Beyond the Token: The Architecture of Justification as a Mitigation Macrostructure for Assertive Utterances in Puebla Spanish

Abstract

This research analyzes justification as a narrative macrostructure of mitigation in the Spanish spoken in Puebla, Mexico. Drawing on the models proposed by Czerwionka (2012, 2014) regarding social imposition and uncertainty, this study proposes a shift toward discursive pragmatics, where mitigation is not limited to isolated lexical tokens but emerges from the overall architecture of the text. Using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT)(Blum-Kulka, 1982) administered to 80 university students, the study evaluated how psychosocial pressure (social imposition and speaker uncertainty) shapes discourse. The results confirm that social imposition is the determining factor in mitigation density, significantly outweighing the speaker’s uncertainty. The study concludes that justification operates as a discursive whole oriented toward constructing an image of honorability, empathy, and honesty. Thus, mitigation, in the Spanish spoken in Puebla, functions not only as a defensive mechanism for evasion or fear of accepting responsibility or commitment through assertive utterance, but also as a tool for social cohesion that transforms assertion into a space for consensus and identity validation.