Arguing in a Multiparty Online Conflict Talk: Disaffiliation and Pragmatic Strategies of Emotive Communication

This paper 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 & Janney (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 paper will be divided into the following parts: an introduction to the problem and a concise state of the art on the relevant research on CMC; a presentation of the choice of methods and of the objectives of the research, with a highlight on the linguistic pragmatic concepts and on conversational analytic resources related to affectivity in interaction I employed; the preliminary results emerging from the analysis of an extract of an exchange selected from a 155 posts thread from the Italian online forum "Postare.it"; 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.