Emotivity and Sociopragmatic Classification of Ethnolects

Abstract

The article focuses on emotivity as one of the classificatory parameters of the communicative ethos and conversational ethnolects. Emotivity analysed in sociopragmatic terms should not only be linked to the so-called emotional charge of enunciation or the verbal externalization of affective states. According to our approach, it is more similar to a ritual attribute of interaction that accentuates conversational involvement, which opposes the strategies focused on non-interference and distancing. As a form of participatory-type positioning in the interaction, emotivity would encompass different mechanisms and strategies of solidarity, linked, grosso modo, with the positive politeness model.