Creating common ground: The role of metapragmatic expressions in BELF meeting interactions

Business English as a lingua franca (BELF) is gaining popularity in international business and research domains. In the framework of the socio-cognitive approach, this article examines the role of metapragmatic expressions (MPEs) in creating common ground (CG) in BELF meeting interactions. Based on the data from one business meeting drawn from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, it is found that the speakers mainly employ four types of MPEs, i.e. commentaries, speech-action descriptions, message glosses and evidentials, as pre-emptive or corrective strategies when they are aware of potential or actual problems or difficulties in interactions. MPEs are intended to activate shared sense (e.g. previous agreement, mutual experiences and company policy) and current sense (e.g. different or new perspectives, evaluations and sympathy) to construct emergent CG of knowledge and emergent CG of affiliation to achieve mutual understanding in BELF meeting interactions.