Contingent (dis)agreement and emotional expressiveness in online responsive discourse

This article focuses on culturally diverse university students’ online (dis)agreement with affective expressions in English as a lingua franca (ELF). A private intercultural group on the social media site Facebook was used for the online discussions. This study analyzed online participants’ comments on controversial sociopolitical issues about the TikTok ban and the Mulan boycott. Through content analyses of online responsive discourse, a range of discursive strategies used by the participants to express (dis)agreement were identified. The participants tended to give contingent (dis)agreements with mitigating expressions and supporting grounds, and the moderators frequently used reported speech, gave opposite opinions, and questioned the claims for alternative positionings. Discourse-pragmatic analyses of emoji-mediated communication also revealed creative and diverse uses of emojis and other nonverbal interactional resources in the coconstruction of humorous discourse and transformation between positive and negative affect stances. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of ELF users’ pragmatic and emotive capability to participate in the online social argumentative practice of affective stance-taking.