Dimensioni cognitivo-semantiche, sintattiche e pragmatiche dei verbi in un corpus di inglese ‘lingua franca’ in contesti multiculturali di immigrazione

Abstract

Abstract – English has been increasingly adopted as the Lingua Franca (ELF) by people with different L1s (cf. Crystal 2003; McArthur 2003; Seidlhofer 2004) and diverse lingua-cultural backgrounds (Cogo et al. 2011). Previous research into its syntax (Mauranen and Ranta 2009) has undoubtedly shed light on some recurrent features of intercultural communication in immigration and asylum contexts (e.g. negation, question formulation, if-clauses), but little attention has been paid to the correlation between personal pronouns, semantic verb types and tense within the communicative process and, more specifically, the report of any traumatic event (Tuval-Mashiach et al. 2004) to which immigrants have been exposed over time and which constitutes what is generally referred to as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD; Friedman et al. 2007; Liotti and Farina 2011). This paper is based on the analysis of a corpus of transcripts published on the internet by the Minnesota Historical Society. The site, Becoming Minnesotan, collects excerpts from oral interviews conducted between 1967 and 2011 with recent immigrants to Minnesota usually fleeing civil war and strife, and their American-born children. By adopting the quantitative research methodology typical of corpus linguistics (Biber et al. 1999; Meyer 2002; Sinclair 1991), we searched for and extracted all the instances of semantic verbs types as well as personal pronouns and mapped their frequencies by means of Wordsmith Tools 6 (Scott 2012). Drawing on Halliday’s (1994) and Scheibman’s (2002) semantic verb type taxonomy, we can observe the frequency of certain semantic verb categories and tenses, and make some general considerations which seem to back up the ‘trance-like level of public re-enactment’ (Guido 2008, p. 105) that the interviewees experience during interviews: their physical and interior ‘displacement’ thus appears to be iconically represented by means of a tense usage being ‘displaced’ with respect to the consecutio temporum and differ according to the traumatic event.