Pragmatic clues to inference in asylum interpreting: A socio-cognitive perspective

Asylum determination interviews are central to migration governance, where applicants’ credibility is often judged through interpreter-mediated communication. While applied linguistics has highlighted the linguistic and cultural complexity of these encounters, the institutional consequences of interpreting choices remain underexplored. This article investigates how interpreters’ handling of discourse markers (DMs) and their prosodic cues influences evidentiary value, credibility, and fairness in asylum procedures, with particular attention to their role as procedural guides to inference. Adopting a relevance-theoretic perspective (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) combined with Goffman’s (1981) participation framework (via Wadensjö 1998), this study analyses a simulated Italian asylum interview involving a Nigerian trafficking survivor, a caseworker, and a Nigerian Pidgin-Italian interpreter. My micro-sociolinguistic and cognitive-pragmatic analysis identifies three recurring patterns: close, zero, and expanded renditions. Close renditions preserve pragmatic scaffolding and support caseworker’s inferential paths, maintaining interpretive coherence and facilitating efficient processing. Zero renditions, by contrast, systematically flatten prosody and erase stance cues, thereby weakening questioning strategies, increasing processing effort, and obscuring applicants’ positioning. Expanded renditions reveal interpreter agency most visibly: non-speaker-oriented insertions often align with institutional frames, while speaker-oriented additions reconstruct intimacy, but blur authorship and redistribute responsibility for meaning. These findings highlight the ethical and institutional risks posed by insufficient training. The omission or mismanagement of DMs can distort perceptions of coherence and confidence, while excessive or ill-calibrated additions may reshape the evidentiary record and influence credibility assessments. More broadly, the results demonstrate that seemingly peripheral features, such as DMs and prosody, play a central role in structuring interaction and guiding institutional decision-making.