Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion in online and offline Interaction

The topic of this volume is the interplay between personal identity and language, with a special focus on interactions involving political correctness, ideological positioning and minority groups. Starting from the awareness that every language behaviour has to be interpreted also in its social dimension, we believe a normative approach to language use may lead to foreseeable negative consequences as far as ideology and identity construction are concerned: a reduced communicative effectiveness, other than the symbolic positioning, and the likely emergence of other ideological counter positioning. For this reason, differently from many studies adopting only an abstract observational perspective or a militant one, this volume aims at describing identity construction as an interactional practice, in order to offer a comprehensive and varied picture of how communicative practices may either facilitate or hinder effective interaction. Processes of community building, (collective) identity construction, and ingroup/outgroup strategies are discussed by scholars of different disciplines (philosophy of language, linguistics and sociology) through the analysis of both linguistic and multimodal resources in online and offline interactions.