring them to the use of English as a "lingua franca" used in international communication between people who are not native speakers, including through new and innovative media. The use of the English language for promotional, advertising and marketing communications is therefore central to the persuasion process of groups of potential consumers from different linguistic-cultural backgrounds. This implies that the linguistic and communicative language features of the English language in the development of new textual, discursive and persuasive strategies, will be modulated on new international (even technological) scenarios, for accessible and acceptable communication with the target consumer through interaction on the socio-cultural, pragmatic and cognitive levels between the business-senders and recipients. The ultimate goal of the volume is therefore to offer scientifically original contributions which not only attest to the current state of the research in this field, but which will also be accessible to a readership of professionals in the field of the marketing of 'Made in Puglia' luxury goods.

This paper investigates how the ‘New Evangelization’ (NE) process in the Catholic Church is enacted through ELF by Italian clergy offering spiritual practical assistance to immigrants. A case study will show how the NE discourse requires from immigrants the activation a ‘suspension of disbelief ’, epistemically inducing them to believe that the clergy’s possible-world ‘metaphysical’ representations can be true, ‘experiential pliability’, deontically compelling immigrants to adapt their actual-world experience to such counterfactual constructions.

The cognitive and communicative processes involved in situations of unequal encounters between non-western supplicants (i.e., African immigrants and asylum seekers) and western experts in authority shall be explored in this paper through a number of case studies aimed at illustrating that the variations of English as a ‘lingua franca’ (ELF) which each contact group uses obey different linguacultural conventions entailing a detachment of ELF from the norms of English as a native language (ENL), since ELF is seen as developing from non-native speakers’ processes of transfer into their English uses of their respective L1 typological, logical, textual, lexical-semantic and pragmatic structures. A number of case studies will illustrate how the lack of acknowledgement of other ELF variations – due to the fact that they are often perceived in intercultural communication as formally deviating and socio-pragmatically inappropriate – may have serious consequences in contexts involving social, legal, or health matters, thus giving rise to misunderstandings that often raise ethical issues about social justice. It is therefore argued that principled pedagogic initiatives aimed at making western experts in authority aware of the mediating strategies for achieving a ‘mutual accommodation’ of ELF variations could, on the one hand, protect the social identities of the participants in unequal encounters and, on the other, facilitate the conveyance of their respective culturally-marked knowledge. This would foster effective communication in cross-cultural immigration encounters with the ultimate aim of developing a ‘hybrid ELF mode’ of cross-cultural specialized communication that can be acknowledged and eventually shared by both interacting groups.

This chapter develops the notion of ‘languaging’ meant as “the process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language” (Swain 2006) by exploring the extent to which the process of corpus tagging carried out by communities of non-native speakers of English as a ‘lingua franca’ (henceforward ELF – cf. Guido 2008; Seidlhofer 2011) from different linguacultural backgrounds can explain different experiential interpretations of the meaning of English modal verbs as ‘keywords in context’. In this way, the view of languaging meant in the Vygotskyan perspective as schemata (or ‘inner speech’) that becomes conscious through the mediation of words comes to be actualized into (a) the development of a ‘problem-oriented tagging’ for the annotation and the functional analysis of English corpora, and (b) the use of such tagging to enquire into possible semantic and pragmatic ‘transfer processes’ from the speakers’ L1s to their respective ELF variations – which may occur as they interpret a number of English modal verbs identified in strings of text from the LOB and Brown corpora. The ‘problem-oriented tagging’ devised for this research differs from the conventional models of ‘corpus-tagging’ insofar as it is not intended for the annotation of every word in a corpus (cf. de Haan 1984), but only for those words that are relevant to this specific enquiry – i.e., modal verbs. The purpose is to explore systematically, through the implementation of a case study, the following research questions concerning the widespread phenomena of the variable languaging processes identified in the interpretative responses from a sample of ELF speakers of different linguacultural backgrounds: - Can interpretative variability be the result of a corpus tagging that is conventionally formulated in a non-exhaustive way? Indeed, the automatic tagging integrated in many electronic corpora generally informs the analyst of the syntactic dimensions (cf. Leech 1993; Souter and Atwell 1994), but only rarely does it signal the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of the language (cf. Stenstrom 1984; Biber et al. 1998: 257-262); - Can interpretative variability be due to natural processes of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic transfer triggered by the ELF speakers’ minds in the attempt to make sense of the L2-English modal-verb structures that may be unfamiliar to them? (cf. Gass and Selinker 1983; Tarone 1988; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993). - Can such interpretative variability be due to a ‘cognitive transfer’ which defines ELF variations as continually changing processes (not as products, or ‘varieties’) in relation to the different socio-cultural experiences of the groups of non-native speakers from different linguacultural backgrounds who variably come to interpret the L2-English modal verbs? On such grounds it is here assumed that the creation of a tagging procedure oriented to a particular problematic area of the Functional Grammar – in this case, that of Modality – can become: (a) a useful research tool to highlight and, then, to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze some transfer issues identified in a sample of ELF speakers of different linguacultural background who give voice to their interpretations of the modal verbs as ‘key-words in context’ by means of the ‘think-aloud technique’ (Cohen and Hosenfeld, 1981; Ericsson and Simon 1984) that, through the activation of languaging processes, make their meaning associations conscious; and (b) a useful pedagogic tool aimed, on the one hand, to encourage non-native learners of English to reflect upon possible L1-transfer processes in their interpretations of modality meanings and, on the other, to develop efficient strategies for a principled teaching of ELF variations.

