The Rhetoric of Conflict Inside and Outside the Stadium: The Case Study of an Italian Football Cheer Group - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 204

Each episode starts with a theme song celebrating the Juventus team. Then
the program is animated through comments, tales, jokes, and gags played by four
people: the presenter, a journalist who is a fan of the team; the president of the
Drughi, a man from northern Italy; one of the main representatives of the group,
named “Ciccio”, from southern Italy; and another fan, named the “Lawyer,” from
northern Italy. During the program, other guests can be contacted, for example, the
head of the Drughi group from Rome. The program ends with the same opening
theme song.
The texts were transcribed and analyzed using qualitative content analysis and
diatextual analysis. In the first approach, we focused on the “what” of communi-
cation, concentrating specifically on the topics of the Drughi culture. In the second
approach, diatextual analysis allowed us to investigate the “how” of communication.
Actually, diatextual analysis is a special kind of discourse analysis that aims at
identifying and understanding the strict nexus between identity and discourses/texts.
Diatextual analysis is based on the assumption that sense does not reside
permanently within texts; rather, it permeates them as a result of the conjunct action
of the speakers, who negotiate the frame of the situation ( stake ) in which they
are actively involved. It tries to glean the meaning of a discourse by answering
three basic questions that organize the interpretative procedures of the SAM model
since they suggest looking for a series of markers that identify the subjectivity ,
argumentation , and modality of discourses (Mininni 1992 , 2003a , 2011 , 2013 ).
The first question ( who says that? ) aims at clarifying the way the text treats
its subjects by weaving complex links with the image the speaker elaborates of
him/herself and of the addressee.
1. Agency markers include all textual units showing whether the speaker is a source
or goal of some action. Both discursive and grammatical tools are used to position
oneself as an “actor” (who makes choices, elaborates programs, makes decisions)
or “patient” (who is subjected to external powers without any responsibility):
first-person pronouns state the speaker as the subject; modal verbs indicate that
the person has no choice (a person must do something); in addition, passive verbs
and marking someone as an object rather than as a subject hide the agency.
2. Affectivity markers reveal the emotional dimension of texts. In particular, the
emotional extent of discourses can be identified using the following markers
(Caffi and Janney 1994 ):
(a) Evaluation markers, which position statements on the axis good/bad, posi-
tive/negative, and so on.
(b) Proximity markers, which metaphorize the emotion through the physic,
social, or temporal gap.
(c) Specificity markers, which modify the reference world (e.g., affective dis-
tance can be shown by dealing with specific arguments in a general way).
(d) Evidentials, which regulate the credibility and the authority of what is said
using modals and subjective/objective verbs.
(e) Volition markers, which modify the self-identification level with respect to
partners, for example, through a declarative, interrogative, or imperative
tone.