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responsive to the interactional requirements and contexts in which the speakers
interact. The
focus
has hence moved from the individual speaker toward a more
co-constructive approach, the same approach my analysis aims at fitting into.
9.3.2
The Concept of Affiliation (Stivers
2008
)
Affiliation is understood as that series of sequential actions in the context of a
communicative exchange aimed at supporting or approving the speaker's emotive
stance, this last being made explicit by the speaker herself in her conversational
turns (Couper-Kuhlen
2012
: 113).
5
In his research on conversational storytelling, Stivers (
2008
) distinguished
between two different types of reception adapted to the interlocutor: alignment and
affiliation. Whereas the former indicates all the communicative tokens linked with
the interlocutor's role (e.g.
,
proper turn-taking or feedbacks on the understanding,
like “mmh mmh,” “a-ha,” “yes”), the latter is the explicit endorsement of the
speaker's affective orientation made evident by means of assessments congruous
with those expressed by the speaker herself. Contrasting short replies, withholdings,
and follow-up questions which appear in the conversational segment that follows
the speaker's explanation or presentation of her emotive stance and generally all
the communicative tokens which do not endorse the speaker's emotive stance are
considered non-affiliative instead, together with those communicative tokens which
are openly discordant with the speaker's affective stance (and that are thus based on
a different and contrasting stance).
Even though affiliation is considered a preferred action in the communicative
exchanges, responses are never intrinsically affiliative, but they become such
depending on their position in the dialogue: for example, nodding is understood
as a type of affiliative response if it occurs right after the speaker's presentation of
her emotive stance, but it is viewed as non-affiliative if it occurs at the end of the
speaker's storytelling sequence (Couper-Kuhlen
2012
;Stivers
2008
).
Lindström and Sorjonen (
2012
) consider complaint stories and trouble talks
the conversational contexts where affiliative replies are more often preferred and
exhibited (see also Selting
2010
—inter alia). The relevance of affiliation as a fruitful
practice in therapeutic contexts has been especially underlined by Ruusuvuori
(
2005
,
2007
,
2013
).
Affiliative and disaffiliative types of responses constitute a resourceful aspect
of emotive communication, though their modalities of presentation in the commu-
nicative exchanges are yet in need of further exploration. As I will show in the
following paragraphs, the degree of convergence of affiliation elicitation and of
5
Affiliation in this sense is a conversational category similar (but not isomorphic) to the
psychological-affective dimension of affiliation mentioned by authors such as Gough (
1957
)or
Russell (
1991
).
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