Professional Documents
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MITIGATION
Presented by: Ikram Debbouza
PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Definition of Mitigation
• Mood and modality concern the indication of the utterance type and the attitude
towards the utterance. Mood is an illocutionary force indicating device. It mitigates
the commitment to a speech act. Since modality operates on propositions,
mitigators, like the English parenthetical I suppose, would be instances of modality.
• The German term Abtö nung ‘downtoning’ traditionally refer to the semantic
and pragmatic effects of German modal particles. Unlike Abschwä chung
‘mitigation’, downtoning modifies the basic features of a speech act.
• Brown and Levinson: “ hedges should be considered markers indicating that the speaker
is not fully adhering to one of Grice’s maxims”.
Eg: the maxim of quantity As you probably know; so to cut a long story short…
the maxim of quality As far a I know; I may be mistaken…
the maxim of relevance Oh, by the way; anyway; I don’t know if this is important…
the maxim of manner This may be a bit confusing; I’m not sure if this makes sense…
Classification of Mitigation
devices (Prince, Frader, and
Bosk)
Adaptors Rounders
Eg: He also has Eg: his weight was Plausibility shields Attribution shields
a somewhat approximately Eg: I think we can Eg: He was not very
low interior 3.2kg just slow him down ill, according to her
larynx to a little over estimates.
maintenance.
Caffi’s Mitigation devices’ classification