Reference and deixis in the hybridization strategies of a Western- Islamic corpus of finance in ELF: A Discourse Analysis

The paper introduces a socio-cognitive enquiry into the hybridization processes occurring in the academic discourse of Islamic Finance as represented in a corpus of recently-published textbooks written in English as a 'specialized lingua franca' dealing with financial topics (cf. Iqbal and Mirakhor 2011). Hybridization involves the structural, textual and pragmatic choices identified in such textbooks reflecting as they do a specific attempt on the part of the text producers to make financial concepts informed by Shariah practices accessible (Widdowson 1991) and acceptable to Western/International university students, especially those from the expanding circle. The focus is placed on selected texts written by Islamic/Muslim scholars reformulating original texts in the L1-Arabic through ELF structures and pragmatics in order to provide explanations and clarifications to the original Islamic concepts. The objective of the enquiry, based on a systematic comparative analysis grounded on Halliday's (1985) functional grammar, involves an identification of the strategies writers apply to: (a) make a text function in a cross-cultural perspective and (b) facilitate students to acquire content competences in a way that best fits their background knowledge of the discipline. Therefore, facilitating strategies such as definitions, periphrasis and repetitions of noun phrases shall be explored as triggers for Western students' processes of schema redefinition, of cross-cultural revision of textuality standards (de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981) and of simplification rules (van Dijk 1980) which actually define a specialized ELF variety of hybrid academic discourse.