Abstract

Mitigation is a pragmatic-linguistic category traditionally related to the theory of verbal politeness. Previous work on this issue has shown that conversational hedging is largely conditioned by the speaker’s identity (Albelda 2012, Cestero 2011, Samper 2017), that is why a deeper understanding of attenuating phenomena requires close attention to the social context underpinning communicative interactions. This paper advances some preliminary results from the ongoing research on discursive mitigation in the Malaga-PRESEEA spoken corpus. The analysis is centered on the underlying mitigating functions in the speech performance of a group of speakers with university education. Since one of our main objectives is contrastive, and previous solid research on attenuation has been carried out within the PRESEEA context, its methodological basis has been assumed (Albelda 2012, Cestero 2011, Samper 2017). Results of multifactorial logistic regression analysis from our data are partially similar to those obtained in previous studies: mitigation formulas are frequent among the well-educated speakers we have studied, especially those related to self-protection functions. Women—more than men—, and younger speakers—more than every other age-group—, tend to lead this use.