On Mitigation CAFFI

ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909
On mitigation *
Claudia Caffi
Department of Scienze Glotto-Etnologiche, University of Genoa, Via Balbi, 1-16126 Genoa, Italy
"Vostra Signoria mi scriva quali parole pare a lei che

debbano esser mitigate, ch'io mi sforzerb di mitigarle."
Torquato Tasso, Lettera del 14 di Maggio 1575, in: Le let-
tere di Torquato Tasso, disposte per ordine di tempo e illus-
trate da Cesare Guasti, Firenze, Le Monnier, 1852-1855,
vol. I, p. 75.
Abstract
If saying is doing it must be an effective doing. Mitigation (or 'downgrading', German

Abschwdchung) is a cover-term for a set of strategies, rooted in a metapragmatic awareness,
by which people try to make their saying-doing more effective. The notion of mitigation -
outlined in Rhetorica ad Herennium (86-82 b.C.) and landed in pragmatics in the eigthies
(Fraser, 1980), lends itself easily to connecting different fields (e.g. pragmatics and classical
rhetoric), different categories (e.g. illocution and perlocution), and different perspectives (e.g.
sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to communication). The aim of the present
paper is to recast the issue of mitigation, which is defined as the result of the weakening of
one of the interactional parameters, in a broad, integrated pragmatic framework by connect-
ing different approaches to interaction, in particular rhetorical and psychological approaches.
In the present work, which takes its data from a corpus of transcripts of doctor-patient and
psychotherapeutic conversations in Italian, different kinds of mitigators and mitigation strate-
gies will be discussed along with the potential effects they release both with regard to their
instrumental adequacy and the psychological distance they project between the interactants.
© 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
I wish to thank the organizers of the Third Rasmus Rask Colloquium, Odense, 5-7 November 1996,
Hemming G. Andersen, Leo Hoye and Johannes Wagner for their kind invitation and hospitality. I am
indebted to Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Alessandra Fasulo, Klaus H61ker, Richard W. Janney, Clotilde Pon-
tecorvo, and Marina Sbis~tfor insightful comments on an earlier draft. I'd like to thank Ian Harvey for
his careful stylistic revision. I'm also grateful to the anonymous doctors and patients who were not afraid
of the recording, thereby making possible the research partly reported here. This paper - which summa-
rizes some issues I deal with extensively in my book on mitigation (in preparation) - would not have
been possible without Jacob Mey's work in pragmatics.
0378-2166/99/$ - see front matter © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S0378-2166(98)00098-8
882 C. Caffi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909
I. Introduction
This paper aims at recasting the issue of mitigation in a broad, integrated prag-
matic framework by bridging different approaches to the study of communication, in
particular, rhetorical and psychological approaches, which tend to remain too distant
from each other and are only occasionally linked. The general view of communica-
tion I subscribe to is that of a complex system where many parameters - be they dis-
crete or scalar, central or peripheral - interact and can be labeled as systemic, holis-
tic. I will use the term 'parameter' in more or less its everyday sense of 'a quantity
whose value varies with the circumstances of its application' (Webster's new worm
dictionary, 1988). The issue of the hierarchical organization of parameters and their
relationship in given contexts, e.g. their mutual implication, is beyond the purposes
of the present paper. However, the basic reason for adopting this term and its sys-
temic theoretical framework is summarized by one of the premises of system theory
applied to human communication, namely the assumption that the parameters of an
open system are more important than the system's initial conditions (Watzlawick et
al., 1967: §4.33). The advantage of this perspective lies in the fact that it allows a
dynamic approach to interaction where the focus is on the system's functioning and
contextual organization.
According to my definition, mitigation - which I take to be a synonym for atten-
uation - is the result of a weakening of one of the interactional parameters, and a
downgrading when the parameters involved are scalar. Mitigation is one of the two
directions of modulation,1 namely the rhetorical stylistic encoding of an utterance
(Caffi, 1991), its expressivity, opposed and complementary to the direction 'rein-
forcement'. Hence, it is a superordinate organizing concept to which it is possible to
ascribe different functions performed by heterogeneous linguistic means that are
labeled variously in pragmatic research (e.g. Edmondson, 1981; House and Kasper,
1981; Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; for a survey, see Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1992). As a
consequence of the weakening of an interactional parameter, mitigation locally
affects the allocation and reshuffling of rights and duties triggered by the speech act,
and, crucially, changes their intensity and cogency. Globally, it reduces participants'
obligations (Meyer-Hermann and Weingarten, 1982: 243), to which the felicity con-
ditions of a speech act belong, thereby furthering the achievement of interactional
goals. Thus, mitigation is functional to smooth interactional management in that it
reduces risks for participants at various levels, e.g. risks of self-contradiction,
refusal, losing face, conflict, and so forth. This definition enables us to explain why
mitigating devices in natural languages studied so far are much more numerous than
reinforcing devices. To give one example, with reference to requests in English and
1 The term 'modulation' is used in HaUiday (1976: 200) to refer to "a kind of quasi-modality" and in
Lyons (1977: 65) to refer to "the superimposing upon the utterance of a particular attitudinal colouring,
indicative of the speaker's involvement in what he is saying and his desire to impress or convince the
hearer". The term is also used in Georges Mounin's many works on translation with reference to one
technical procedure of translation. My different use of the term takes inspiration from physics, where
modulus means 'intensity', which is a scalar parameter defining a measurable quantity, e.g. a force.
C. Caffi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909 883
German, House and Kasper (1981) list eleven types of downgraders and six types of
upgraders. The basic effect of reducing obligations makes it possible to unify miti-
gation which relates to deontic modality and mitigation which relates to epistemic
modality. Typically, mitigation affecting deontic modality reduces addressee's oblig-
ations, while mitigation affecting epistemic modality reduces speaker's obligations.
To use a distinction advanced in a different framework by Giles et al. (1979), I pro-
pose to gather the different functions of mitigation around two main dimensions,
which also differ in conventionality: (1) the dimension of interactional efficiency,
which meets essentially instrumental needs, since mitigation helps achieve interac-
tional goals; (2) the dimension of identity construction, which meets essentially rela-
tional needs, since mitigation is functional to the monitoring of emotive distances
between interlocutors.
Given these starting points, I will argue that mitigation works in a multi-layered
and multi-dimensional way, simultaneously affecting a plurality of linguistic levels
and interactional dimensions. The negative character of the speech act for the
addressee, its being a face-threatening act (Brown and Levinson, 1978), with which
mitigation is usually associated, is just one of these parameters; and these can be
central or peripheral, according to the type of interaction and its goals. So, my first
aim is to show, tentatively, and rather ethnocentrically, as the examples are in Ital-
ian, how mitigation affects different parameters and different dimensions at the same
time. More precisely, I will try to show that mitigation is active in both the dimen-
sions distinguished above, because it involves psychological and emotive aspects
which have so far been neglected in favor of sociolinguistic aspects (Blum-Kulka,
1992: 273). In particular, using examples of different types of mitigation from a cor-
pus of doctor-patient interaction in Italian, I will try to illustrate the multi-level
process defined by Giv6n (1989), i.e. the inferential, abductive process whereby
grammatical and semantic phenomena shade into pragmatic modalities and psycho-
logical effects. I will focus on the contribution that mitigated choices can make to
the emotive monitoring of interaction, lending themselves easily to an increase or
decrease in psychological distance. This issue, which concerns the less convention-
alized (and less studied) steps of the inferential process, is in my view a crucial one,
inasmuch as the management of psychological distance is part and parcel of our
communicative competence in both encoding and decoding processes (Frijda, 1982:
112). We are faced here with very subtle inferences which are easy to grasp and dif-
ficult to describe and which once again foreground the problem of the integration of
affect and emotive communication in pragmatics (Arndt and Janney, 1987; Caffi and
Janney, 1994). This research perspective has been partly anticipated by German
research on image-work (Imagearbeit) and relational work (Beziehungsarbeit) (Holly,
1979; Adamzik, 1984) which have developed Goffman's concept of 'face work'.
My second concern here will be to put forward - more as a heuristic tool than as
a cross-cut typology - a tripartite classification of mitigating devices based on dif-
ferent scopes of mitigation. I will advance a classification of mitigating mechanisms
based on the three components of the utterance on which mitigation can operate: the
proposition, the illocution, and the utterance source. Extending Lakoff's (1973)
metaphor, I'd like to call them 'bushes', 'hedges', and 'shields' respectively. The
formal criterion I have selected is clearly only one of the possible classificatory cri-
teria. Since it is anchored in linguistic form, it has, however, the advantage that it
avoids the risk of an unfettered proliferation of maxims which vary according to the
linguist's sensibility and imagination (from 'be tactful' to 'be optimistic' etc.). Fur-
thermore, I will distinguish some mitigating strategies which concern larger units
than the utterance.
My third point, which here will be presented only as a working hypothesis, takes
into account some possible links between scopes of mitigation and their potential
effects on the relational emotive level. In order to clarify these kinds of effects, I will
apply a non-linguistic model, i.e. the theory of disqualification, advanced in 1959 by
Jay Haley, one of the founders of family therapy, to explain the functioning of schiz-
ophrenic communication in a systemic framework. The pragmatic notion of 'mitiga-
tion', in its broad as well as in its narrow sense, shares with the psychological notion
of 'disqualification' the basic feature of deresponsabilization. Both notions call into
play the problem of responsibility management in discourse, involving cognitive as
well as emotive aspects.
2. Extending the concept of mitigation
To define mitigation as it has been employed in pragrnatics, it is necessary to dis-

