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( 1994 ), and Arndt and Janney ( 1987 ). Especially Caffi and Janney's emotive devices
are a direct attempt of gathering Giles et al.'s ( 1979 ) speech markers and Gumperz's
( 1982 ) contextualization cues in a unique polyfunctional type of analytic tools.
9.2.2
Caffi and Janney's Emotive Devices ( 1994 )
Caffi and Janney's ( 1994 ) research effort aims at connecting psychological and
linguistic research perspectives to the theme of emotive communication. The authors
identified six different emotive devices based on the three most recurrent psycho-
logical dimensions of affect in the history of psychology— evaluation , potency , and
activity (Osgood et al. 1957 )—and on the most widespread linguistic categories
up to the early 1990s. Rather than focusing solely on the propositional content
of the conversational units of analysis (thus investigating emotive communication
not exclusively on its semantic and lexical levels), Caffi and Janney ( 1994 : 354)
preferred to specify the communicative phenomena that could highlight a certain
global affective tonality of the conversation, and they did so by systematically
organizing the different types of rhetorical, stylistic, and possibly prosodic and
paralinguistic choices that the speakers use in order to strategically produce different
evocative effects connected with the kind of emotive stance they display.
The devices they proposed are:
1. Evaluation devices (polarity: positive/negative), which include all the verbal and
nonverbal choices used to assess the speaking partner or the discursive content
and context (e.g., friendly or hostile tones of voice, modal adverbs, adjectives,
vocatives, diminutives, lexical, or stylistic choices conveying a positive or a
negative attitude). According to the authors, these choices can be interpreted as
indexes of pleasure or displeasure, agreement or disagreement, and sympathy or
antipathy.
2. Proximity devices (polarity: close/far), which include all the verbal and nonverbal
choices that can modify the metaphorical distances between the speakers and
their conversational topics, between the speakers and the spatial and/or temporal
objects belonging to their speaking context, or among the speakers themselves.
Proximity is intended as a subjective dimension emotively experienced by the
speakers and aimed at the shortening (or at the widening) of their own perceived
distances, including the communicative ways of approach or withdrawal toward
specific objects of appraisal.
3. Specificity devices (polarity: clear/vague), which include all the lexical choices,
conversational techniques, and those organizational patterns in the utterance that
can express a variation in the level of clarity and accuracy regarding objects and
states of affairs, the interlocutor, and the conversation itself. Examples are direct
or indirect vocatives, definite articles and pronouns versus indefinites, generic
references to the whole versus specific references to parts of a whole (e.g.,
“Lunch was great”/“The salad dressing was great”), and explicit subjects versus
generic subjects (e.g., “I think that”/“One thinks that”).
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