FUNCTIONS of MITIGATION in FORMAL ACADEMIC WRITTEN REGISTERS: The CASE of LAW and JURISPRUDENCE COMMENTARIES in CHILE

Abstract

Mitigation is understood as a rhetorical-communicative phenomenon whose use reduces the illocutionary force of utterances in order to protect the image of the interactants and, consequently, to successfully achieve the intended goals (Albelda, 2016; Cestero and Albelda, 2020). During the last few years, this phenomenon has been addressed especially regarding oral language in colloquial discourse genres, but recently there has been an interest in studying it in various oral and written academic genres. In this context, the aim of this article is to describe the functioning of mitigating resources found in a scarcely described disciplinary genre: case law commentaries. For this purpose, corpus linguistics tools are used to, on the one hand, collect 18 case law commentaries (97772 words in total) published during the last 10 years in Chilean indexed and mainstream law journals, and, on the other hand, to automate the search for mitigators, which was complemented with an inferential analysis. The results suggest a relationship between the use of mitigators, the expression of legal interpretations and the evaluation of the behavior of members of the disciplinary community, especially those who hold social and symbolic power.