tinguish between a narrow and a broad sense of the tenn. 2 In the narrow sense, f'n'st
proposed by Fraser (1980), mitigation is linked to Brown and Levinson's (1978)
notion of 'face-threatening act'. In the broad sense, 'mitigation' is a synonym of weak-
ening, downgrading, downtoning (German Abschwiichung, Langner, 1994), and is one
of the two opposite directions of modulation. The two senses are not mutually exclu-
sive: mitigation in the narrow sense is simply a case of mitigation in its broad sense.
There is another possible conceptual distinction regarding the fact that mitigation
can foreground a result (while backgrounding the strategy), or a strategy (while
backgrounding the result). As a nomen actionis, 'mitigation' denotes both the miti-
gating device, i.e. the operation on the linguistic form, and its result. In this latter
case, 'mitigation' foregrounds the goal achieved by an action, here a stylistically
shaped speech act. The term refers then to the goal of mitigating as an autonomous
communicative goal, a possible perlocution; the corresponding level of analysis is
that of the ~nonc~, and the perspective is a static one. The other sense of the term
foregrounds the process, the means used to achieve the result; the corresponding
level of analysis is that of the ~nonciation, and the perspective is a dynamic one.
2 Mitigation is outlined in Rhetorica ad Herennium, IV, 38, 50 (Cornificium, 86-82 B.C.) as deminu-
tio, literally 'belittlement' (though also the term mitigatio is employed in IV, 37), one of the exorna-
tiones sententiarum, figures of thought. The Auctor ad Herennium says that deminutio (extenuatio,
laeicoat~)aims at avoiding an impressionof arrogance: "Deminutio est, quom aliquid inesse in nobis aut
in iis, quos defendimus,aut natura ant fortuna ant industria dicemus egregium, quod, ne qua significetur
adrogans ostentatio, deminuitur et adtenuatur oratione [...] Quare quemadmodum ratione in vivendo
fugitur invidia, sic in dicendo consilio vitatur odium". Cicero, in De Oratore 3, 118, uses mitigatio and
inminutio (3,207), terms which were to be adopted by Quintilian in lnstitutio Oratoria (6, 3, 52).
c. Caffi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909 885
Mitigation is a relational concept. Logically, it is a three argument predicate:

