Small words, big meaning – Ideational and pragmatic markers of trauma discourse in Bohdan Lepky's war fiction

Serhii Zasiekin

doi:10.29038/

Authors

Serhii Zasiekin University College London, UK; Lesya Ukrainka Volyn National University, Ukraine

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29038/

Keywords:

ideational markers, pragmatic markers, trauma discourse, Relevance Theory, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), Bohdan Lepky, war narratives

Abstract

The paper aims to examine the linguistic markers of 'trauma discourse' (Matei, 2013) in short fiction on World War I by Bohdan Lepky. The comparative analysis of his pre-war and war fiction employed the Ukrainian version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015) software tool (Pennebaker et al., 2015) and an independent samples t-test. On the basis of the established specific weight of categories in the two sets of texts, it was possible to identify markers of trauma discourse in Lepky's wartime stories. The results demonstrated that war fiction exhibited a statistically significant reduction in text coherence signals, namely discourse markers, both ideational and pragmatic. Additionally, there was a greater prevalence of 'tentative' words, or 'mitigation' (Caffi, 2013) pragmatic markers and 'affect' words, including indicators of anxiety with a focus on the present. As Busch (2015) noted, narratives produced in traumatic contexts often fail to meet institutional expectations in terms of coherence and accuracy. Higher use of tentative words may suggest that the author is not secure about the topic, i.e. has not yet processed a traumatic experience and formed it into a coherent story. From the perspective of Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) and procedural-conceptual meaning distinction (Blakemore, 1993), the availability of ideational and pragmatic discourse markers fosters higher cognitive effects for the minimum processing effort, thereby increasing the relevance of the communicated utterance(s) for the reader.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the support of funding from the British Academy, UK

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