Verbal conflict and digital communication written in French professional circles: Verbal aggression and cognition

International audienceThis article aims to show the specificity of e-mail exchanges between university professors and researchers through the functioning of verbal aggression, its impact and its interactional management. We know that oral exchanges allow for elements of adjustment that do not exist in written communication. We will therefore study how and how mail exchanges to several people in an institutional context foster interactions involving emotions, aggression and verbal escalation. This, because of the context itself (asynchronous verbal interaction) and to the extent that some elements (linguistic and discursive) are exacerbated due to the absence of other elements (prosodic and mimogestual) generally present in synchronous communications. Our hypothesis is that if the exchanges of collective emails degrade the relations between the people (by focusing the attention and making emerge divergences), it is the absence of contact in face-to-face which would encourage the crystallization of the verbal aggression (Rizzolatti & Sinegaglia 2008; Seltzer & al. 2012) and this sometimes in a broader (potential) context of unwillingness to cooperate (Bousfield, 2008). We postulate that the dimension of face to face verbal interaction is the best way to regulate the interdiscursive relationship because of the physical presence of the interactants and more specifically the mimogestuality, the prosody and the contribution of the latter to the co-construction of emotions. On the contrary, asynchronous electronic communication would favor the emergence of aggressive and threatening statements and their crystallization through a rise in specific verbal tension. Our corpus consists of cc type e-mails exchanged between academics. We will study it from the angle of the linguistic analysis of the interactions, thedescription of the aggression and the place occupied by the emotions. We will cross the linguistic analysis of verbal violence (Auger & al., 2008 ; Fracchiolla & al., 2013ab), as a contextualized rise in tension through various stages, conflict triggers, discursive markers of rupture and degrading speech acts, with the analysis of the place occupied by verbal aggression and that of emotions