someone mitigates something through something else. The sense of mitigation I
intend to deal with covers the set of cases where one of the two objects involved is
a linguistic object (the linguistic means of mitigation, i.e. the mitigating device),
while the other is an abstract component of the utterance, i.e. one feature of the clus-
ter of semantico-pragmatic features of the utterance (cf. Langner's 1994:83 distinc-
tion between the Abschw?ichendes and the Abgeschw?ichtes).
Now, the presupposition triggered by the lexeme, both in its everyday and in its
metalinguistic explication, is that the extralinguistic object to which it applies -
whether it is an action, event, process, or state of affairs in the everyday sense of the
term, or an unwelcome perlocutionary sequel in the technical sense of the term - is
negative. In everyday use, the 'object' referred to by 'mitigation' has already hap-
pened. In metalinguistic use, on the other hand, the 'object' may have already hap-
pened, in which case mitigation is co-extensive with repair, or it may not yet have
happened, in which case mitigation refers to an anticipatory strategy, based on
metapragmatic competence. In the latter case the object has no ontological reality; it
exists merely as a possibility.
Paradoxically, every case of mitigation in its narrow sense, insofar as mitigation
can be interpreted as an attempt at softening, reflexively marks the act in which it
occurs as a potentially or actually threatening act.
Fraser (1980) has the narrow sense in mind, considering mitigation as a result
strictly connected with unwished-for perlocutionary goals or sequels and explicitly
rejecting an extension of the term (in spite of Larry Horn's opinion reported by
Fraser in the footnote, 1980: 342). In my work, which is centered on the linguistic
means by which mitigation is achieved, I refer basically to the broad sense as well as
to the sense which foregrounds the process, and consider the former as a special case
of the latter. The extended view of the notion (alternative terms could be 'attenua-
tion', 'weakening', 'downgrading', though they do not foreground the active, inten-
tional character of the process as 'mitigation' does) has the advantage of providing a
unified account of the different cases that have been considered intuitively to be
cases of mitigation. In fact, mitigation works through analogous mechanisms and
along the same dimensions, though in different Gestalten, both in directive speech
acts and in constative speech acts, both in deontic and epistemic modality, both in
phenomena related to politeness and in phenomena related to different motivational
dimensions, e.g. degrees of epistemic certainty, social distance, psychological dis-
tance, etc. Though implicitly held by authors, since lists of mitigating devices
include devices referring to non-directive - not inherently threatening - acts such as
statements (for example, Fraser, 1980, includes in mitigating strategies parenthetical
verbs and other disclaimers for assertive illocutions), this view has so far not been
adequately recognized theoretically.
My aim in proposing an extension of the notion of mitigation (the term itself I am
not particularly committed to) is not just to gain in generalization and simplicity on
an abstract theoretical level; it is also to account for some empirical linguistic facts.
In fact, research on various types of downgrading (e.g. Edmondson, 1981; House
and Kasper, 1981; Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) for different types of speech act in dif-
ferent languages, has shown, though not emphasized, that apart from the set of spe-
cialized means typical of a given illocution, mitigating strategies are basically simi-
lar across illocutions. In line with these findings, I compared, in a previous stage of
my research on mitigation strategies in Italian (Caffi, 1995), the linguistic means
employed to mitigate different types of speech acts, which I provisionally subdivided
into two macro-types according to their speaker- or hearer-centeredness and their
'direction of fit' (Searle, 1975), i.e. constative-verdictive acts vs. directive-exercitive
acts. I expected to find different classes of mitigating devices reducing the speaker's
obligations in the case of constatives-verdictives, and the hearer's obligations in the
case of directives. As it happened, it emerged instead that, from a formal viewpoint,
downgraders in both illocutionary macro-types can be clustered around two types,
which can be labeled 'substitutive' and 'additive' (cf. Lausberg, 1967; Kerbrat-
Orecchioni, 1992: 200). Substitutive means are at work in so-called 'indirect speech
acts' (Searle, 1975) which question or state felicity conditions of a speech act, e.g. in
requests, preparatory conditions for the performance of the action. Another kind of
substitutive means is represented by 'shields', which will be addressed under s. 4.
Among the additive means, the following can be employed in many different illocu-
tions. With regard to 'internal' mitigation (for the distinction between internal and
external mitigation, see Blum-Kulka et al., 1989): morphological means, e.g.
diminutive suffixes, vocative, address terms (the apostrophe in rhetoric); syntactic:
(a) local, e.g. conditional mood; (b) global, e.g. hypothetical constructions; lexical,
e.g. markers such as un po ', un attimo, magari. With regard to 'external' mitigation:
if-clauses, pre-sequences, grounders. Thus, my starting hypothesis about distribu-
tional constraints of mitigators according to the type of illocution proved to be some-
how inadequate, since data showed rather a bi-partition of mitigators from a func-
tional viewpoint into two basic groups: the group of 'illocution-free' mitigators and
the group of 'illocution-bound' mitigators, specialized for a specific illocution. In
particular, specialized mitigators cover the whole range of epistemic mitigators spe-
cialized for statements, the 'evidentials', from modal adverbs to parenthetical verbs,
which are simultaneously indicators of mitigation and indicators of illocution. As it
has been pointed out by previous research on modals, probabilmente ('probably'),
for example, not only downgrades the illocutionary force by downgrading the epis-
temic commitment to the proposition, but also indexes the act as a statement. Simi-
larly, among the whole range of specialized mitigators for requests, per favore
('please') downgrades the directive and at the same time indexes the act as a request.
On the other side, there are downgraders like un attimo, un po', magari and other
passe-partout downgraders that can be used in various illocutionary acts (where they
modify various aspects). There is an inclusive relationship between the two sets of
mitigation; in other words, the set of mitigation markers includes a subset of spe-
cialized markers which are also markers of illocution. The specialization process
could be explained diachronically by the conventionalization of devices, at different
