Influence of situational factors and linguistic expression of mitigation in microdiachronic study of directive speech acts by familiar roles in a literary corpus

Abstract

The general aim of this paper is to describe the evolution of the linguistic expression of mitigation in the management of the family role face during a period of the Spanish social history: from the late nineteenth century to the sixties of the twentieth century. To this end, a corpus study of selected plays of the period is carried out, focusing on the directive speech acts uttered by characters that play family roles. The analysis is carried out following a mixed methodology that provides, on the one hand, the quantification of the frequency of the different linguistic mitigation strategies and the factors with which they are linked; on the other hand, the qualitative analysis allows to connect the behavior of the mitigation procedures with the face needs and the social effects generated. In order to do this, the interpretation is based on the sociological context of the moment. The results suggest that forms of address, justifying structures, indirect formulation and impersonalization are the most productive mitigation strategies in the utterance of directive speech acts between the family roles of the corpus in this period. Likewise, these procedures are found to be placed at the service of the projection of family relations in which, although the hierarchies are respected, the vertical component gives way to more horizontal relations based on proximity each time.