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Trauma-Narrative Analysis at the Level of Pragmalinguistic Schemata

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English as a Lingua Franca in Migrants' Trauma Narratives

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Abstract

This chapter presents a series of case studies in the field of legal advice to trauma-affected migrants. The purpose is to enquire into the pragmalinguistic features of the asymmetric interactions through ELF from which non-Western migrants’ trauma narratives emerge as ‘deviations’ from the expected Western schematic knowledge of the discourse of law. Such schematic deviations are assumed to prompt the migrants’ activation of conversation moves that are perceived as ‘dispreferred’ from the perspective of the Western legal advisors, causing a ‘pragmalinguistic failure’ in intercultural communication. More specifically, the chapter explores, in the principled contexts of the case-study analysis, novel constructs which are here defined as ‘conflicting semantic, pragmatic, and specialized (legal) text schemata’, ‘diverging typological iconicity’ in the pragmalinguistic pattern of trauma events, and ‘formal, functional, and pragmatic markedness’ in misinterpreting schema-deviating reports of traumatic events in unequal situations of legal advice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Indeed, speakers of pidgin and creole English perceive these variations as expressions of their own national and socio-cultural identities, which explains why they reject conventional orthography in favour of their indigenous phonetic spelling.

  2. 2.

    These cognitive/discursive processes will be explored in the protocol analysis of the ensuing transcriptions. In them, words and structures recognizably in NPE and Sierra Leone Krio follow, respectively, Faraclas’s (1996) and Wyse’s (1989) spelling conventions. Conversational transcription symbols are once again adapted from Edwards (1997: 323–324).

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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 Pragmalinguistic Schemata. In: English as a Lingua Franca in Migrants' Trauma Narratives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58300-0_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58300-0_7

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  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58300-0

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