This book examines how trauma is experienced and narrated differently across languages and cultures, drawing on rich ethnographic case studies and a novel cognitive-linguistic approach to analyse the variations of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) used in the narratives of West-African migrants and refugees in the course of intercultural encounters with Italian experts from domain-specific fields of discourse (including legal, medical, religious and cultural professionals). It examines the ways in which such experts interpret the migrants' trauma narratives by applying discourse conventions from within their communities of practice, as well as their own native linguacultural norms. It argues persuasively for the development of a 'hybrid ELF mode' of intercultural communication to be used by experts in charge of unequal encounters in specialized migration contexts that can accommodate different culture-bound categorizations of trauma. This timely and important work will appeal in particular to students and scholars of applied linguistics, discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, intercultural communication, pragmalinguistics, migration studies and healthcare communication.

This book explores the cognitive and communicative processes involved in the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) within cross-cultural specialized contexts where non-native speakers of English - i.e. Western experts and non-Western migrants - interact. The book argues that the main communicative difficulties in such contexts are due precisely to the use of ELF, since it develops from the non-native speakers' transfer of their native language structures and socio-cultural schemata into the English they speak. Transfer, in fact, allows non-native speakers to appropriate, or authenticate, those English semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and specialized-discourse structures that are linguistically and conceptually unavailable to them. It follows that there are as many ELF varieties as there are communities of non-native speakers authenticating English. The research questions justifying the ethnographic case studies detailed in this book are: What kind of cognitive frames and communicative strategies do Western experts activate in order to convey their culturally-marked knowledge of specialized discourse - by using their ELF varieties - to non-Westerners with different linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds? What kind of power asymmetries can be identified when non-Westerners try to communicate their own knowledge by using their respective ELF varieties? Is it possible to ultimately develop a mode of ELF specialized communication that can be shared by both Western experts and non-Western migrants?