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Incivility and confrontation in online conflict discourses

  • Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

    Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Dr. Habil., Full Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the State University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Poland; Head of the Department of Research into Language, Literature and Translation, for many years served as Head of the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Lodz. Author and editor of numerous books and papers in cognitive and corpus linguistics, emotion studies and online discourses. Invited to read papers at conferences and give workshops at European, American and Asian universities.

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From the journal Lodz Papers in Pragmatics

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.

About the author

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Dr. Habil., Full Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the State University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Poland; Head of the Department of Research into Language, Literature and Translation, for many years served as Head of the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Lodz. Author and editor of numerous books and papers in cognitive and corpus linguistics, emotion studies and online discourses. Invited to read papers at conferences and give workshops at European, American and Asian universities.

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Published Online: 2017-12-19
Published in Print: 2017-12-20

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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