Licensing Through English

An observation about pragmatic borrowing from English into various recipient languages is what has been termed “licensing”, which, along with semantic bleaching and perceived positive politeness, has been advanced as a motivation for borrowing pragmatic forms from English (see Andersen 2014). In this chapter, the notion of licensing is explored further, drawing on observations from, for example, Matras ([2009] 2020). It has already been proposed that the borrowing of certain English-sourced linguistic items allows a speaker to engage in discourse behavior that is not seen as native (or possibly even appropriate) in the recipient culture or language (Peterson 2017). In this chapter I broaden the perspective of previous research to look at longer stretches of discourse and language choice, demonstrating that perceived ideologies about characteristics of English in native-speaker settings are driving mechanisms in how English is used in foreign language settings, in this case Finland.Peer reviewe