Disaffiliation and Pragmatic Strategies of Emotive Communication in a Multiparty Online Conflict Talk - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 159

However, it is important to notice that this kind of perspective, more theoretically
than practically clear-cut, may be valid mostly on micro-level units rather than on
macro-level units (i.e. , conversations, texts, or discourses as a whole), and it may
vary depending on different speaking contexts, situations, registers, and cultures. In
the extract I analyzed, recurring patterns of devices are organized around hearer-
centered utterances, and they mostly present strategies of empathetic proximity and
devices of low evidentiality and volitionality when understanding and affiliation
is solicited and contrasting sets of devices of low empathetic proximity, negative
evaluation, and high intensity in the interlocutor's replies.

9.2.3 Mitigation: An Umbrella Category of Emotive

Communication

The communicative actions aimed at adjusting at one's interlocutor may also be
seen from a perspective of cautious accounting of the risks and responsibilities
that conversations generate per se , as well as a way of careful distancing from the
possible negative perlocutionary effects that conversations lead to and a manner
of protecting the interlocutor or the speaker herself from unwanted interactional
outcomes. This form of adaptation is addressed in pragmatics metalanguage with
the term mitigation (Fraser 1980 ) and potentially include all the communicative
choices aimed at reducing the possible unwanted effects of a given speech act (e.g.,
indirect acts, justifications, impersonal or passive constructions as a means of non-
immediacy, disclaimers, parentheticals, modal adverbs used in order to decrease the
emotive subscription to an uttered state of affairs, tag questions, and hedges).
The multidimensionality of mitigation is given by the different resources every
speaker has at her disposal in her metapragmatic awareness, resources which can
be expressed prosodically (e.g., quieter tone of voice, less emphatic intonations),
morpho-syntactically (e.g., impersonal and passive constructions), lexically (e.g.,
parentheticals, diminutives, modal adverbs aimed at expressing a minor degree of
epistemic confidence), and on the conversational level (e.g., topic shifts, digres-
sions). Other examples of mitigating devices are also phatic expressions, vocatives,
empathetic datives and honorifics (especially in Asian languages), lexical markers
of common ground, fillers, and discursive markers of agreement.
Mitigation is a nomen actionis : it can be referred to as the act of mitigating
something or as a result of the mitigating process. On the one hand, the former can
be seen as part of the speaker's metapragmatic competence where emotive, social,
and linguistic abilities converge. On the other hand, the latter can be seen as the
object of negotiation among different interlocutors.
In seeing mitigation as a process, Caffi ( 2001 , 2007 : 256) distinguishes between
different types of mitigation and different types of mitigating devices. Types of
mitigations are divided into: