The Phenomenon of Usted as a Mitigation Strategy in Requests Towards Mother in the Spanish of Medellín (Colombia)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4151/S0718-09342026012001243Abstract
In this article, we study the use of usted as a mitigation strategy in requests towards one’s mother in Medellin Spanish (Jang, 2012b). We conducted an analysis with data from a sociolinguistic survey of 843 informants aged between 18 and 81 years. From a theoretical perspective, the research relied on the notion of politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987), the concept of mitigation (Briz, 1995; Albelda, 2016; Cestero & Albelda, 2020), variationist sociolinguistics (Labov, 1972), and sociocultural pragmatics (Bravo & Briz, 2004). The social variables considered are socioeconomic status, sex, and age. Our conclusions include the following aspects: 1) the usted in requests as a mitigation strategy has considerable validity; 2) when the absolute ranking of imposition of a request is high, this mitigation strategy is used more frequently; 3) the younger upper-class informants would use this strategy to a lesser extent, which implies that this phenomenon is on the path of linguistic change, with the possibility of gradually weakening in this speech community.
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