Lexis
ELF speakers have also been shown empirically to create new words and collocations.
Examples of innovative collocations in VOICE include ‘space time’ and ‘severe
criminals’, where English NSs would say (I assume) ‘spare time’ and ‘serious
criminals’. Again, ELF speakers have been found to convert so-called ‘false friends’
into what Hülmbauer (2007) prefers to call ‘true friends’. For example, whereas
‘actually’ means ‘in fact’ in ENL, many European ELF speakers prefer to use it with
the meaning ‘now’, ‘currently’. Similarly, they may use the word ‘card’ to mean
‘map’ rather than one of its preferred meanings in ENL, e.g. ‘greeting card’. ELF
speakers are also innovative in their use of morphemes. For instance, among the
forms Björkman (2008) finds in her ELF corpus collected at a Swedish university are
‘boringdom’, ‘levelize’, ‘forsify’, and ‘discriminization’.