Variationist study of mitigation II: Microanalysis of discourse sequences, speech acts and mitigating resources

Abstract

The study of pragmatic mitigation has been prioritized in the last decades, particularly in speech-related disciplines such as discourse analysis and conversation analysis. Nevertheless, the sociopragmatic and geolectal variability of mitigation in Spanish has barely been studied. This is the main objective of this paper (which complements the research presented in Cestero & Albelda, 2020), which aims to examine the state of the art on sociolinguistic variation in mitigation strategies, especially within the framework of the Project for the Sociolinguistic Study of Spanish in Spain and America (PRESEEA). The present article addresses two further aspects: a study in greater depth of some discourse sequences and speech acts and some specific mitigation resources, and a diaphasic comparison between the results obtained from the PRESEEA corpus and those from other corpora. The findings of the present report suggest that variations in mitigation are not only dialectal and sociolectal but also diaphasic.