degrees of transparency, which progressively lose their semantic content and become
'frozen' mitigators (Labov and Fanshel, 1977: 83). Theoretically, a reasonable
hypothesis to explain the process of specialization of some mitigators into illocution
markers, which could be studied as cases of grammaticalization, is that these latter
markers are directly connected with the essential condition, in Searle's sense, of the
act (the idea of linking mitigation and felicity conditions is proposed in Lakoff,
1980). Instead, mitigators like un attimo, un po', p e r caso, magari etc. work by
implicature and are based on very general semantic mechanisms, such as temporal or
logical operations (see below 5.4.).
3. Mitigation: Interactional and relational aspects
Mitigation, or any other analogous label we might decide to choose, far from
being an implementation of an old-fashioned philosophical speech act theory, is an
empirical way of anchoring interaction management, also on the relational and emo-
tive level, in actual linguistic choices by speakers. A concept such as 'face', useful
though it may be, is psychologically inadequate. We cannot settle for the notion of
face or for politeness as the only motivational dimension of our communicative
behavior. What is behind face? What is beyond politeness? Future research on these
issues should focus not only on the interpersonal dimensions but also on the intra-
personal dimensions. In Caffi and Janney (1994) we emphasized the importance of
the emotive aspects of communication as a neglected variable of pragmatic theories.
Other psycholinguists suggest the notion of 'stake' as a crucial variable (Ghiglione,
1986). Wiener and Mehrabian's (1968) 'immediacy', with reference to speakers'
emotive distance detectable in linguistic micro-choices in a context, is another poten-
tially useful concept, as has been pointed out in Amdt and Janney (1987) and Caffi
and Janney (1994). In any case, in order to go further it is necessary to study how
sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors interact in specific settings. For instance,
in doctor-patient interaction, co-operativeness and politeness are redefined and over-
ridden by the decisional goals of interaction. What is more, the whole system of
expectations and acceptable behaviors changes; e.g. clients typically give up, to
some extent, their faces, since they are supposed to make self-disclosures which are
often threatening for their positive face. Doctors are supposed to be invasive of the
other's territory, imposing obligations, prohibitions, etc. The pragmatic analysis of
this reassessment cannot be exhausted by the sequential structural study of these
activity types; they must be integrated into a stylistic study focussed on the con-
struction of these (provisional) social and psychological identities.
Here it will only be possible to hint at how this multiple integration between dif-
ferent dimensions can be conceived. What is important to stress is that the necessity
of this integration is not only a theoretical a priori, but is based on the analysis of
actual speech, including my own data. This integration also met with concrete prob-
lems which arose during my work in institutional settings. In fact, one of the com-
municative problems doctors usually describe as most urgent is the problem of the
most effective choices, the immediate choices in Wiener and Mehrabian's (1968)
model, in constructing an empathetic atmosphere, in building what psychoanalysts
call the 'helping alliance'. They cannot be direct - empathy cannot be 'said' - they
must be constructed indirectly. It should incidentally be noted that the heightened
involvement due to the matters at stake (the patient's health, and the doctor's pro-
888 c. Caffi / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909
fessional reliability) enhances the degree of conversational cooperation and the num-
ber of inferential abductive steps on both sides (Arndt and Janney, 1987). We have
no direct access to the speaker's mind, and the best we can offer is a description of
what we are entitled to infer on the basis of actual words, a reconstruction of recog-
nizable effects which is compatible with a given context. Thus, what is crucial from
this perspective is not individual psychology, but rather the links between interde-
pendent variables (psychological, sociological, linguistic variables) within the inter-
actional system. A pragmatic theory must account for all these variables together,
not one after another, piece after piece, as if communication were a machine) A gen-
eral systemic approach makes it possible to ask questions such as: how can surface
stylistic choices contribute to building up the interpersonal relationship? And this
question forms part of a set of more general questions related to the definition of the
'subjectivity': who is speaking in pragmatics? Who are the inhabitants of pragmat-
ics as a general theory of human interaction? Or, to rephrase the title of one of Jacob
Mey's books (Mey, 1985), whose pragmatics? Is the model speaker of pragmatics,
like Winnicott's (1965) false-self, merely conforming to external social expectations
(a definition of 'face' may be 'just what society expects us to conform to')? Today's
pragmatics, having overcome the phase in which the anthropological, historical, psy-
chological subject had to be suppressed in favor of his/her formal simulacrum, is
now allowed to raise these questions.
4. Scopes of mitigation
By way of starting a systematic account, I will concentrate on the speech act unit.
For the sake of space and clarity, I will exclude cases of sequential or multi-turn mit-
igation, in particular, the case of passing on bad news, and phenomena such as the
'perspective display', a kind of mitigation in the delivery of a diagnosis (Maynard,
1992). Leaving aside the external mitigation obtained by pre-sequences, grounders,
etc. (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989), different kinds of mitigation can be distinguished
according to their different scopes in the speech act, according to the abstract com-
ponent on which mitigation centers. These abstract scopes can be gathered around
three major focuses: the proposition (and within it, the reference and the predica-
tion), the illocution (and within it, the speaker's propositional commitment toward
the proposition in assertive speech acts), and the deictic origin of the utterance (Btih-
ler, 1934), the 'I-here-now', the ego-hic-nunc at the core of Benveniste's (1970)
instance d'~nonciation. Obviously, more than one type of mitigating device can be
employed simultaneously in each case, and conversely, one mitigating device can
mitigate more than one aspect of the speech act simultaneously.
Following and extending Lakoff's (1973) metaphor, I'd like to call these different
types of mitigators 'bushes' (i.e. propositional hedges), 'hedges', and 'shields'
respectively. There are no clear-cut distinctions between these cases, since the dif-
3 Thispoint is madeby Ray Birdwhistellin Batesonet al. (1981 : 296).

