Flaming (or verbal violence in digital media) and its functions in the public sphere

Abstract In this article, we are concerned with the function of flaming (hostile language) in the public sphere, drawing on a case study of electronic posts published in a news site, after President Dilma Roussef´s electoral campaign in 2015. To this end, the concepts of public sphere (HABERMAS, 1991) and polemical discourse (AMOSSY, 2011) are introduced, as well as Kayany´s (1998) conceptualization of flaming. For corpus analysis, Bousfield´s (2008) categories for the study of impoliteness in language are adopted. It is argued that verbal violence (in the form of positive and negative face threats in the corpus) is systematic, addressed to an imaginary interlocutor positioned in an antagonistic field; and that, although flaming does not contribute to a Habermasian public sphere, characterized by the rational debate of public issues, it nonetheless serves the purpose of making distinct positions in discourse explicit, allowing for conflict situations to be managed in the digital sphere.