This article explores the emotional experience of Italian seaside resorts whose geographical position in the Southern Mediterranean coasts has always determined their destiny as places of hospitality and hybridization of languages and cultures. A Cognitive-pragmatic Model of Experiential Linguistics (Lakoff, Johnson 1999; Langacker 1991; Sweetser 1990) and some strategies of Experiential Place Marketing (Hosany, Prayag 2011; Jani, Han 2013; Prayag et al. 2013) will be employed to ‘emotionally promote’ Responsible Tourism (Lin et al. 2014; Ma et al. 2013) in order to enquire into the effects of emotions upon the tourists’ experience of the holiday as a path towards their ‘personal and cultural growth’. The case study illustrated in this article represents precisely an instance of ELF communication developing from tourists’ and migrants’ appraisal of: (a) the contemporary non-Western migrants’ dramatic sea-voyage narratives reported in their ELF variations (Guido 2008, 2012), and (b) the epic narratives of Mediterranean ‘odysseys’ towards ‘utopian places’ belonging to the Western cultural heritage, translated from Ancient Greek and Latin into ELF. The subjects of this case study under analysis are tourists playing the role of ‘intercultural mediators’ with migrants in one of the seaside resorts of Salento affected by migrant arrivals. To facilitate tourists’ and migrants’ processes of ‘experiential embodiment’ of past and present dramatic sea voyages, they will be introduced to an ‘Ethnopoetic analysis’ (Hymes 1994, 2003) of two corpora of modern and ancient oral journey narratives – the former collected during ethnographic fieldworks in reception centres for refugees, and the latter including extracts from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. The purpose is to make tourists and migrants play the roles of ‘philologists’ and ‘ethnographers’ as they realize how such ancient and modern oral narratives are experientially organized into spontaneous ‘verse structures’ reproducing the sequences and rhythms of human actions and emotions in response to the traumatic experience of violent natural phenomena which, through the use of ergative syntactic structures (Talmy 1988), become metaphorically personified as objects and elements endowed with an autonomous, dynamic force capable of destroying the human beings at their mercy. The Ethnopoetic analysis and translation, together with the subsequent multimodal rendering of such journey narratives into ‘premotional videos’ for place-marketing purposes (Kress 2009), aim at making both tourists and migrants aware of their common experiential roots, as well as of the socio-cultural values of the different populations that have produced them.

This paper investigates how the 'New Evangelization' process in the Roman Catholic Church is enacted through ELF by the Italian clergy offering spiritual and practical assistance to non-western immigrants newly-arrived in Italy. A case study explores how religious discourse reflects the two contact groups' different typological-syntactic, semantic and sociopragmatic features transferred to their respective ELF usage, as well as their different knowledge sustems and community values associated with the religious experience. It is argued that misunderstanding occurs when the clergy's culture-bound patterns of Possible-World Semantics, characterizing the counterfactual logic of their religious/metaphysical discourse in ELF, fail to account for the divergent ways by which non-western immigrants make religious sense of their existence. The conversational analysis shows how the New-Evangelization discourse requires from immigrants the activation of the two 'bimodal' cooperative maxims of 'suspension of disbelief', epistemically inducing them to believe that possible-world representations can be true, and 'experiential pliability', deontically compelling immigrants to adapt their actual-world experience to such counterfactual constructions, even though for the cultures of some African countries which immigrants come from religion is intrinsically connected with the referential domain of the actual world. Recognizing divergent ways of expressing the religious experience in different cultures may help 'new evangelizers' find alternative, 'hybrid' ways of conveying the Word of God through ELF, thus fostering true ecumenical communication.