ferent parts of the speech act are not neatly separated. Furthermore, the three kinds
of mitigating devices are heterogeneous, inasmuch as bushes and hedges are lexical-
ized expressions, sometimes markers: if the latter is the case, it is often problematic
to assign them a scope, also due to the well-known fact that markers are often not
integrated syntactically into the sentence (disjuncts). Instead, in shields, unlike in
bushes and hedges, there is no explicit operator of mitigation and the weakening
operation takes place at a deeper, more abstract level: for instance, it affects syntax,
as in passive transformations, or morphology, as in the shift from first-person singu-
lar pronouns to other person pronouns.
Approximate as this triad may be, I find it useful in making some first heuristic
distinctions. And, crucially, my point of view is not t a x o n o m i c but pragmatic: my
goal is not to classify expressions but to explain occurrences, and my concern is not
with words as such but with their use (this point is treated extensively in H61ker,
1988).
5. Some examples
In this section, I will discuss some examples integrating different perspectives, in

order to show h o w mitigation works.
The following examples are taken from transcripts of doctor (D) - patient (P) and
psychotherapist (T) - client (C) conversations recorded from 1994 to 1996 in North-
ern Italy. 4 The English translations are only tentative. I have dealt with some prag-
matic aspects of this type of asymmetrical interaction also in Caffi (1997). It is
impossible here to gloss the examples extensively; nevertheless, I have taken into
account the whole conversation. Nor is it possible to consider the very important
4 Abbreviations used are the following:

GP general practice visit
SV specialistvisit
PsV psychiatricvisit
PsS psychotherapeuticsession
Transcript conventions used are the following:
short pause (up to 2" duration)
-- pause (between 2" and 5")
:: lengthenedsyllables
= "latched" utterances
falling intonation contour
? rising intonation contour
-> intonationcontour of "non-finality", level intonation or "holding intonation in which the
tone neither falls nor rises" (Gumperz 1992:235) (Italian "intonazione sospensiva")
*+ overlap (*marks the beginning in A's and B's turns;+ marks the end in A's and B's turns)
(h) audible breath
XXX additionalpitch
** low volume
(italics) non-linguistic phenomena
xx unintelligiblewords
((XXX)) omissions
890 c. Caffi /Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909
prosodic and kinesic means of mitigation, such as changes in pitch prominence,

rhythm, speech rate, as well as eye-contact, gaze, gaze aversion, smile, particular
postures, etc. (Arndt and Janney, 1987; Mitchum, 1989). Instead, I will narrow the
discussion down to some cases in which mitigation is a local strategy, which is
detectable in linguistic micro-phenomena even within a single utterance, and from
which multidimensional pragmatic effects are inferable. In particular, for each exam-
ple, I will sketch the interplay between different interactional parameters released by
mitigation in an attempt to distinguish: (a) the instrumental aspects and (b) the rela-
tional aspects.
5.1. Bushes (propositional hedges)
In bushes, the focus of the mitigating device is on the propositional content,

