Disaffiliation and Pragmatic Strategies of Emotive Communication in a Multiparty Online Conflict Talk - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 158

4. Evidentiality devices (polarity: confident/doubtful), which include all the
linguistic strategies that can regulate the speaker's subscription to the correctness
and credibility of what she intends to speak of. From the point of view of an
emotive approach to conversation, the most interesting feature of these devices
is their ability to convey the speaker's level of confidence or insecurity toward
specific topics and interlocutors (1994: 357). Examples are strategic uses of
modal verbs (e.g., “It's correct”/“It might be correct”), the degree of explicitness
of an intention (e.g., “I'm coming tomorrow”/“I might be coming tomorrow”),
other sorts of parentheticals, modal adverbs, hedges (Brown and Levinson 1987 ;
Lakoff 1974 ), verbal forms of epistemic commitment (Schiffrin 1987 ; Lyons
1977 ), verbal forms of self-identification with the conversational topic ( Tannen
1989 ), and more generally all the prosodic and nonverbal choices that can express
a major or minor level of intended clearness.
5. Volitionality devices (polarity: assertive/nonassertive), which include all the
linguistic and conversational strategies that can give the conversational agents
an active or a passive role. Examples are, again, strategic uses of modal
verbs in requests (e.g., “Would you mind passing the salt?”/“Can you pass the
salt”/“Give me the salt”) or active versus passive verbal forms in regard to
expressing opinions (e.g., “I thought that”/“It was claimed that”). The research
on volitionality phenomena is central in studies of Western politeness (inter alia:
Brown and Levinson 1987 ; Blum-Kulka 1987 ; see Locher and Graham 2010 for
a recent overview).
6. Quantity devices (polarity: more intense/less intense), which include all the
lexical, prosodic, and sometimes kinesic choices aimed at enhancing or reducing
the level of conversational intensity (Volek 1987 ; Labov 1984 ). Heterogeneous
examples are unexpected prosodic stress (e.g., “Don't do that”/“DON'T do
that!”), emphatic adjectives (e.g., “It was a good experience”/“It was an awesome
experience”), adverbs (e.g., “It was quite/definitely fun”), and various rhetorical
strategies of repetition (e.g., “I'm happy, really happy we have met”).
The emotive devices of evaluation, specificity, and evidentiality often seem
to foreground the speaker-content relationship and to background the speaker-
interlocutor relationship, while the devices of volitionality appear to be crucial
in the speaker-interlocutor relationship but less important in the speaker-content
relationship. When the focus of the communicative act is the interlocutor, preferred
choices are rhetorical and stylistic strategies aimed at expressing the willingness
to maintain the interlocutor's approval, displays of respect (i.e. , low levels of
assertiveness, recurring positive evaluations, high levels of vagueness, and politely
doubtful choices), and face-saving strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987 ; Goffman
1971 , among others). When the focus of the communicative act is the speaker herself
instead, preferred choices are self-disclosures and choices related to the speaker's
own attitudes and desires, primarily marked by devices of evaluation and proximity
and enhanced by devices of quantity. Finally, when the focus of the communicative
act is the conversational content, devices of (2.4) and generally the order in which
the elements appear in each utterance are especially central in the expression of
relevance and proximity to specific objects and states of affairs.