Mitigation in oral narrations

variationist study on Santiago de Chile speakers

Abstract

In this study, we have carried out a variationist analysis of the use of mitigation resources in oral narrations of personal experiences both individually and conversationally constructed by speakers from Santiago de Chile. For this purpose, we have followed the model proposed in González Riffo yand Guerrero González (2017), who have classified the mitigation resources in three pragmatic axes: ‘certainty’, ‘veracity’, and ‘esteem’. The extralinguistic factors are the informants’ sex, their socioeconomic status, and the type of narrative construction.  We have contrasted 36 individual narrations and 54 conversational (or co-constructed) narrations. Results have shown that speakers from high socioeconomic status mitigate more than those in medium or low status; females mitigate more than males in individual narrations; and, in conversational narrations, females mitigate less in those constructed by two males in comparison with those constructed by two females or a male and a female. Lastly, it is possible to observe that in individual narrations speakers mitigate less than in conversational narrations, which can be explained by a ‘conversational validation’ that can be found in the latter.