This article investigates the causal antecedents of conflictual language and the geometry of interaction in online threaded conversations related to climate change. We employ three annotation dimensions, inferred through LLM prompting and averaging, to capture complementary aspects of discursive conflict (such as stance: agreement vs disagreement; tone: attacking vs respectful; and emotional versus factual framing) and use data from a threaded online forum to examine how these dimensions respond to temporal, conversational, and arborescent structural features of discussions. We show that, as suggested by the literature, longer delays between successive posts in a thread are associated with replies that are, on average, more respectful, whereas longer delays relative to the parent post are associated with slightly less disagreement but more emotional (less factual) language. Second, we characterize alignment with the local conversational environment and find strong convergence both toward the average stance, tone and emotional framing of older sibling posts replying to the same parent and toward those of the parent post itself, with parent post effects generally stronger than sibling effects. We further show that early branch-level responses condition these alignment dynamics, such that parent-child stance alignment is amplified or attenuated depending on whether a branch is initiated in agreement or disagreement with the discussion's root message. These influences are largely additive for civility-related dimensions (attacking vs respectful, disagree vs agree), whereas for emotional versus factual framing there is a significant interaction: alignment with the parent's emotionality is amplified when older siblings are similarly aligned.

翻译：本文研究了气候变化相关在线主题对话中冲突性语言的因果前因与互动几何结构。我们通过大语言模型提示与平均推断构建了三个标注维度，以捕捉话语冲突的互补特征（如立场：赞同 vs 反对；语气：攻击性 vs 尊重性；情感化 vs 事实性框架），并利用主题式在线论坛数据考察这些维度如何响应讨论的时间结构、对话结构与树状结构特征。研究表明：首先，正如文献所指出的，主题内连续发帖间隔时间越长，回复通常越具尊重性；而相对于父帖的延迟时间越长，则会导致轻微减少反对立场但增强情感化（削弱事实性）语言。其次，我们刻画了与局部对话环境的对齐特征，发现回复既强烈趋同于回应同一父帖的兄弟帖的平均立场、语气与情感框架，也趋同于父帖本身的特征，且父帖效应普遍强于兄弟帖效应。我们进一步证明分支层级的早期响应调节了这些对齐动态：分支是否以赞同或反对讨论根消息的方式发起，会相应增强或削弱父子立场对齐效应。这些影响在文明相关维度（攻击性 vs 尊重性，反对 vs 赞同）上主要表现为叠加效应，而在情感化 vs 事实性框架维度则存在显著交互作用：当兄弟帖呈现类似对齐时，与父帖情感特征的对齐效应会显著增强。