[Air-l] naturally occurring conflicts?

[Joshua Raclaw]

I think your use of 'naturally-occurring' is a little confusing because both forms of conflict that you've described fall under the rubric of 'natural' conversation (especially in the conversation analytic framework that you've chosen to use), and because classifying flaming as 'unnatural' privileges all other forms of verbal conflict as more common or intuitive to speakers.  You might want to focus more on what you see as intentionality or provocation rather than naturalness (although this carries its own set of problems when thinking through the CA notion of procedural relevance).

Joshua



Joshua Raclaw - PhD student
Department of Linguistics
Culture, Language & Social Practice
Women and Gender Studies
University of Colorado at Boulder
http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~raclaw/


---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:55:19 +0300
>From: Jonna Ahti <jonna.ahti at helsinki.fi>  
>Subject: Re: [Air-l] naturally occurring conflicts?  
>To: Ellis Godard <egodard at csun.edu>
>Cc: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
>
>
>Hello again,
>
>Citerar Ellis Godard <egodard at csun.edu>:
>
>> But I don't know what you intend to mean by "naturally occurring". Is
>> flaming somehow unnatural? 
>
>Actually yes, if I look at my data. It is of course sometimes hard to know
>whether a conflict is naturally occurring or if it is provoked by a hostile
>member. In my data most of the conflicts are caused by misunderstandings.
>Example: 
>a: shut up just shut up shut up
>b: what?!
>b: do you mean that I should shut up???
>c: she sings black eyed peas: shut up
>a: I'm singing black eyed peas
>b: ah, ok, good :-)
>
>Sometimes the members talk about the verbal duels they are taking part in
>which can be very intensive and rough. That intentionally conflict-seeking
>behavior I would categorize as flaming. But as I said these things will and
>have to be discussed in the dissertation. Also the cultural differences have
>to be taken into account: my data is from a public chat-room for the Swedish
>speaking minority in Finland. Similar data in Finnish would be much more
>aggressive and I assume it has partly to do with the sense of community the
>members create in different chat-rooms.  
>
>regards,
>Jonna 
>
>-- 
>Ms. Jonna Ahti
>PhD student
>NORDICA - Department of Scandinavian Languages
>and Scandinavian Literature
>P.O.Box 24
>00014 University of Helsinki
>Finland
>tel. +358-40-5625497
>jonna.ahti at helsinki.fi
>
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