Mitigation strategies in Spanish and German colloquial conversations

Abstract

There is a great variety of studies on linguistic mitigation in different genres and registers, but there are not so many research into interlinguistic and intercultural comparison. This paper focuses on the comparison of this pragmatic phenomenon in two languages, Peninsular Spanish and German. The purpose is to find out what mechanisms native speakers use in colloquial conversations in both languages, if there are similarities or differences in the mechanisms used in these conversations and what they are due to. This is based on a pragmatic vision of mitigation and on an intercultural and sociocultural theoretical perspective, in order to explain the reasons for the results obtained. Our corpus consists of nine conversations belonging to the Val.Es.Co. corpus and five corresponding to the Datenbank für gesprochenes Deutsch (‘data bank for spoken German’) with the same minutes analyzed and manually counted. This methodology was essential to decide whether a mechanism worked as an mitigation mechanism or not. A first result shows, as expected, that there are mechanisms that are used in one language to mitigate but not in the other, for reasons of linguistic typological diversity. This finding is interesting because it reveals which mechanisms the other language uses instead. A second result is that the group of mechanisms that are common in both languages differs in frequency due to socio-cultural causes, such as the more outgoing and open nature of the Spanish speakers in contrast to the interactions which are more respectful of one's own territory and of the other, characteristic of the German culture.