Negative Emotions: Conflict and Cross-linguistic Contrasts in Online Commenting Discourse

The paper focuses on the dynamics of online exchanges in English and Polish posts related to the Greek political and economic crisis in 2015 and European Union membership. It introduces and defines the concepts of emotion and conflict, and discusses quantitative and qualitative methods and tools used to analyse corpus materials of Polish and English online communication, primarily in terms of the Interconnectivity Index and emotion valence as perceived by the users as well as the degree of their emotional arousal. The data reveal significant differences in the conflict dynamics profiles between the two groups of commentators, more interactional, and interactant face-saving discourse strategies in English, manifested by means of self-mockery and jocular style, significantly less frequent resort to verbal abuse and vulgar language on the one hand, and a more aggressive, confrontative and mutually hostile attitude, with instances of verbal abuse types recorded in the Polish data. An attempt to interpret the results in terms of cultural dimensions and characteristics concludes the paper.