Lori Czerwionka
 

Mitigation in language relates to communication modulation. This project focuses on the softening of emotional vehemence and cognitive certitude in a speaker’s utterances. For example, speakers may choose from a variety of options: (1) I broke the glass, (2) The glass broke, (3) I think I broke the glass, (4) Oh, sorry, it’s that the glass broke, or (5) Uh, um, well, it wasn’t on purpose. The degree of mitigation in these utterances varies, based on the speaker’s cognitive processing of the event (Lakoff 1972) or the utterance’s dependence on the social environment, including politeness norms and context (Holmes 1984, 1995; Brown & Levinson 1987).  Little information is known about the impact of cognitive certitude on the expression of linguistic mitigation, a topic highly relevant to witnesses’ testimonies and one that can provide further insight to the reliability and certainty of a testimony.  The purpose of this research is to determine how two factors (1. Information type: factual vs. inferential and 2. Event seriousness:  more vs. less serious event) impact the mitigation strategies used when informing a listener about the event.
            To study these factors and linguistic mitigation, I have conducted an experimental role-play, similar to the designs used by Félix-Brasdefer (2006) and Kasper (2000). I included speaker cognitive knowledge about the event (factual vs. inferential) and the seriousness of the event (more vs. less serious) as independent variables. 56 university students participated in this experiment designed to include the two factors and to elicit mitigation. Lexical items, syntax, phonetic cues, and discourse-level organization were analyzed in 56 interactions.
            General results indicate the length of the pre-sequence before communicating the news is influenced by the seriousness of the situation.  When the situation is more serious like when a car is stolen, lengthier pre-sequences are used than when the situation is less serious, like when a glass is broken. In serious situations, which are more comparable to issues of the law, the degree of cognitive knowledge impacts the type of co-construction between a speaker and listener in the interaction. When the speaker’s information is based on fact, co-construction seems to be relied on for the construction of a discourse-level mitigation strategy: the creation of a lengthy pre-sequence through multiple turns before stating the news. This pre-sequence uses many pauses, discourse markers, and dispreferred turns. When the speaker has to infer what has happened, co-construction in the pre-sequence is content-based, utilized to construct the actual events that occurred.  This is done with utterances like ‘you know’ and tag questions creating solidarity related to the topic.
            These results directly relate to the interpretation of witness testimony.  The findings from this research will allow analysis of testimony to go beyond a content-based analysis to include a deeper analysis of the linguistic construction and expression of the testimony.  According to the results of this study, a witness’ testimony may reveal his level of cognitive knowledge about the event or crime, indicating reliability of the speaker’s evidence.
            Although mitigation has been studied in various contexts and languages (Hübler 1983; Brown & Levinson 1987; Holmes 1984, 1995; Markkanen & Schröder 1997; Caffi 2006), studies have not sufficiently examined the distinction between mitigation affected by cognitive and social factors.  In general, cognitive and social factors are not well understood in terms of their impact on language. This research contributes to the overarching questions relating cognition, social environment, and language and to the applied area of testimony interpretation.

References

            Félix-Brasdefer, J.C. (2006). Linguistic politeness in Mexico: Refusal strategies among male speakers of Mexican Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 38(12), 2158-2187.
            Holmes, J. (1984). Modifying illocutionary force. Journal of Pragmatics 8, 345-365.
            Holmes, J. (1995). Women, men, and politeness. New York: Longman.
            Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatley (Ed.), Culturally Speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316-341). New York: Continuum.
            Lakoff, G. (1972). Hedges: A study of meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. In P. Peranteau, J. Levi, & G. Phares (Eds.), Papers from the eighth regional meeting of Chicago linguistic society (pp. 183-228). Chicago: Chicago University Press.