Austin's locutionary (rhetic) act, which is typically made less precise. The down-
grading operation centers on the interactional parameter 'precision' (Bazzanella et
al., 1991), the pragmatic counterpart of Lakoff's (1973) logico-semantic notion of
'fuzziness', which is related to the second B-felicity condition in Austin's (1962)
terms, i.e. the condition which states that the procedure must be executed com-
pletely. In fact, bushes, which often work as 'approximators', signal that this condi-
tion is not fully satisfied. We can find bushes in examples (1)-(4).
(1) D. le do uno sciroppino da prendere. (GP)

'I'11 give you a cough syrup+DIM'
This utterance is a case that Austin would have labeled as 'suiting action to words',
similar to, though not identical with, true performatives, a sort of on-line preface of
the action while starting its performance. In fact, the doctor utters (1) as he is about
to write a prescription. Even at a first glance, dare ('to give') is a mitigated lexical
choice compared to prescrivere ('to prescribe'), which is actually what the doctor is
going to do. But let us look at the diminutive sciroppino. The parameter of precision
here interacts with other even more salient aspects. In fact, the diminutive suffix
with its semantic feature [-SERIOUS] (Dressier and Merlini Barbaresi, 1994: 17) has
the function of reducing the severity and unpleasantness of the therapeutic prescrip-
tion, thereby both downgrading the burden for the patient in complying with it, and
indirectly calming her possible worries about her pathology. Locutionary, illocution-
ary, and perlocutionary levels are affected by a single morphological device. More
precisely the achieving of the perlocutionary object is furthered by a device operat-
ing on the reference in the locutionary act, which in turn affects the illocutionary
level, decreasing the weight of imposition (Brown and Levinson, 1978) of the direc-
tive, the scalar dimension of illocutionary force that has been labeled as 'obligation
on the hearer' (Bazzanella et al., 1991). On the interpersonal level, diminutives in
asymmetrical interaction frequently seem to exploit the function of 'stressing the in-
group membership', which is the typical function of 'internal modification' accord-
ing to Blum-Kulka (1992: 267). In doctor-patient interaction, they often instantiate
a diminutivum puerile which further encourages the patients' natural tendency
toward regression. In a less pessimistic and more general version, diminutives "may
at large be seen as in-group markers that fall into the sphere of our notions of famil-
iarity, intimacy and decreased psychological distance ... [they] may also function as
'accelerators' of intimacy" (Dressier and Merlini Barbaresi, 1994: 233). In the psy-
cholinguistic framework developed by Wiener and Mehrabian (1968), the diminutive
in (1) could be described an as indicator of immediacy. Significantly, in my corpus
of 'therapeutic' interaction, the use of this morphological mitigating resource, which
also occurs in (2) and (3) below, is extremely frequent, sometimes becoming a dis-
tinctive feature of a doctor's communicative style that makes it very close to a sort
of baby-talk. If the benefits of mitigation sketched above are clear, both from an
instrumental and a relational viewpoint, it also implies potential costs: for instance,
the patient, feeling him/herself treated like a child, may reject this definition of the
relationship (saying something like 'not as bad as the last one you gave me') or may
continue the interaction on excessively intimate terms so that intimacy 'brakes'
would have to be deployed by the doctor.
Examples (2) and (3) are understatements in diagnosis, which is a verdictive
speech act in Austin's (1962) sense, where mitigation, centered on propositional
content again, affects the parameter of 'precision'.
(2) D. la sua non 6 una vera e propria emia. - ~ solo un pochino:=

P. =una puntina.
D. una puntina. (GP)
D. yours is not a real hernia. - just a bit =

P. a spot+DIM
D. a spot+DIM
The doctor, after his attempt at mitigating the diagnosis, by using an understatement
and a minimizer in the predication ('it is just a bit of a hernia'; un pochino is a
diminutive form of un po'), accepts the non-technical definition suggested by the
patient in his turn-completion. The doctor's mitigation is reformulated through the
patient's mitigation on which agreement is finally reached. Much more than a sim-
ple terminological agreement, this means a convergence of two codes, a typical case
of accommodation in Giles and Coupland's (1991) terms (the powerful member
adapts his/her code to the other's code). Further, the convergence not only concerns
definitions and codes (the technical and the non-technical) but also styles, reached
via mitigation: the patient volunteers a re-formulation of the diagnosis (una puntina)
which is both colloquial and mitigated with a bush (the diminutive suffix). Through
the joint sequential definition as well as through mitigation, different kinds of effects
are reached: first, on a purely referential level, the health problem is, though impre-
cisely, co-defined along a three-turn sequence as a non-prototypical case of a given
disease and therefore not particularly serious. On a relational level, not only the
social but also the psychological distance between the interlocutors (a general prac-
titioner and a South Italian shoemaker in a big Northern town) is diminished. Cer-
tainly, the sequential format of the exchange plays an important role in producing
this effect: the co-production of the problem definition is an interactional achieve-

