MITIGATION VS NEGATIVE POLITENESS (ON THE SAMPLES FROM ENGLISH FICTIONAL DISCOURCE)

Abstract

The article is focused on the comparison of communicative phenomena of politeness and mitigation in fictional communication. It has been established that mitigation functions in communication as a kind of negative politeness; it has been defined as “distance politeness”, which helps to maintain the distance between the speaker and the listener. Negative politeness strategies are aimed at minimizing the threat to the negative face of the interlocutor and are used if the speaker has a certain power upon the listener and / or a social distance is observed between them. Negative politeness seems to be a much broader concept. Another difference between mitigation and negative politeness is that the speaker, trying not to offend the interlocutor, at the same time, sees to keeping his/her own face. Thus, it has been established that the terms negative politeness and mitigation are related to each other as a hypernym and a hyperonym, mitigation is defined as a type of negative politeness. Besides, the article offers our own classification of mitigation strategies, which includes mitigation of disagreement of the interlocutor’s opinion, mitigation of the addressee’s negative opinion or actions, mitigation of refusal, mitigation of breaking bad news, mitigation of request, mitigation of advice, mitigation of promise, and mitigation of topic avoidance. The article also offers a number of communication tactics that realize the mitigation strategies: apology tactics, gratitude tactics, approval tactics, praise tactics, partial agreement tactics and the tactics of categoricalness reduction. The implementation of the outlined strategies and tactics has been followed up in the personage speech in English fictional discourse. The prospect of the study is to involve other discourses into study of the phenomenon of mitigation in different social and ethno-cultural communities.