Interpreting trauma narratives in crosscultural immigration encounters between outer-circle and expanding-circle ELF users: sociolinguistic issues and pedagogic implications

This paper explores the ways in which traumatic experiences of war and torture are first represented in the narratives of West African refugees through their ELF variations during crosscultural medical encounters, and then interpreted by Italian specialists with reference to their clinical-schema categories, and encoded according to the genre conventions which inform the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and textual features of the ELF which the specialists use. The case study investigates not only the different ELF linguacultural conventions of the two contact groups, respectively coming from the ‘outer’ and the ‘expanding’ circles, but also the register structures of the Italian specialists, transferred to their ELF, which do not account for the African refugees’ differently situated narratives, perceived by specialists as ‘deviating’. This is so because coherence and cohesion in such narratives reflect the refugees’ different L1 typological features transferred to their ELF variations, as well as their different knowledge systems and community values associated with traumatic experiences relating more to socio-political balance than to individual wellbeing. Four deviation levels between ‘conventional’ and ‘native’ trauma reports through ELF are investigated: transitivity vs. ergativity; generic vs. ethnopoetic patterns; epistemic vs. deontic modality; specialized lexis vs. native idioms of distress. The identification of divergent narratives has also a pedagogical impact on the training of community interpreters in contexts of transcultural psychiatry as it suggests alternative ways of textualizing, through ELF, different socio-cultural conceptualizations of the trauma experience, thus safeguarding the refugees’ social identities and fostering successful communication in the ‘expanding circle’.