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Abstract
Abstract This paper compares the pragmatic mitigation strategies used by speakers of five geographic varieties of Spanish: European, Cuban, Mexican, Argentinian and Chilean Spanish. Mitigation can be understood as a pragmatic strategy arising from face-protection needs that seeks to reduce possible adverse effects on the satisfactory progress of communication. The data are drawn from the Ameresco corpus of colloquial conversations, and the analysis includes four kinds of parameters: linguistic, pragmatic, and socio-situational. The study explores the functions and frequency of use of mitigation, speakers’ and hearers’ exposure to social and relational risks, the degree of their commitment in interaction, and the most productive resources observed in each variety. The results show convergences and divergences in the use of mitigation in these geographical areas, providing a picture of dialectal and sociolectal patterns here. The study concludes that mitigation varies according to the priorities of face needs in each speech community.
Highlights
Recent decades have seen exponential growth in research looking at pragmatic mitigation and how it varies geographically
Previous work on pragmatic phenomena such as mitigation has typically been based on elicited methods; the present approach, by contrast, deals with naturally-occurring data which, as such, are wholly uncontrolled by the researcher;2 no elicitation cues were given to speakers, and their speech production is wholly spontaneous
2.2 Characterisation of the Pragmatic Phenomenon of Mitigation As we can see in the literature on mitigation over the last three decades, most cases exhibit the same characteristic features: (i) mitigation is considered a pragmatic strategy, (ii) it arises from the needs of face-protection, (iii) it seeks to reduce possible adverse effects on the satisfactory progress of communication, (iv) it is a strategy used in the interpersonal negotiation of communicative agreement and of persuasion, and as such (v) it allows speakers to establish a lower level of commitment to what is being said, and to attain conversational goals more efficiently
Summary
Recent decades have seen exponential growth in research looking at pragmatic mitigation and how it varies geographically. The study is based on an analysis of 500 minutes of oral speech, 100 minutes of each variety/dialect, this material largely drawn from a section of the Ameresco corpus (América Español Coloquial, Albelda and Estellés online) According to these currently available data, and given that the study is a first descriptive approach to geographical variation in mitigation that focuses on. Previous work on pragmatic (and contextual) phenomena such as mitigation has typically been based on elicited methods; the present approach, by contrast, deals with naturally-occurring data which, as such, are wholly uncontrolled by the researcher (see Félix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker 2017, Koike 2021); no elicitation cues were given to speakers, and their speech production is wholly spontaneous.
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