Mitigation in discourse: Social, cognitive and affective motivations when exchanging advice
Introduction
Mitigation has been generally conceived as a communicative strategy designed by the speaker to convey distance in relation to the message (Briz 2003; Briz and Albelda 2013; Caffi 1999, 2007). As a synonym of “attenuation” or “downgrading”, mitigation results from weakening one of the interactional parameters (Caffi 2007), so the illocutive force of the speech acts and the role of the participants are minimized (Briz 2006). By reducing the threat to incur loss of face (on a social level), self-contradiction (on a discourse level), or interpersonal conflict (on the conversational level), the interaction is managed more ‘smoothly’ (Caffi 2007: 40). In relation to facework, mitigation includes a set of strategies oriented to build self-protection, to prevent unwanted effects on the recipient, or to repair social damage during interaction (Albelda et al., 2014).
This classical definition of mitigation only takes into consideration its sociological or sociolinguistic dimension. Yet, mitigation is a multifunctional phenomenon that extends its scope to other areas of discursive meaning production. Adopting a broader perspective, Caffi (2007) argues that mitigation affects two other domains in communication: interactional efficiency and identity construction. Mitigation facilitates the attainment of the communicative goals (cognitive dimension), while, at the same time, it helps to monitor emotive distance (affective dimension). Accordingly, mitigating devices are either oriented toward instrumental needs or to relational needs (Caffi 2007: 41). Mitigation is both a cognitive and an emotive category.
Caffi's (1999, 2007) psychological approach offers the possibility of contemplating mitigation as a multilevel and multidimensional phenomenon insofar as it involves various linguistic levels together with an interactional dimension. In this line of research, the model of mitigation devised by Martinovski et al. (2004) renders a more compounded framework to understand the cognitive, emotive, relational, situational, and linguistic components of the mitigation process. The mitigating linguistic output is placed by Martinovski et al. (2004) in a cognitive and social model of language that tackles both the motivations and the effects of mitigation. This approach allows for a more comprehensive treatment of specific perlocutionary effects, such as the decrease of the interlocutor's interest in contributing to the interaction or the minimization of her/his vulnerability.
Mitigation has been generally associated in the literature with an array of linguistic mechanisms specialized in modifying the illocutionary force of the utterance (e.g, Lakoff 1972). Most of the research has been concerned with the mitigated meaning conveyed by isolated grammatical structures or lexical items (cf. Caffi 2013; Flores-Ferrán 2020), albeit several works adopting a corpus-discursive approach have identified certain discursive strategies with which mitigation might be induced (e.g, providing justifications, making apologies and concessions, resorting to reported evidence, etc.; Albelda 2010; Albelda et al., 2014; Albelda and Cestero 2011; Briz and Albelda 2013).1 In addition, contrastive studies have enriched our understanding of how mitigation is built in specialized discourses, such as medical research papers (Alonso-Almeida 2015; Carrió-Pastor 2016), while the relations between mitigation and other discursive dimensions, such as evidentiality and epistemicity, have been a recent focus of interest in the literature (Figueras and Kotwica 2020). All in all, these studies show that mitigating devices represent a heterogeneous set of mechanisms of morphological, lexical, syntactic and discursive nature that display the speakers’ metapragmatic awareness of the parameters of the communicative event (Caffi 2007).
The mitigated meaning is scalar or gradual in nature, rather than categorical (Flores-Ferrán 2020). Mitigating devices are often used in conjunction with each other, resulting in mitigating discourse structures (Czerwionka 2012). Consequently, this pragmatic category only can be thoroughly examined at the discourse level; specifically, in interaction. Focusing on court examinations, Martinovski (2006) concludes that mitigation is realized through defense processes that comprise argumentation lines, discourse moves, and communication acts, with their recognizable linguistic patterns. These patterns reflect the specific coping mechanisms of which the speaker is availing herself/himself to deal with the stressor faced in communication. Cognitive and discursive processes, therefore, aligned. This line of research should be developed and applied to other speech situations in which different kinds of social and psychological stressors are at play. Depending on the parameters of the communicative event, as well as the kind of stressor experienced by the interactants, presumably there will be recognizable and distinctive patterns of mitigation for each particular speech event. To develop such a multidimensional analysis, a model that goes beyond the politeness theories approach of mitigation as an exclusively socially motivated phenomenon is necessary. The model should embrace the cognitive and affective facets of mitigation, and their discourse representation, when confronting and dealing with diverse situations of stress and conflict in communication (cf. Flores-Ferrán 2020; Czerwionka 2012). One such model is proposed by Martinovski et al. (2004).
According to Martinovski et al. (2004), mitigation can be initiated when an actual or potential conflictive (stressful) event occurs in communication. This stressor presents a psychological risk to the individual: the person feels exposed to being harmed or attacked (Keay and Kirby 2018). The risk sensed by the individual might arise from the specifics of the social interaction itself. Some communicative events pose more serious psychological stressors than others. For instance, dealing with criminal guilt in a trial (Martinovski et al., 2004), managing an intercultural conflict, narrating a traumatic experience, doing psychotherapy, or participating in an online mental health support group (Figueras 2020).
