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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Mitigation and boosting as face-protection functions

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description

Abstract Mitigation is undeniably and necessarily linked with the social aspect of communication. No speaker mitigates an utterance without a goal in mind, which makes mitigation a means to an end and not an end in itself. Even though the various definitions of mitigation do not assign the same aims to this phenomenon, the social impact it has on the participants in the communication is generally agreed upon throughout the literature (Fraser, 1980; Meyer-Hermann, 1988; Bazzanella et al., 1991; Briz, 1998, 2003; Caffi, 1999; Thaler, 2012; Briz and Albelda, 2013; Schneider, 2013; Albelda et al., 2014; Albelda, 2016, 2018). In this paper, the mitigating and boosting strategies in relationship with face-protection are analysed in a self-compiled corpus containing the transcriptions of the Spanish reality television show Gandia Shore. The results demonstrate that the aforementioned mitigating functions do not belong exclusively to the domain of mitigation, but they can also be performed using boosting. The findings suggest that the functions associated with mitigation in previous studies are, in fact, the face-protection functions, which thus constitutes a broader and hierarchically higher category.