Naming emotions in dispute mediators’ strategic maneuvering
case study on a corpus in French
Additional information
Authors
Greco S.,
Cigada S.,
Jermini C.
Type
Journal Article
Year
2024
Language
English
Abstract
This paper sets out to analyse why dispute mediators identify disputants’ euphoric and dysphoric emotions in the context of mediation discussions, turning them into “said” emotions. Our analysis is based on a corpus of seven role-played mediation sessions, which took place in French. Adopting the notion of strategic manoeuvring from argumentation studies, we consider recurring instances of the presentational device of naming emotions, as used by the mediators. Our findings show that the mediators name emotions in two ways. First, they identify dysphoric emotions that lie at the root of the parties’ conflict, making these explicit. Second, they present to the parties a trajectory of their emotions, which moves from dysphoric to euphoric through the discussion that takes place during mediation. These two presentational strategies correspond to three functions that relate to the mediator’s goal of helping the parties find a solution to their conflict: clarifying the core of the conflict, empowering the parties as co-arguers and making emotions part of an argumentative discussion.
Keywords
Argumentation, Strategic maneuvering, Dispute mediation, Conflict, Oral interaction, Emotional lexicon, Reasonableness, Stylistic choices
Journal
Text & talk
Volume
44
Number ( Month )
1
Pages (or article number)
25-46
Diffusion
License
CC BY-NC
Visibility
Public
Status open access
Green
