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Conclusion
A lexico-grammatical analysis of the written Croatian ELF variety was provided in this paper. Based on the results, it may be suggested that, despite the fact that Seidlhofer’s categories of lexico-grammatical ELF features are based on the most commonly used deviations from the norm, the usage scales will not be the same in every language. Rather than being universal, they may depend on the users’ mother tongue; that is, positive and negative L1 transfer, which have been found to significantly impact the deviations from the norm in the participants’ written production. However, this has to be confirmed by more extensive research. Moreover, other lexico-grammatical features of ELF which would be typical of Croatian and possibly other Slavic languages should be uncovered. On the basis of such findings, Croatian/Slavic ELF categories could be formed. Such scales of usage of lexico-grammatical feature categories could be drawn for each group of ELF speakers who share a common mother tongue or one of the mother tongues belonging to the same language family.
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References
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