BEYOND THE LEXICON: TEMPORAL DISCOURSE DYNAMICS, PRAGMATIC MARKERS, AND CONVERSATIONAL TRAJECTORIES IN MULTILINGUAL SUICIDE-RELATED COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The Psycho-Forensic Linguistic Surveillance Initiative (PFLSI) has advanced from qualitative analysis of Pakistani suicide notes to English corpus analysis, theoretical integration, multilingual corpus design, and a prespecified transformer-validation protocol. However, document-level classification alone cannot explain how meanings change across conversational turns, how distress is negotiated through responses, or how culturally situated expressions vary within an interaction. This paper proposes a temporally and interactionally sensitive research framework for analysing suicide-related discourse in English, Urdu, Punjabi, Roman Urdu, and code-switched communication. It operationalizes five complementary layers: turn-level pragmatic action, temporal orientation, interpersonal alignment, culturally situated framing, and sequential change. A prospective mixed-method design combines conversation analysis, discourse-pragmatic annotation, within-conversation trajectories, and leakage-controlled computational comparisons. The paper defines sampling and annotation requirements, reliability and validation procedures, negative controls, interpretive safeguards, and ethical governance. It does not report new data, estimated effects, or model accuracy. Its contribution is a falsifiable methodological bridge between PFLSI’s document-based architecture and future studies of interactional dynamics, while maintaining the distinction between suicide-related communication, clinical risk assessment, and individual-level prediction.