ABSTRACT
Many English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)-related sources cite grammar as one of the "most studied" aspects of ELF. In actual fact, however, serious investigations into the syntax or structure of ELF are still rare, and ELF grammar easily loses out in popularity to descriptions of other linguistic levels, such as lexis or pragmatics in ELF. This chapter seeks to answer three central questions of ELF grammar: why study grammar in ELF, what can we expect from ELF grammar and what do we know about ELF grammar so far. The first tentative results from written ELF seem to further corroborate the distinction between second-language acquisition and ELF also in terms of grammar, and demonstrate how ELF does participate in and accelerate on-going grammatical changes in English. The chapter concludes that ELF grammar does seem to manifest some simplification in structure but to a relatively low degree as non-standardness in (spoken) ELF is, overall, fairly infrequent.
