Disaffiliation and pragmatic strategies of emotive communication in a multiparty online conflict talk

This chapter examines the emergence and the development of a multiparty conflict talk within an Italian computer-mediated community, with a special focus on the pragmatic resources and sequential strategies wherewith the users express their stance. Namely, the former are described by means of six multimodal emotive devices of evaluation, proximity, specificity, evidentiality, volitionality, and quantity proposed by Caffi and Janney (J Pragmatics 22: 325-373, 1994), while the latter are described by identifying the users' disaffiliative responses. Reflections on how these two sets of communicative choices possibly interact in the strategic signaling of disagreement among the users will be presented. The chapter will be divided into the following parts: a concise presentation of the relevant theoretical background, with a highlight on linguistic pragmatic concepts and on conversational analytic resources related to affectivity in interaction; a presentation of the choice of methods and of the objectives of the research; the analysis of an extract of an exchange selected from a 155-post thread from the Italian online forum Postare.it; and conclusive remarks and a call for increased discussion on how further studies on multimodal pragmatic markers and conversational strategies might help to better understand the dynamics of multiparty conflict talk.