Formulazione e gestione pubblica degli affetti: un'analisi del discorso in famiglia alla presenza del ricercatore

The paper examines the interactional construction and management of affect in everyday family interactions videorecorded at home. Relying on a corpus of ethnographic data collected from 8 Italian families, the aim of the paper is to show how discourse and sequences of actions work in concert to manage the quality and intensity of affect in the parent-child interaction. In particular, the paper focuses on episodes of divergence and conflict between the parents and their children. Analyses show how the use of <i>formulations</i> (Heritage & Watson, 1979), together with changes in the participant framework (Goffman, 1981), including the presence of the researchers, help the parents to exit from a potentially high degree of emotional involvement and prevent threats of the family face (Goffman, 1959). Finally, the author discusses how affect in discourse, besides being identified as linguistic (or, also, para- and non- linguistic) markers, needs to be examined on a sequential basis, i.e., as it develops (and changes) <i>across turns, actions and activities</i> performed in talk.