The naming of emotions in dispute mediators’ strategic manoeuvring: a case study using a French language corpus

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.

Pathos in Natural Language Argumentation: Emotional Appeals and Reactions

“…Several researchers tackled the problem of emotions in argumentation from the empirical perspective, employing methods from both discourse analysis and psychological as well as physiological tools. Discourse analysis studies focus on emotion names occurring in natural language, referring to them as "said" emotions (Plantin 2019;Cigada 2019;Greco et al 2022) in the context of persuasive dialogue. Certain authors add that emotions can be not only "said", but also "shown" or "argued" (Micheli 2010), that is they are expressed not only by direct emotion names but also other linguistic devices.…”