Lo studio introduce un approccio cognitivo-esperienziale al discorso metafisico (Lakoff e Johnson 1999; Guido 2005) inteso come fondamentalmente bimodale, controfattuale e, come tale, testualizzato secondo gli schemi di ‘verità condizionale’ della Semantica dei Mondi Possibili nella Logica Modale (Allen 1989; Pietrovski 1993; Stalnaker 1994). L’obiettivo è dimostrare come la struttura testuale (nel caso specifico in lingua inglese) di questo tipo di discorso speculativo costruito sul ‘falso sillogismo’ induce nella mente dei lettori una ‘sospensione dell’incredulità’ e la conseguente attivazione di processi cognitivi che permettono una visualizzazione delle costruzioni epistemiche di mondi possibili (Hintikka 1967, 1989) come se fossero vere e proprie immagini mentali dislocate da qualsiasi riferimento a situazioni del mondo reale. Tali immagini, a loro volta, agiscono come stimoli deontici che inducono i lettori ad ‘abitare’ i mondi possibili rappresentati dal discorso metafisico (Stalnaker 2001) e ad esplorarli attraverso una varietà di generi e registri ad esso correlati (dal discorso filosofico argomentativo alla poesia Imagista fino all’arte visiva Metafisica e Surrealista ed alla musica sinfonica modernista) che hanno in sé la potenzialità di incoraggiare diverse interpretazioni e riformulazioni creative da parte degli stessi lettori (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen 1990; O’Toole 1994), come emerge dai casi di studio che costituiscono oggetto di analisi.

This chapter introduces an original cognitive-pragmatic model that integrates Experiential Linguistics and Experiential Place Marketing approaches applied to the ‘emotional promotion’ of Responsible Tourism – a form of tourism aiming at advertising the tourists’ intercultural and human experience in socio-cultural situations normally perceived as problematic – such as the promotion of holiday destinations affected by migrants’ arrivals. The case study illustrated in this chapter is aimed at the exploration of different schemata regarding the socio-culturally marked food norms which come into contact and often in conflict in the course of the ELF-mediated communication between tourists and migrants who reside in the same seaside resorts. The objective of the research is to promote a Responsible Tourism that also includes eating habits aimed at the achievement of physical health and spiritual wellbeing. In an intercultural context like the one that underpins the case study, the dietary precepts existing in the various societies often account for a hybridization of specialized discourses: from the expected gastronomic discourse to the scientific-medical one, up to the religious and legal discourses. More specifically, the hybridization between the gastronomic and religious discourses is typical of many cultures tourists and migrants hosted by the seaside resorts belong to, informing their respective social and legal systems. In the case study under analysis, a sample of subjects with different linguacultural and ethnic backgrounds was selected (i.e., a male Chinese tourist, a female Israeli tourist and a male Nigerian migrant). These subjects were asked to share their food schemata, involving the Chinese cuisine and medicine as well as Jewish and Islamic dietary norms, in order to apply them to the creation of promotional slogans to advertise on a special website the Mediterranean Diet as a luxury product recommended by the restaurants of the seaside resorts that tourists and migrants were staying at. These participants were asked to read a popularized text on Nutrigenomics (i.e., the branch of genomic research affirming that the degree to which diet influences the balance between health and disease depends on an individual’s genetic makeup or ‘ethnic genotype’ determining their ‘race’). The text was also integrated with another one regarding the health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet. The goal was twofold: on the one hand, to associate a food tradition like the Mediterranean one, normally regarded as ‘humble cuisine’, to the well-known legal-religious and medical norms of other cultures and, on the other hand, to raise the prestige of the Mediterranean Diet contextualizing it in an advanced scientific domain like that of Nutrigenomics. Both goals aim at the re- evaluation of the Mediterranean diet as a luxury product to be promoted in the context of a Responsible Tourism that associates luxury with the psycho-physical wellbeing of the individual as well as that of the community as a whole. Through the ‘Think-aloud technique’, the participants’ schemata were explored as they were interpreting this text on the basis of which they were then expected to create their advertising slogans for the promotion of the Mediterranean Diet.

