Disaffiliation and Pragmatic Strategies of Emotive Communication in a Multiparty Online Conflict Talk - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 155

provide similar opportunities of emotive cohesion or lack thereof through, mutatis
mutandis, macro- and micro-stylistic strategies similar to those occurring in conver-
sational settings.
Exchanges on CMC are a potentially fruitful unit of analysis in the research
on emotive communication, since the impressions of interpersonal distance and
proximity inferable from their tokens of interaction are so heavy and clear. These
impressions contrast with the contextual “coldness” which distinguishes them: as in
e-mail, so in online discussion groups (namely, fora or the Internet message boards)
or on social network platforms (excluding those with integrated instant messaging
systems), the interaction often occurs among strangers; the communication is
asynchronous, which means that the production of a message and its answers occur
at different times; and language is “disembodied” by its producers. Nevertheless,
the intensity of the exchanges produced and communicated via these media is often
strong enough to make communicative activities such as affiliation and disaffiliation
or involvement and detachment particularly evident. At a first glance, it even seems
that such manifestations of emotion and positive or negative affectivity are more
heavily communicated online than in face-to-face conversations.
If CMC has received special attention since the early 1990s of the last century, 1
recently more attention has been paid to the expressions of emotionality through
CMC (to mention a few recent works: Pistolesi 2002 ;Fabrietal. 2005 ; Provine
et al. 2007 ; Rodham et al. 2007 ; Kleinke 2008 ; Gill et al. 2008 ; Hancock et al.
2007 ; Angouri and Tseliga 2010 ; Thelwall et al. 2010 , 2011 ; Marwick and Boyd
2010 ;Chmieletal. 2011 ; Langlotz and Locher 2012 ; inter alia). It is, however, an
amount of researches still quite heterogeneous with regards to investigated objects
and platforms, methodologies, and theoretical paradigms of reference.
The analysis I propose is an attempt to employ the resources and analytic
tools related to the concept of emotive communication on contextualized tokens
of conflict talk in CMC: in particular, I will try to consider how disaffiliation could
be detected and measured by means of markers such as Caffi and Janney's ( 1994 )
emotive devices. The methodological and disciplinary framework that I adopt is that
of an “integrated” or “holistic” pragmatics (Caffi 2001 , 2007 ), a framework which
takes into account strategies and concepts coming from different perspectives (i.e.,
linguistic pragmatics, social psychology, rhetoric, stylistics, possibly also prosody
and nonverbal communication). 2 The CMC platform I chose for this analysis will
be that of Internet message boards. The language of reference is Italian or what
Giuseppe Antonelli defined as “digital Italian.” 3
1 Two important references with these regards are the volumes of Language@Internet and the
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , respectively available online from 2004 to 2012
and from June 1995 to July 2007.
2 For an alternative approach to CMC tied to a framework of cognitive pragmatics, see Yus ( 2013 ).
3 For an overview of features that the Italian language assumes through CMC, see Orletti ( 2004 ),
Antonelli ( 2007 ), Tavosanis ( 2011 ), and Fiorentino ( in press ).