ment which contributes per se to building a co-operative climate. This co-production
also involves, however, stylistic aspects. The partners' sharing of the minimizing
attitude expressed in the mitigated informal style redefines their relationship and
puts it on a more friendly basis. This example, which shows the intertwining of
sequential and stylistic aspects of interaction, prompts a general remark: a pragmatic
account which separates, as Levinson (1992) does, structural and stylistic aspects is
at best partial, at worst misleading.
In the two-part turn of (3), mitigation is obtained through morphological means,
i.e. the diminutive suffix and the pronoun quello ('that'), a case of empathetic
deixis, which bears a feature of [--PROXIMITY] (in paradigmatic opposition to
questo, 'this', which should have been selected in the co-text, since the problem at
hand had just been introduced by the patient in the adjacent turn) conveying a nega-
tive attitude:
(3) D. ma quello 6 un problemino. - non 6 mica un problema grosso. (GP)

'but that's a problem+DIM. - it's not a big problem'
Mitigating syntactic means are used in the second part of the turn, i.e. a litotes
shaped as a negatio contrarii (non d mica un problema grosso), which reformulates
the propositional content of the first part with a stylistic variatio. From an instru-
mental viewpoint, these bushes minimize the seriousness of the problem, which in
any case remains undefined by the expert in precise terms. From a relational view-
point, it could be observed that the reassuring function of these minimizations - the
benefit - works somehow to the detriment of the interlocutor's reliability: he is indi-
rectly treated as excessively worried, a bit fussy, maybe an anxious subject. Indeed,
research on doctor-patient interaction has repeatedly shown that a typical doctor's
strategy is to treat requests for information as boring symptoms of anxiety.
5.2. Hedges
In hedges, the scope of the mitigation centers on the illocution, i.e. on illocu-
tionary force indicators. My view of speech acts as clusters of multi-level and mul-
tidimensional features which range along a continuum of gradual variations both
within a given type of illocutionary force and between two different types (cf.
Giv6n, 1989; Bazzanella et al., 1991) leaves no space for a notion such as that of
'indirect speech act'. The latter would also be in contradiction with my claim (see
7 below) about the non-dichotomic functioning of bushes and hedges. This issue
deserves, however, a full discussion which for reasons of space I can't enter into
here.
In examples (4) and (5) we find hedges.
(4) T. io le proporrei se vuole una medicina apposta per vedere se riesco a farla
dormire.
P. hmm (PsV)
T. I'd propose, if you like, a special medicine, to see if I can make you sleep.
P. hmm
In (4), the mitigating devices are the following:
(1) io le proporrei, a hedged performative: the verb in the conditional mood is a

weaker form than the performative expression 'I propose'; this is a case of
internal mitigation according to Blum-Kulka et al.'s (1989) model.
(2) se vuole ('if you like'), a routine formula, a consultative device (Blum-Kulka et
al., 1989: 19).
(3) A supportive postponed move, a case of external mitigation, a grounder (of the
Head Act): a final clause, per vedere se riesco afarla dormire ('to see if I can
make you sleep') which, according to Blum-Kulka (1992: 267), applies the neg-
ative politeness principle by appealing to the hearer as a rational partner who
cannot be forced to do something that s/he does not fully understand.
From a relational perspective, on the one hand, the doctor presents the therapy as
an attempt whose possible success will be his personal merit, thereby indirectly
affirming his strong role, as the 'healer'; on the other hand, he formally downgrades
his directive to a proposal which it is up to the patient to accept. Besides, from this
relational, emotive perspective, there is an ambivalence in the doctor's utterance
about who is the main actor in the therapeutic process, with an oscillation between
two different 'narratological' answers to the question 'who is the protagonist?' - and
correlatively between two different cultural models of the professional's role.
The modal probabilmente occurs twice in the following example:
(5) D. probabilmente 6: - dove c'~ l'attacapanni - probabilmente 6 una:: con-

