Epistemic strategies of mitigation in assertive utterances in university students from Puebla, Mexico

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to analyse the phenomenon of mitigation and social image in linguistic communicative behaviours in Mexican culture from a pragmalinguistic perspective (Albelda y Cesteros, 2014; Briz, 2003; Brown and Levinson, 1987; Caffi, 1999; R. Lakoff, 1973; G. Lakoff, 1972; Leech, 1983). In the present study, it was analysed how the contextual factors of social cost (social factor) and uncertainty (cognitive factor) determine the use of epistemic mitigation strategies in assertive statements (Czerwionka, 2012, 2014). Data were collected using the instrument known as Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (Blum-Kulka, 1982), which consists of four situations that represent the two independent contextual variables of the study, namely, the uncertainty of the speaker (cognitive factor) and social imposition (social factor), resulting in a 2x2 design. The instrument was presented to 80 native Spanish-speaking students from a public university in the city of Puebla, Mexico. The results show that the greater the social cost and the greater the uncertainty, the greater the presence of epistemic mitigation strategies in accordance with the studies on mitigation. However, it was also found that there is an upward trend in the use of epistemic mitigation strategies even in situations with a lower degree of imposition and certainty of the speaker. This suggests that this group of informants, in relation to their social image, far from looking after the image of the other, they rather take care of looking after their own image, pretending to follow good manners within this discursive community by being politically correct (Watts, 2003).