Disaffiliation and Pragmatic Strategies of Emotive Communication in a Multiparty Online Conflict Talk - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 161

accommodation theory, in particular Giles et al. ( 1991 ). Two kinds of attunement
are hypothesized: “thematic attunement,” a strategy wherewith the speaker helps
understanding her point (e.g., with reformulations), and “stylistic attunement,” a
set of convergent strategies both on the topic and on the formal aspects of the
conversation the speakers adopt in order to attempt a mutual approach to each
other (e.g., by decreasing the level of formality and indirectness). The device of
empathetic distance/proximity is proposed by Caffi as a manner of identification of
the linguistic markedness of these two types of attunement.
However, why are mitigating devices and empathetic attunement relevant in
the study of conflict talk? As I will show in the analysis that follows, sensitive
issues are often presented with numerous kinds of mitigating strategies in order to
avoid negative perlocutionary effects. On the contrary, the expression of contrasting
stances can strategically present aggravating strategies (Merlini Barbaresi 2009 ) and
generally emotive strategies opposite to mitigation as a manner of reinforcement of
the status of distance and disagreement.

9.3 Key Concepts from the Conversational

Analytic Framework

9.3.1 The Idea of Emotive Stance (Ochs 1986)

Emotive or affective stance has different definitions throughout linguistic literature.
Ochs (1986: 410) defines it as “a mood, attitude, feeling and disposition, as well as
degrees of emotional intensity vis-à-vis some focus of concern.” More recently, Du
Bois ( 2007 : 169) generally defines stance taking as “a public act by a social actor,
achieved dialogically through overt communicative means (language, gesture and
other symbolic forms), through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects,
position subjects (themselves and others) and align with other subjects, with respect
to any salient dimension of the socio-cultural field.” Stivers ( 2008 ) uses the term
stance to describe the affective treatment by a given speaker of the events she is
speaking of.
Some authors postulate more forms of stance, of which the affective-emotive is
one of the possible types. Ochs ( 1986 ) distinguishes between affective and epistemic
stance, and she highlights the indexical nature of each of them. Goodwin ( 2007 )
distinguishes between five different types of stance: instrumental, cooperative,
epistemic, moral, and affective. He imagines all of these stances manifested through
verbal and mostly nonverbal strategies and devices, such as intonation, body posture,
prosody, and gesture.
Other researches on the expressive modalities of emotive or affective stance
are found, among others, in Goodwin et al. ( 2012 ), Niemelä ( 2010 ), Jaffe ( 2009 ),
Englebretson ( 2007 ), and Kärkkäinen ( 2003 , 2006 ). More recently, stance styles
have begun to be regarded as intersubjective phenomena (Kärkkäinen 2003 ),