Disaffiliation and Pragmatic Strategies of Emotive Communication in a Multiparty Online Conflict Talk - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 163

disaffiliative replies with the possible emotive stances presented by the interactants
in a conflict talk may be measurable with the different types of emotive devices that
those interactants employ.

9.4 Data

The corpus I examined is a thread of 155 posts in Italian from the generalist forum
Postare.it , which is divided into 38 boards featuring topics ranging from health to
comics, from cooking to philosophy. It is a widely attended message board by Italian
users remarkably heterogeneous in age, sex, and gender.
The use of nicknames by the users—or, at all events, the impossibility to
recognize their true identity—guarantees the privacy of the people who participated
to these discussions behind the screens of their computers. The threads I selected for
this analysis are publicly visible on the website without any need of registration to
the message board. The interactions were faithfully reported, including their typing,
orthographic, and grammar mistakes. The transcription system I used follows the
Internet message boards standards used by Langlotz ( 2010 ).

9.5 Methods and Objectives

Central in my analysis is above all the concept of emotive communication I
previously presented: the inner state of the interactants, particularly inaccessible also
due to the kind of exchange they are protagonists of, was not considered. I instead
focused on the various effects of approach and withdrawal (Frijda 1998 ) and of
interest and disinterest inferable from the interactant's communicative choices. The
persuasive and strategic importance of these choices in the acts of co-construction
of meaning will also be shown, as well as the implications of those choices for the
management of the communicative exchange.
The presentation of the various strategies adopted by the users and their
articulation in a wide range of dimensions has been considered sufficient thus
far in order to explore the conflictive emotions in this kind of interaction. While
detecting the linguistic markers in the text, the following dimensions have been
taken into account: linguistic, in its pragmatics, semantic, syntactic, stylistic,
and rhetorical aspects; discursive, in particular dealing with metacommunicative,
contextual, and co-textual strategies; psychological, evaluated mainly by means
of the emotive devices by Caffi and Janney ( 1994 ) and by means of the markers
of empathetic proximity and mitigation by Caffi ( 2001 , 2007 ) and boosters and
markers of linguistic aggravation (Merlini Barbaresi 2009 ); and sequential strategies
and strategies of presentation and reception of the affective message in their
different phases, evaluated mainly thanks to conversational analytic concepts (i.e.,