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Article published In:
Closeness and conflict: The discourse of domestic discord across English and Spanish-speaking communities
Edited by Diana Boxer and María Elena Placencia
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 6:2] 2018
► pp. 320–343

Managing conflict on WhatsApp

A contrastive study of British and Spanish family disputes

| Universidad de Alcalá de Henares

This study investigates family conflict talk in a computer-mediated environment from a language-in-interaction focus. It is based on two different data sets of six WhatsApp groups that feature arguing British families, and of six WhatsApp groups that feature arguing Spanish families. It looks at the different linguistic strategies that participants deploy when taking up opposing stances on a given issue. Through a detailed discourse analysis of the conflict-based episodes in English and Spanish, the results not only show a differentiated linguistic process in the way(s) in which the study participants managed conflict, but also suggest that smartphone-mediated interpersonal conflict needs to be understood as an attempt to inhabit legitimate subject positions in and through discourse.

Keywords: computer-mediated communication, conflict talk, family disputes, interpersonal communication WhatsApp
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Interpersonal communication and communication technology
    • 2.2Conflict talk as language-in-interaction
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Description of the data
    • 3.2Framework and procedure
    • 3.3Discussion: A pragma-discursive approach to the analysis of attribution biases
  • 4.Maintaining, escalating, and terminating conflict talk
    • 4.1The Spanish data set: Adopting a competing conflict style
    • 4.2The English dataset: Adopting a conflict avoidance style
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00015.gar
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