THE LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTION OF PARTITION TRAUMA: AN APPRAISAL-BASED STUDY OF BAPSI SIDHWA’S ICE-CANDY-MAN

Abstract

This study examines the linguistic construction of violence in Partition through Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, Ice-Candy-Man, using the theoretical approach of Appraisal Analysis. Although there are many studies focusing on the historical and feminist aspects of the novel, this paper seeks to address the deficiency in functional linguistic research into the use of evaluative language in encoding the trauma of Partition in 1947.The study adopts a qualitative and descriptive research approach wherein selected "trauma-dense" passages from the book are annotated and analysed through the UAM Corpus Tool in line with the three subsystems of Appraisal, which are Attitude (Affect, Judgment, Appreciation), Graduation (Force and Focus), and Engagement (Monogloss and Heterogloss).The results show that Appreciation dominates the analysis, suggesting that violence is mostly encoded through the spatial destruction and environmental desolation rather than through Affect. Judgment often reflects the moral degeneration of the collective, and Graduation analysis reveals a relatively higher occurrence of strategies to upscale the horror and dehumanize the victim. Moreover, the story maintains a Monoglossic approach in that the narrator speaks with authority through the eyes of an adult child. Age influences the perception of historical trauma. The paper reveals that in this novel, Partition Violence is not merely a historical event but rather a deliberate linguistic construction created to convey the moral collapse and dehumanization. In doing this, this paper shows how Sidhwa makes use of grammatical constructions to achieve this effect. In relation to linguistics, this paper is important to SFL since it provides evidence of the influence of language on the experience of historical events.