Authors

Discussion

The paper aims to examine the linguistic markers of 'trauma discourse' (Matei, 2013) in short fiction on World War I by Bohdan Lepky (1872-1941). Our previous research findings on the psycholinguistic features of Russia's war testimonies posted by today's Ukrainians on Facebook and Lepky's war narratives demonstrate striking similarities (Zasiekin et al., 2022). This study is based on an analysis of Lepky's pre-war and war short fiction. Two research questions were thus formulated: RQ1: Does the topic of death and negative emotions, such as anger, sadness and anxiety, receive greater attention in war narratives? RQ2: Are war narratives less coherent and discrete as a result of the reduced use of conjunctions and discourse connectives? The comparative analysis employed the Ukrainian version (Taraban et al., 2022)  of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC2015) software tool (Pennebaker et al., 2015) and an independent samples t-test using SPSS 30. On the basis of the established specific weight of categories in the two sets of texts, it was possible to identify linguistic markers of trauma in Lepky's wartime short stories. The results demonstrated that war fiction exhibited a statistically significant reduction in text coherence signals, namely discourse connectives, both ideational and pragmatic (Zasiekin, 2024). Additionally, there was a greater prevalence of 'mitigation' (Caffi, 2013) 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. Furthermore, the greater use of verbs in the present tense is a hallmark of the author's discourse when discussing an undisclosed event (Pasupathi, 2007). The use of different verb tenses could be indicative of increased psychological distance and a higher degree of resolution for disclosed events in comparison to undisclosed events. A greater use of affect, or emotion words, is indicative of a greater degree of immersion in the traumatic event (Holmes et al., 2007). In other words, for Lepky, the act of storytelling served as a means of disclosing unuttered individual painful experiences. This strategy has been acknowledged by social psychologists as a mechanism for stress relief (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). Accordingly, in response to RQ1, while anxiety was found to be a significant factor in the narrative of trauma discourse, the topic of death, markers of anger and other negative emotions were found to be insignificant. RQ2 was answered in the affirmative. The results shed new light on the linguistic manifestations of the individual author's traumatic experience. The study offers prospects and implications for further psycholinguistic and pragmatic analysis of the Russia's war testimonies by today's Ukrainians.