Incivility and confrontation in online conflict discourses

What is it about?

Abstract The paper aims to uncover the interactional discourse negative emotion dynamics in online conflict discourses in Polish and English and identify conditions for transitory group emergence. The analysed comments concern the present challenges to the status and position of the European Union as well as its existential legitimacy crisis, including the status of refugees and immigration throughout the years 2012-2017. It is shown that negative emotionality underlying incivility axis patterns as identified throughout the CMC discourse threads, functions as a stronger driving force towards a unity of particular group identification than a comparable set of positive emotionality parameters. There are cultural and language-related aspects of these processes identified with regard to differences between Polish and English in terms of discourse strategies, cultural dimensions, presence of incivility and emotionality dynamics. Considered from the overall level of the relationship between conflict and emotions, what is observed is the radicalization of the attitudes and their language expression, accompanied by the rise in emotional arousal as evidenced both in the English and Polish sets of data, although differences in the degree of its overtness are still distinct. Keywords CMC, discourse strategies, emotions, English, incivility, online conflict, Polish

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Why is it important?

It is shown in the paper that negative emotions underlying incivility axis patterns as identified throughout the CMC discourse threads, function as a stronger driving force towards a unity of particular group identification than a comparable set of positive emotionality parameters. These processes are also argued to be, to a large extent, culture-specific.

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