Abstract
This chapter explores the linguacultural deviations between Western clinical reports on war/torture-related trauma and non-Western migrants’ native trauma narratives at the level of epistemic and deontic modality. It argues that, on the one hand, in the analysed scientific articles on transcultural psychiatry, there is a recurrent use of epistemic modal verbs and ‘hedging’, which diminish the expert writers’ commitment to the truth value of their interpretations of non-Western trauma narratives. On the other hand, non-Western (West African) migrants’ original trauma narratives are marked, instead, by a frequent use of deontic modality, signalling an obligation, felt by the traumatized migrants, to perform repair actions of political or even supernatural kinds involving their own community as the only solution for them to start the recovery process. The chapter also shows evidence, from the ethnographic data of migrants’ ELF reports, of three recurrent non-Western trauma-narrative structures—here defined as trauma narratives of ‘hope’, ‘frustration’, and ‘despair’—accounting for a possible/unreal/impossible-worlds gradient corresponding to the three conditional propositions in Modal Semantics.
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- 1.
The Masters course in “Intercultural Mediation in Immigration and Asylum Domains” has been held for more than ten years at the University of Salento, Southern Italy.
- 2.
Transcriptions of trauma narratives in African-ELF variations are often followed by a Standard English version in case of a lack of familiarity with these autochthonous English variants.
- 3.
Sierra Leonean Krio English is a creole variation of English used as a lingua franca in Sierra Leone, where it has acquired the status of national language. Krio has neither auxiliaries, nor inflectional morphology marking verbs for tense and aspect, as it makes use of pre-verbal tense/aspect markers, such as: “bin” (simple past); “dohn” (perfect aspect); “de” (continuous aspect); “kin” (habitual aspect); “go” (future tense); “mohs” (epistemic modality); “foh” (deontic modality). Also the -s suffix for “plural” is absent in Krio English, as plural is signalled by the pronoun “dehn”/”them” following a noun. Krio narratives are here transcribed according to Wilson’s (1964) spelling conventions.
- 4.
This can explain the spoken-discourse origin of cliticization (Jeffers and Zwicky 1980) by which English phrasal-verb particles become verb affixes—as in the above-mentioned Sierra-Leonean Krio verbs “kohmoht” deriving from ‘come out’; “lehdohn” from ‘lie down’; “sidohn” from ‘sit down’. Cliticization is assumed to occur according to a ‘decategorialization process’ (Hopper and Traugott 1993: 103–123) from discourse to morphology, triggered by the universal ‘principle of economy’ (Slobin 1977; Dressler 1988) aimed at rapidity and efficiency in communication which, however, in cases of cross-cultural interaction, often produces a lack of clarity and, thus, miscommunication. This lack is reflected in the semantic bleaching (Sweetser 1988) of the cliticized phrasal verb particles. By the same token, it is assumed that the principle of economy can also explain the process of pragmatic inferencing in cross-cultural communication activated by participants from different native languages, as they interact through ELF. In such cases, inferencing is determined by the participants’ abductive processes of cognitive generalization, which constrain their interpretations of the other participants’ propositions into conventional implicatures in an attempt to avoid ambiguity (cf. Blakemore 1987: 130).
- 5.
The expression ‘Boko Haram’ in Hausa means ‘Western education is sin’.
- 6.
NPE is an acknowledged, though by no means standardized, communication-oriented language, a ‘lingua franca’ widely used for interactional/commercial purposes (Elugbe and Omamor 1991; Faraclas 1996). Like Sierra Leonean Krio English, NPE has no grammaticalized auxiliaries and inflectional morphology to mark verbs for tense and aspect, as it makes use of pre-verbal tense/aspect markers, very similar to the Krio ones, such as: “bin” (simple past); “don” (perfect aspect); “de” (continuous aspect); and “go” (future tense). NPE orthographic transcriptions include: “a” (I); “os” (us); “i” (s/he/it); “am/in” (him/her/it); “mai” (my); “awa” (our); “di” (the); “di + noun + dem” (the + plural); “won” (a/an/one); “tu/tri” (two/three); “dat” (that); “for/fo” (all-purpose preposition); “na” (it/there is/was); “no bi” (it/there is/was not); “se” (that); “wen” (when); “wie” (where); “hie” (here); “bifo” (before); “mek” (so that); “kom” (come-came/arrive/d); “sabi” (know); “dey” (be).
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Guido, M.G. (2018). Trauma-Narrative Analysis at the Level of Modality. In: English as a Lingua Franca in Migrants' Trauma Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58300-0_3
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