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But what exactly is referred as emotive communication and what kind of
tools are relevant for its investigation? What kind of pertinent concepts does the
conversational analytic research offer and how do they relate with the former in the
study of conflict talk? Before heading to data and charts, I will briefly try to answer
these two questions.
9.2
Emotive Communication: Psychology and Linguistic
Pragmatics at Their Interface
At the beginning of the twentieth century, emotive communication was broadly
defined by Marty ( 1908 : 364) as the strategic and intentional signaling of affective
information in speech and writing aimed at influencing the interlocutor's commu-
nicative actions, perlocutions, dispositions, stances, and goals. This idea was set
by the author against that of emotional communication , meaning the spontaneous
bursting out of emotion in speech. Leaving behind the discussion on how emotional
communication in this sense could also (both intentionally and unintentionally)
modify the interlocutor's dispositions and perlocutions (e.g., Haakana 2012 ), I
would like to draw attention on the type of commitments and stances speakers
linguistically adopt to influence their interlocutors, either in contexts of negotiation
or conflict, and quickly present how they have been treated in the literature.
9.2.1
Linguistic Markers of Psychological Attitudes
Conversations are overflowing with polyfunctional signals or markers (Hölker
1988 ) which indicate the quality of the self-presentation enacted by the speaker
and the quality of her cooperation with her interlocutors on different levels (e.g.,
prosodic, morpho-syntactic, stylistic, and rhetorical levels). From psychological and
sociological points of view, markers might act as cues of extralinguistic behaviors
and attitudes: for example, they may index the speaker's belonging to a given social
group, specific features of the speaker, or the degree of adherence to an uttered state
of affairs and the affective bonds connected with it.
More or less evident and intense tokens of emotive communication are inferable
from these cues. The idea of strategic markedness of discursive contents and
modalities (Hübler 1987 ) has a long tradition in semiotic studies, as well as in social
sciences (see, for instance, Abercrombie 1967 ). The signaling of speech markers is
itself a communicative activity through which the speakers can negotiate needs,
request and express information, and regulate personal attitudes (Caffi 2001 : 26).
From the point of view of a pragmatics of emotive communication, it is important
to identify a comprehensive operational category of markers able to detect and
integrate the speaker's attitudes and the modality in which the conversational
content is expressed. Tentatives in this direction are, among others, Goodwin et al.
( 2012 ), Couper-Kuhlen ( 2012 ), Selting ( 1994 , 2010 ), Caffi ( 2001 ), Caffi and Janney
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