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Trauma-Narrative Analysis at the Level of Language Typology

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English as a Lingua Franca in Migrants' Trauma Narratives

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Abstract

This chapter analyses the influence of native language typologies on the ELF structures of West African migrants’ trauma narratives. It starts by illustrating the deliberate use of the passive voice in the transitive clause structures of Western scientific texts on PTSD in transcultural psychiatry, where trauma symptoms are collocated in a subject position whereas trauma-affected people are defocused at the end of the clause, or are totally omitted. Then, the chapter moves to the analysis of the OVS (Object → Verb → Subject) ergative structures transferred from West African native languages into the migrants’ ELF variations that they use to convey their trauma narratives—which are liable to be misinterpreted by Western experts in charge of unequal encounters as a deliberate choice to withhold information about the agents of illegal actions. Case-study evidence shows how Italian experts in charge of interview formulate questions according to the cause-effect accusative structure of their native language, typologically marking the SVO (Subject → Verb → Object) active transitive clauses in order to elicit from migrants precise information about responsible agency. The chapter also enquires into the use of ergative ‘supernatural’ personifications of objects and natural phenomena as the migrants’ strategy to cope with their impotence when overwhelming traumatic events befall them—which is believed to be at the primordial source of ergativity in Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afro-Asiatic languages.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The same primordial ‘displacing’ sense of being under the control of hostile natural elements is believed to be at the basis of the lack of directionality and orientational categories in West African native languages, reflected in the absence of directional and recipient prepositions indicating a movement category in the syntax of NPE and in Sierra Leonean Krio. This explains the use of the all-purpose preposition ‘for’ making up for such categorical lack in both NPE and Krio. This absence of a cognitive-experiential ‘directionality’ category (cf. Talmy 1983) is probably due to the adverse climatic and geomorphological conditions of the primordial African territory where the ancient Proto-Afro-Asiatic languages developed.

  2. 2.

    Igbo is not a standardized, communication-oriented language, but a representational, ‘cognitive’ one, aimed at conceptualizing reality according to ergatively constructed idioms and proverbs passed down from generation to generation, all referred to folk situations of natural and everyday life experience (Okeke 1984). In its process of adaptation, English is incorporated in Igbo discourse in terms of ‘borrowing’, by having its syntax redistributed among the ‘syntactic slots’ of the native Igbo sentence-structure, thus becoming Engligbo (Eze 1998).

  3. 3.

    Conversation symbols: [ ] → overlapping speech; underlining → emphasis; ° ° → quieter speech; (.) → micropause; (..) → pause; :: → elongation of prior sound; hhh → breathing out; .hhh → breathing in; > < → speed-up talk; = → latching.

  4. 4.

    In transcriptions, NPE expressions follow, to a great extent, Faraclas’s (1996) spelling conventions, whereas Igbo and Engligbo phrases are transcribed according to Okeke’s (1984) and Eze’s (1998) codification.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Maria Grazia Guido

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  1. Maria Grazia Guido
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Guido, M.G. (2018). Trauma-Narrative Analysis at the Level of Language Typology. In: English as a Lingua Franca in Migrants' Trauma Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58300-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58300-0_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-58299-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58300-0

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