This book presents a view of the nature of poetry as a dramatic use of language, showing the relevance of Experientialist theories in Cognitive Linguistics to the empirical experience of acting poetry out, on the assumption that an overt and collectively-shared embodiment of meanings, accomplished through the use of drama techniques, can enhance the interpreters’ awareness of the formal and metaphorical characteristics of a poetic text. This entails the interpreters’ rediscovery of the ‘embodied’ nature of their own schemata at the source of their emotional and conceptual responses to poetic language. Interpreters are thus defined as acting interpreters when they act poetry out in a real space of enactment, appropriate it into their own schematic identities as they embody and authenticate its meanings, and then analyze its effects on themselves and on the other acting interpreters inter-acting with them. Embodied stylistics is therefore meant not as the analysis of the text as such but, instead, as the analysis of the acting interpreters’ responses to the poetic patterns of the text. This theoretical argument becomes actualized in the experience of ‘poetic meaning embodiment’ reported by acclaimed actors and directors – Judi Dench, Peter Hall, Derek Jacobi, Richard Olivier, Franca Rame, and Fiona Shaw – as the subjects of a number of case studies that subsequently inspire the embodied-stylistic analysis of the ethnographic data collected during poetic-drama workshops involving groups of acting interpreters.

This book introduces a fresh perspective on the dubbing translation of a humorous audiovisual genre, the sitcom, by presenting the innovative Cognitive-Experientialist Model of the Acting Translator and its principled applications to translation practice. The book argues that to achieve a total experience of a sitcom, dubbing translators need to ‘embody’ the characters and ‘inhabit’ sitcom situations within a ‘physical space of representation’ where they can at first improvise and, then, reflect on the incongruous patterns of humour, typical of this sitcom genre, so as to produce ‘in action’ pragmatically equivalent versions in the target language. In this way, they become ‘acting translators’ who encompass all the roles involved in the dubbing-translation process: the linguist, the actor, the translator, the script adaptor, the dubbing actor, and the dubbing director. The Model is then applied to the conversation analysis of a number of scripts from five American sitcoms (The Nanny, Roseanne, Dharma & Greg, Friends, and Will & Grace) in both source and target languages, thereby giving evidence of the translation shortcomings identified in the dubbed versions for Italian television by comparing them with the more pragmatically equivalent versions provided by university students/acting-translators, whose translation choices represent indeed instances of ‘product naturalization’ which retain the spontaneity of Italian conversational styles.

The cognitive and communicative processes involved in situations of unequal encounters between non-western supplicants (i.e., African immigrants and asylum seekers) and western experts in authority shall be explored through a number of case studies aimed at illustrating that the ELF variation that each contact group uses obeys different linguacultural conventions entailing a detachment of ELF from ENL, since ELF is seen as developing from non-native speakers’ processes of transfer into their English uses of their L1 typological, logical, textual, lexical-semantic and pragmatic structures. A number of case studies will illustrate how the lack of acknowledgement of other ELF variations – due to the fact that they are often perceived as formally deviating and socio-pragmatically inappropriate in intercultural communication – may have serious consequences in contexts involving social, legal, health and religious matters, thus giving rise to misunderstandings that often raise ethical issues about social justice. It is therefore argued that principled pedagogic initiatives aimed at making western experts in authority aware of the strategies for achieving a ‘mutual accommodation’ of ELF variations could, on the one hand, protect the social identities of the participants in unequal encounters and, on the other, facilitate the conveyance of their culturally-marked knowledge, thus fostering successful communication in cross-cultural immigration encounters with the ultimate aim of developing a ‘hybrid ELF mode’ of cross-cultural specialized communication that can be acknowledged and eventually shared by both interacting groups.

ELF used in immigration domains typically reflects the different cognitive and communicative processes as well as the power/status asymmetries involved in cross-cultural situations of unequal encounters between non-western supplicants (i.e., African immigrants and asylum seekers) and western (Italian) experts in authority. Such situations will be here explored with reference to institutional contexts where the conditions for achieving successful communication through the use of ELF variations are biased against the participants’ different native linguacultural backgrounds from which they appropriate English without conforming to native speaker norms of usage. A number of case studies will illustrate the extent to which features of ELF usages may be perceived as formally deviating and socio-pragmatically inappropriate in intercultural communication – this being due to the participants’ lack of acknowledgement of each other’s ELF variations – thus giving rise to misunderstandings that often raise social and ethical issues about inequality and social justice. More specifically, the case studies will enquire, on the one hand, into the processes by which ELF users transfer typological, textual, lexical and logical features of their native languages and cultures to the domain-specific communication they are involved in, thus affecting their pragmalinguistic behaviours and interpretative strategies, leading ultimately to communication failure. On the other hand, some case studies will enquire into possible ‘hybridization strategies’ of written reformulation aimed at making ELF discourse conceptually accessible and socio-pragmatically acceptable to immigrants and refugees involved in the interaction, by making it conform to their different native linguacultural backgrounds, with the ultimate purpose of achieving a ‘mutual accommodation’ of ELF variations in order to promote the social inclusion of marginalized immigrants as well as raise awareness among intercultural mediators operating in such situations of power asymmetry of the possible discourse strategies that can improve mutual intelligibility through ELF.