Il disaccordo nelle pagine Facebook dei politici della Svizzera italiana

The paper presents a conversational, textual, argumentative, and linguistic analysis of the expression of disagreement on the Facebook pages of four Swiss-Italian politicians. The analysis is divided into two parts, according to the target against which disagreement is directed. The first part focuses on the ways in which citizens express disagreement towards the politician, while the second part deals with the clash between citizens themselves. The analysis considers an articulated typology of disagreement, developed on the basis of conversational and socio-pragmatic studies such as Pomerantz (1984), Muntigl/Turnbull (1998), Langlotz/Locher (2012). The typology distinguishes, first of all, between a disagreement that is directed towards the individual and one that is directed towards the content of the message; the latter class includes strong disagreement, that is directly contrastive, and weak disagreement, that is mitigated in several ways; finally, strong disagreement can be argumentative or non-argumentative.