Mitigation / Claudia Caffi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Caffi, Claudia.

Series:

Studies in pragmatics 1750-368X ; 4.

Studies in pragmatics, 1750-368X ; 4

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italian language--Semantics.

Italian language.

Pragmatics.

Sociolinguistics.

Grammar, Comparative and general--Honorific.

Grammar, Comparative and general.

Physical Description:

xiii, 342 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam ; London : Elsevier, 2007.

Summary:

This fourth volume in the Studies in Pragmatics (SiP) series is a fittingly solid, well-illustrated and theoretical account of Mitigation (as a form of Politeness). The main goal of this book is to present a new integrated pragmatic approach to communication. The approach has been called??pragmatics of identity???. It's major feature is that it aims at integrating pragmatic views (research on politeness, face-work, etc.) with insights from different research fields into an extended framework where psychological aspects of communication in context also can be taken into account.

Contents:

Presentation of the corpus 3

List of metalinguistic abbreviations 10

Chapter 1 Pragmatics: subject and subjectivity 13

1.1 Towards a psychostylistics of interaction 15

1.2 A 'loaded' discipline 21

1.3 The subjectivity of language 24

1.3.1 The instance d'enonciation (Benveniste, 1966) 24

1.3.2 The deictic origin (Buhler, 1934) 25

1.3.3 The egocentric child (Piaget, 1989 [1926]) 26

1.4 A complex subjectivity 28

1.5 Stylistic markers 29

1.6 Semiotic markers 35

1.7 The function of identity maintance and 'speech markers' (Giles et al., 1979) 36

1.8 Contextualizations cues (Gumperz, 1982a) 38

1.9 Mitigation: first definitions 40

1.10 Bridging the gap between linguistic pragmatics and self-psychology 43

Chapter 2 Mitigation: the background 47

2.0.1 Structure of the chapter 47

2.0.2 Scopes of mitigating devices 49

2.1 Ideas of mitigation 51

2.1.1 Mitigation in different research areas: the empirical turn 51

2.1.2 Hedges in Brown and Levinson (1987) 53

2.1.3 Mitigation as vagueness: hedges 56

2.1.3.1 Lakoff (1972) 56

2.1.3.2 Bourdieu (1982) 60

2.1.4 Mitigation as indirectedness (Fraser, 1975; Leech, 1983; Holmes, 1984) 61

2.1.4.1 Fraser (1975) 61

2.1.4.2 Leech (1983) 63

2.1.4.3 Holmes (1984) 64

2.1.5 Mitigation as de-focalization of deictic origin 66

2.1.6 Mitigation as removal of unwelcome perlocutionary effects (Fraser, 1980) 66

2.1.7 Prince, Frader, and Bosk (1982) 69

2.1.8 The notion of weakening (Abschwachung) 70

2.1.8.1 Meyer-Hermann and Weingarten (1982) 71

2.1.8.2 Langner (1994) 72

2.2 Intensity 73

2.2.1 Intensity according to Bally (1970 [1909]) 74

2.2.2 Intensity according to Strawson (1964) 76

2.3 Towards an extended notion of mitigation 80

2.3.1 Some conceptual distinctions 80

2.3.2 The multidisciplinary relevance of mitigation 87

Chapter 3 Pragmatics of mitigation: bushes, hedges and shields 91

3.1 Mitigation as a bridging category 93

3.2 Types of mitigating devices (Habermas, 1987 [1981]) 95

3.3 The functioning of mitigation 97

3.3.1 Bushes 98

3.3.2 Hedges 102

3.3.3 Combination of bushes and hedges 104

3.3.4 Shields 106

3.4 Other strategies of mitigation: quotational shields and topical shields 114

Chapter 4 Mitigation and emotive communication: steps toward a psychostylistic approach 121

4.1 Style as a psycholinguistic issue: the role of emotion 123

4.1.1 Mitigation as an empathic strategy: attunement (Stern, 1985) 125

4.1.2 The other edge of the sword: mitigation as an anti-empathic strategy 129

4.2 On the conceptualization of emotion in linguistic theories 132

4.3 A folk psychological category: involvement 136

4.4 An approach to emotive communication (Caffi and Janney, 1994b) 138

4.4.1 Emotive communication and emotional communication 138

4.4.2 The notion of emotive contrast 139

4.4.3 Types of emotive devices 141

4.4.4 Emotive closeness and distance: empathic deixis 143

4.5 Immediacy (Wiener and Mehrabian, 1968) 145

4.6 Equivocation (Beavin Bavelas, 1985; Beavin Bavelas et al, 1990) 149

4.7 Disqualification 150

4.7.1 Haley (1959) 150

4.7.2 Mitigation and disqualification 152

4.8 Transactional disqualification (Sluzki et al., 1967) 154

4.8.1 Types of transactional disqualification 155

4.8.2 Reactive moves to transactional disqualification 157

4.9 The Freudian concept of 'undoing' (Ungeschehenmachen) 158

Chapter 5 Doctor-patient dialogue: a case-study 161

5.1 Analysis of a dialogue at a primary care physician's 163

5.2 The broader summary of the encounter: the fabula 165

5.2.1 The phases of the encounter 167

5.2.2 The recurrent trend of the phases 168

5.3 Between fabula and plot: salient moments of the encounter 171

5.4 Muldimensional microanalysis of TR1: the plot 176

5.5 The argumentative layer 185

5.6 The illocutionary layer: overall illocutionary description of the phases 186

5.7 Mitigation and institutional politeness in TR1 189

5.8 Micro-sequences of (non)-attunement 192

5.8.1 Topical and stylistic non-attunement 192

5.8.2 Micro-sequences of stylistic attunement 195

5.9 Distribution of mitigators 197

5.10 Mitigation and monitoring of emotive distances 200

5.11 Co-variance among parameters 202

Chapter 6 Grammar of mitigation in doctor-patient dialogue 207

6.1 Preliminary questions 209

6.2 Mitigation and institutional politeness 212

6.3 Types of mitigation 216

6.4 Between natural and non-natural mitigation: a transitional case 217

6.5 Non-natural mitigation 220

6.5.1 Lenitive mitigation 220

6.5.2 Tempering mitigation 222

6.6 Linguistic means of lenitive and tempering mitigation 226

6.6.1 Linguistic means of lenitive mitigation 226

6.6.1.1 Lenitive mitigation and deference 236

6.6.1.3 Strategies of lenitive mitigation 240

6.6.2 Linguistic means of tempering mitigation 242

6.6.2.1 Prepositional phrases in tempering mitigation 251

6.7 Mitigation and felicity conditions (constitutive rules) 255

6.7.1 Attenuation of compliance with essential rules 256

6.7.2 Attenuation of compliance with preparatory rules 256

6.7.3 Attenuation of compliance with the prepositional content rule 257

6.7.4 Mitigation as side-effect of the reinforcement of the sincerity rule 257

6.8 Conclusions: toward a pragmatic typology of mitigators 259

Appendix A TR1, dialogue at a primary care physician's (Ch. 5) 301

Appendix B Examples from Chapter 6 317

A 'Lenitive' mitigation (directive acts) 317

B 'Tempering' mitigation (assertive-verdictive acts) 320

C Other types of mitigation (other acts) 323.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [273]-297) and indexes.

ISBN:

9780080443348

OCLC:

76910992