Likewise, certain speech acts (such as requests, apologies, rejections, suggestions, etc.) represent social stressors to speakers (Czerwionka 2012). Further, interactants might face more than one stressor in communication, a scenario that requires the activation of a battery of mitigating strategies. Based on which type of stressor sets in motion the mitigation process, the linguistic mechanisms mobilized to deal with the real or potential threats in communication will be different and adapted to the parameters of the situation. In addition to the particularities of the communicative event, the stressor might also come from “life events (major or minor) that disrupt those mechanisms that maintain the stability of individuals’ physiology, emotion, and cognition” (Ingram and Luxton 2005: 34). In any of these scenarios, the person experiences vulnerability.
The notion of vulnerability, originally conceptualized in natural disaster studies, has grown into a central tenet in psychology and sociology during the last years, in spite of the difficulties in composing an operational definition for this concept (Vironkannas et al., 2020). In psychology, vulnerability has been broadly understood as the susceptibility to a negative outcome (or the sense of feeling unprotected), with the subsequent emotions of instability, uneasiness, and even anxiety in the interactants (Ingram and Luxton 2005). In a broader sense, vulnerability has been regarded as a universal experience that is at the core of what it means to be human: it positions us in relation to each other (Fineman, 2010). Vulnerability is a context-specific construct: it is often the result of a variety of individual and situational factors that intersect and, hence, it stands as a multidimensional notion (Keay and Kirby 2018).
Within the realm of mental health, vulnerability has been framed within diathesis-stress models that regard it as the individual's susceptibility to certain disorders (Ingram and Luxton 2005). This predisposition is determined by the person's genetic makeup and by her/his early experiences in life. Stress, on the other hand, relates to the challenges confronted by the person through her/his existence. Its management is dependent on the subject's coping skills, social support, and involvement in meaningful activities. From this perspective, online mental health support groups can be seen as efficient resources to stabilize the dynamics of vulnerability-stress experienced by their members. These online affordances are particularly beneficial for people with an eating disorder (ED), since they endure high levels of psychological distress, isolation and stigma (Harney et al., 2014).2
ED populations consistently suffer impairments in emotion regulation, as well as more difficulties to handle stress (Fitzsimmons and Bardone-Cone 2010). The chronic inability to deal with unpredictability and uncertainty of life events triggers an emotional response with negative valence and episodes of severe anxiety (Guido et al., 2012). Due to the severity of the disorder, recovery from anorexia, bulimia or their variants requires extensive emotional, financial and time dedication, to the point that the maintenance of the physical and psychological improvements after discharge, when intensive care is no longer available, is quite challenging for the person; hence, the high rate of relapse reported for EDs (Khalsa et al., 2017). Patients might do better when some kind of coping resources, such as computer-mediated support groups, are made available to them (Stommel 2009). Participating in discussion forums seems to provide some kind of therapeutic benefit (Campbell 2008), as well as temporary relief from the emotional pressure of living with the illness. In the communicative space created by these platforms, mitigation becomes a powerful instrument to manage the stressor of the ED and to reduce participants’ vulnerabilities.
Section snippets
The present study
The present study examines the mitigation processes undertaken in an online forum for recovery from anorexia nervosa (AN forum). My aim is to contribute to the development of an activity-based framework for discourse analysis of mitigation when dealing with mental disorders in interaction. I center the analysis on the practice of exchanging advice on the site. The cognitive and affective motivations of participants when negotiating advice prompt the deployment of an array of mitigation devices,
Sample
The method of ethnographic observation was applied to collect the corpus of posts from the AN forum. I immersed myself, as a participant observer, in the activity of the online platform. I took an emic viewpoint of the interactional activity on the site. The forum was created in 2006 and is still active today. 98,841 messages have been posted so far in 9,264 threads. The number of registered users is 10,309. The forum is free and provides the opportunity for any Spanish speaker with Internet
Results
Active users of the AN forum cope with a set of different stressors when interacting. The overarching psychological stressor is the ED itself. The strain of living with the illness shapes the relational work within the forum, while, at the same time, it constrains the way reasoning and emotions are constructed and managed in talk when exchanging advice. Subsidiary to coping with the ED, two more stressors have to be dealt with in interaction: claiming the right attributes to become (and to
Conclusions
At the beginning of this article, we reviewed the current definitions of linguistic mitigation in the field of interactional studies. Following previous work on mitigation in discourse, we pointed to the limitations of adopting an exclusively social approach to this pragmatic category. In line with Martinovski et al. (2004), we advocated for a more comprehensive, multidimensional and interdisciplinary model of mitigation to include its cognitive, emotive, relational, situational, and linguistic
Declaration of competing interest
There is no conflict of interest.
Carolina Figueras Bates is associate professor of Spanish Philology at the University of Barcelona. She is author of the book entitled Pragmática de la puntuación (Barcelona, Octaedro, 2001), and the editor, with Adrián Cabedo, of Perspectives on Evidentiality in Spanish: Explorations across Genres (Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2018). She is the coeditor, together with Dorota Kotwica, of the special issue “Evidentiality, epistemicity and mitigation in Spanish”, published in 2020 in Corpus
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Carolina Figueras Bates is associate professor of Spanish Philology at the University of Barcelona. She is author of the book entitled Pragmática de la puntuación (Barcelona, Octaedro, 2001), and the editor, with Adrián Cabedo, of Perspectives on Evidentiality in Spanish: Explorations across Genres (Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 2018). She is the coeditor, together with Dorota Kotwica, of the special issue “Evidentiality, epistemicity and mitigation in Spanish”, published in 2020 in Corpus Pragmatics. Her research interests are focused on linguistic evidentiality, as related to mitigation and appraisal, speech acts and argumentation, and the construction of epistemic stance in non-solicited illness narratives.