Our contribution builds upon prior linguistic research into emotional expression, and specifically into the role of prosodic elements. It makes use of a corpus of autobiographical narrative interviews – known as the Israelkorpus – conducted by Anne Betten and her collaborators with Jewish migrants who escaped from German-speaking regions of Central Europe to Palestine / Israel during the Nazi era. Given that the recounting of traumatic events often exhibits circular-repetitive and fragmented speech patterns, we complement and enrich the study of the prosodic dimension by analyzing the role of repetition at the textual level. The paper’s main objective is thus to explore the relationship between emotional expression and thematic repetitions. Firstly, we detect recurring themes that appear like leitmotifs across five interviews with the same speaker, Ari Rath; we then examine more closely how such a circular speech procedure affects the emotional potential of the latest narrative in the sequence. Finally, we focus on the expression of emotions to determine whether thematic repetitions bring about similar prosodic patterns.