Disaffiliation and Pragmatic Strategies of Emotive Communication in a Multiparty Online Conflict Talk - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 160

• Mitigation per se: it includes all the communicative actions aimed at “protecting”

the interlocutor from negative perlocutionary effects (i.e., altruistic moves) and
all the communicative actions aimed at reducing the speaker's responsibilities
(i.e., self-serving moves, see also Fraser 1980 ).

• Nonnatural mitigation, further divided into two subclasses: mitigazioni lenitive ,

in which the speaker-interlocutor relationship is mostly relevant and which
mainly operate on directive speech acts, and mitigazioni temperatrici , where
the speaker-content relationship is mostly relevant and which mainly operate on
representative speech acts.

Types of mitigating devices are divided into:

• Bushes : they are aimed at reducing the level of specificity of the propositional

content. 4 Examples are approximators (e.g., “a bit,” “a sort of”), omission signals
(e.g., “etc.,” “and so on”), euphemisms and nominal periphrases (e.g., “a bit
of x C DIM”, “this and that”), fillers (e.g., “well,” “let's say”), litotes, and
understatements.

• Hedges : they are aimed at reducing the degree of evidentiality and assertivity

of the illocutionary force. Examples are metapragmatic devices (e.g., “I don't
know ::: ”), disclaimers, cautious premises, and markers of the preparatory
conditions of the speech act (e.g., “If I understood correctly ::: ”), attenuations of
the interlocutor's call to do something or to believe in something (e.g., “maybe,”
“a tiny bit”), and modalizers of the epistemic commitment (e.g., “perhaps.” “I'd
say,” “probably”).

• Shields : they are aimed at reducing or removing one or more aspects of the

instance d'énonciation (Benveniste 1970 ). Examples are deictic shields (or
“ nonego devices,” e.g., footing shifts, quotes, impersonal subjects) and spa-
tiotemporal shields (or “ non-hic devices” and “ non-nunc devices,” e.g., strategic
uses of verbal past tenses and inclusive enallages).

In seeing mitigation as a product or as an effect, Caffi ( 2001 : 452) presents a
series of conversational macro-strategies such as semantic strategies (e.g., eventu-
alization), metacommunicative strategies (e.g., fictionalization), sequential strate-
gies (e.g., strategic turn-taking and strategic topic shifts and changes), and co-
constructional strategies (e.g., stylistic actions on the speaking register aimed at
increasing or decreasing the level of shared intimacy).
A very interesting type of co-constructional strategy of mitigation is empathetic
attunement, which is defined by Caffi ( 2001 : 218) as an operation of cognitive and
emotive coordination enacted by the speakers of how they perceive each other and of
what their interactional goals are. By attuning with each other, the communicative
actors mutually verify the interpretation they should give to their exchange (i.e.,
cognitive operations) and mutually reduce their perceived distances (i.e.. emotive
operations). The author develops this concept from Stern ( 1985 ) and communication

4 Lakoff ( 1974 ) included this type of devices among hedges.