Bloggers as ELF users

The global spread of English, particularly as a lingua franca, has fostered vivacious research over the last ten years. Employed in multilingual settings by users belonging to different linguacultures, ELF appears to be developing characteristics of its own at different levels, from phonology to lexico-grammar and pragmatics. English is increasingly used also as the lingua franca in the internet, and blogs in particular have become an important self-expression and interaction place for younger generations, who communicate in English in the international blogosphere. This paper investigates the use of zero 3rd person –s marking in the present tense as an ELF feature, within a corpus of blogs produced by Italian teenagers and young adults. The findings of my investigation appear in line with current ELF research, as bloggers’ instances of 3sg Ø, also with indefinite expressions and in concord with collective head nouns, can be interpreted an emerging feature.