Intercultural Perspectives on Research Writing

A great deal of academic knowledge is produced in English by and for peers from different linguacultural backgrounds. It is the aim of this paper to study written scholarly English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication, focusing specifically on a lexico-grammatical structure, the anticipatory it pattern, fulfilling an interpersonal (attitudinal and epistemic) function. Its use in the Sci-ELF corpus (University of Helsinki, Finland), will be compared to its use in a corpus of ENL RAs of the SERA