Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2022

Abstract

In recent years, travellers have increasingly opted for sharing economy businesses, such as Airbnb. In contrast to other platforms for travellers, the Airbnb review system is characterised by its positivity bias, which implies that most of the users post enthusiastically positive reviews. Posting a negative review is the exception, which makes it a highly sensitive task in relational terms.

In light of the above, this study aims to examine 60 reviews with negative valence in order to understand: first, which aspects of the experience make airbnbers feel dissatisfied; second, the extent to which relational concerns and authenticity make an impact on both dissatisfaction and rapport orientation; and third, how rapport concerns (i.e., face and rights and obligations) are managed in reviews with negative valence. The results show that a large number of users tried to repair rapport, while others neglected or challenged rapport. The difference in tone and intention was motivated by the presence/absence of the relational component (i.e., association rights), which had an impact on the varying importance given to other faults. The present study intends to bring to the fore the importance of rapport management when posting sensitive information in an online system in which the management of communicative skills lies at its core.

Abstract

The 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia represented a watershed moment for the alt-right movement in the United States, involving a highly visible demonstration of multiple far-right hate groups. Understanding how multiple groups such as those that “united” in the Unite the Right Rally is essential in potentially disrupting future events and curbing their ability to create consensus. In this paper, we note that participants often engage in conflict through evaluative and authoritative stance taking. Aggression is sometimes ignored, and other times gets escalated through interpersonal conflict. Throughout, rapport or consensus is rarely prioritized. These findings offer insight into the workings of the alt-right and provide an example of how discourse analysis can be used in intelligence gathering and research on these dangerous groups.

Abstract

This paper examines the factors that influence the outcome of exchanges containing refusals, focusing specifically on the role of irony. For this purpose, we analyse spontaneous conversations in English (SPICE-Ireland Corpus and Spoken BNC) within a discursive framework (Eelen 2001; Mills 2003; Watts 2003) that considers the negotiation of opposing views as well as relationships between interlocutors. We propose a model that relies on the crucial distinction we draw between the ‘positional’ and the ‘interpersonal’ level, pointing at mismatches between the two when it comes to the presence of conflict. We determine the presence and (non-)resolution of interpersonal conflict based on evidence of relational work (Locher and Watts 2008) and show that although there is no fixed trajectory from irony type (Kapogianni 2011, 2018) to interpersonal effect, some ironies are more interpersonally risky than others.

Abstract

Linguistic analysis of the interpersonal patterning of threatening communication is a means of uncovering the attitudes, ideological orientation, and hostile intentions of perpetrators of violence in terrorist discourse (Gales 2010, 2011). Corpus analysis focused on attitudinal meaning also offers a diagnostic for characterizing the personal and relational identities (Bednarek 2010) manifest in such texts. This paper explores discursive patterns of authorial identity in terrorist communication in a set of post-9/11 terrorist public statements made by former al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. It draws on the Appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005), a model of evaluative language developed within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), to investigate the interpersonal component in this dataset. Specifically, patterns of attitude provide evidence of relational and actional attitude, and personal and relational identities. Negative judgement was found to characterize the encoded attitude in terms of (i) construing aggression and conflicting moral values (e.g., social sanction underpinning a perceived personal duty) and (ii) enacting the author’s aggressive and aloof identity, and violent actional attitude.

This article reviews Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction31.21€