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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.

Abstract – The huge increase in migration flows through the Afro-Mediterranean routes during recent decades has shaped previously homogeneous populations into linguistically and culturally diverse ethnoscapes. Migration has therefore made a notable contribution to the acquisition and the use of English as a first, second and foreign language and to the burgeoning of new Englishes all over the world (Crystal 1997; Trudgill et al. 2002; Jenkins, 2003) thus questioning our traditional knowledge of language as a social projection of territorial unity held together by shared behavioral norms, beliefs and values. Specifically, by examining the communicative and translation processes which twelve interviewed interpreters, translators and language mediators were involved in during their interaction with newly-arrived migrants in Southern Italy, this paper addresses three main research issues concerning: a) the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in the practice of language and cultural mediation and the extent to which this language may be perceived either as a barrier or as a bridge, thus affecting the relationship between the mediator and the migrant and the shaping of the politics of hospitality in the Mediterranean; b) the different linguistic and extra-linguistic strategies which mediators can adopt in the field of migration emergencies not only to serve communicative purposes, but also to humanize the migrants’ transfer to, and stay at the different camps across Italy; c) the interviewed language mediators’ narratives as a testimony of negotiation, activism and resistance to the strict institutionalized protocols of Italian immigration policies. Finally, in this chapter, we also intend to investigate the extent to which the interviewed mediators form not a mere aggregation of individuals achieving the task of translation as a mere linguistic transfer, but a community of practice held together by a conscious and critical sense of the performative power of their words and their mediation conceived as a way to create meanings which form and transform human reality.

English has become the most influential language for international discourse (Weber 1997, Graddol 2010) and it is tempting to foresee a largely monolingual future at the international level, where other languages become irrelevant. Such a simplistic view sees the adoption of English as something universal and uniform with little room for variation, local identity, or other lingua francas. Data shows that other lingua francas are not inevitably in decline. Diverse languages – e.g. Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, French – continue to be important regionally or in certain discourse contexts (Weber 1997, Ostler 2010, Ronen et al. 2014) and on the internet. In this paper, we look at recent data from a variety of recent sources (Ronen et al. 2014,Olivié et al. 2015,) in an attempt to examine the situation regarding languages and their influences in the world today. In particular, we will attempt to take into account the fact that much language distribution is today no longer tied in with territorial dimensions. New media such as the internet, as well as mass migration between countries, have made it less easy to identify specific langugaes with precise geographical areas. Furthermore although the world is increasingly globalised, significant regional divisions still exist in the use of media (especially in the case of China) making it difficult at present to make direct comparisons about language use. In this complex scenario, it is also apparent that as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) variations emerge and gain in influence (see Seidlhofer 2011), the identity of English will change and come to become itself a reflection of a plurilingual reality in which speakers typically have at their disposal a repertoire of different languages