Legal English as a lingua franca in academia: The strategic use of repetitions in lectures

This paper investigates the functions of repetitions in ELF academic discourse, exploring the complex nature of their realizations. The data presented originate from a corpus of Law lectures in which English is used as a lingua franca. Special attention is given to the identification of the specificities and the functions of repetitions which may typify these events from a disciplinary perspective. The main hypothesis is that the realization of repetitions in an event which lies at the crossroads between legal and academic discourse is influenced by the lecturers’ cultural allegiance to the use of normative and semantic repetition. Data show that repetition displays a tendency, on the one hand, to enhance formal correctness, and, on the other hand, to favor intelligibility and mutual understanding. The discussion in this paper contributes to an ongoing debate on the extent of the use of English in English-medium tertiary-education settings at a global level, and more specifically, on the use of specific pragmatic devices in this context.