seguenza di un problema intestinale: che ~ cominciato con l'influenza eh:
(SV)
'probably it is - where the clothes-stand is - it is probably a consequence of
an intestinal problem: that began with the flu eh:'
Here, the scope of the mitigation is (that aspect of the illocution which is) the speak-
er's epistemic commitment to the propositional content. Probabilmente weakens the
speaker's degree of certainty about the proposition: the overall effect on the utter-
ance is that the diagnosis is downgraded to a hypothesis, nothing more than an
attempt to trace abductively the temporal and causal sequence of facts. Pragmati-
cally, the diagnosis can be analyzed as a verdictive speech act in Austin's (1962)
terms, a type of illocutionary act whose preparatory felicity conditions have to do
with the authority or the competence of the speaker-agent. For these reasons, diag-
nosis is easily able to show the interplay of different parameters - knowledge,
power, role - in the same speech act. The assignment of a minor value to the para-
meter of knowledge in (4) and (5) goes together with a downgrading of the parame-
ter of power. The semantic indeterminacy associated with the litotes in (4) and the
downgrading of certainty on the part of the speaker in (5) are mirrored by the
upgrading of the hearer's active role, e.g. his/her involvement in deciding what the
case is, in confirming the hypothesis, in adducing further evidence etc., in a word, in
sharing the responsibility for the abductive process. From a relational perspective,
this means a redefinition of the role of the patient as slightly less passive. Further, if
the patient is also entitled to a kind of knowledge, the relationship may proceed on a
more symmetrical basis: at this point a range of possible emotive inferences opens
up. And this range includes the possible interpretation on the part of the patient that
the doctor's decreased epistemic subscription to the content may be paralleled by a
decrease in assertiveness, to use a psychological category (Arndt and Janney, 1987),
in what I'd like to call an 'emotive subscription', an identification of the speaker
with his/her communication. In fact, modal adverbs are listed as indicators of non-
immediacy, precisely in the 'modification' class, in Wiener and Mehrabian (1968:
44). In conclusion, what the examples show clearly is that epistemic certainty, social
power, and psychological distance are connected parameters in a multilayered
process which, especially in its less conventionalized steps, remains to be decon-
structed.
5.3. Combinations of bushes and hedges
In the following examples, mitigation affects both the proposition and the illocu-
tion. In example (6), the parameter of 'epistemic certainty' is crucially affected by
mitigation and is assigned a minor value, while the parameter 'intimacy' or 'emotive
closeness' is indirectly assigned a major value. In particular, this example raises an
important theoretical question: what is the threshold beyond which mitigation pro-
duces not only a deintensification of the same act but a different act, i.e. when the
problem at hand is not a matter of degree but a matter of type (Giv6n, 1989)? In (6),
the weakening of the 'epistemic certainty' parameter affects the parameter of 'social
role', here a professional one, in the overlapping area of 'competence'. This weak-
ening, obtained through a combination of bushes and hedges, is such that the speech
act seems to shift from one type to another. It becomes, more than a hypothesis, a
verdictive, the giving up of any hypothesis, the expression of a doubt, a behabitive,
the report of a mental state, which hopefully can be limited. This shift happens when
the sincerity condition (Austin's, 1962, F-conditions) prevails over the competence-
knowledge condition (Austin's, 1962, A-conditions) crucial to verdictives.
(6) D. magari ~ un periodo cosl - va a sapere - qualcosa del genere. (GP)

'maybe it's a sort of bad moment - who knows - something like that'
In (6), magari/va a sapere are hedges focussed on the aspect of the assertive illocu-
tion which is the commitment to truth (the neustic); d u n periodo cosi/qualcosa del
genere are bushes that make the proposition semantically fuzzy.
On the relational level, in (6) the downgrading of the knowledge parameter (by the
lexical means magari; the syntactic bushes ~ un periodo cosi and qualcosa del
genere which make the reference fuzzy; and finally by the explicit admission of
uncertainty va a sapere), which is even stronger than in (5), increases the symmetry
c. Caffi /Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909 895
from a social viewpoint and the (not necessarily welcome) intimacy from a psycho-
logical viewpoint. It is as if the doctor, by giving up his knowledge, also gives up his
social role based on that knowledge: both seem temporarily suspended.
(7) is another example of the combined use of bushes and hedges:
(7) T. niente mh sl - allora se ho capito bene - il suo problema ~ che ogni tanto le
capita di svenire.
C. si. (PsV)
T. well (lit. nothing) mh yeah - now if I've understood correctly - your prob-
lem is that you sometimes happen to faint (lit. it happens to you to faint).
C. yeah.
After four starters (niente mh si allora) signalling hesitation, se ho capito bene ('if
I've understood correctly') is a 'disclaimer' in Fraser's (1980) sense, a controlling
reformulation or a 'gist' in Thomas' (1989) sense, a 'hedge' in the sense proposed
here, since its scope is the whole illocution. This reformulation is both self-serving
(obeying cautiousness) and altruistic (Fraser, 1980): the client has to check if the
reformulation is correct. It functions as a metacommunicative anticipation-neutral-
ization of a possible disagreement.
Ogni tanto ('sometimes') is a bush, focussed on the propositional content, on the
predication; it reduces the frequency of the symptom thereby also reducing the seri-
ousness of the problem (the fainting). Le capita ('it happens to you') is a bush,
focussed on the propositional content. It is the lexical choice of the predication
which allows the doctor to background the responsibility of the client: the event
'happens', without being brought about intentionally by an agent. On the relational
level, the combination of bushes, globally aimed at minimizing the problem, and
hedges, the hypothetical premise which leaves open the possibility that things can
also be treated differently, constructs the relationship as one where the expert - a
psychiatrist - can also make mistakes. It also weakens the asymmetry and calls for
the client's co-definition of the problem, implicitly stating her control capacity.
5.4. Shields
The scope of mitigation in the following examples is Biihler's (1934) deictic ori-
gin, the 'I-here-now' (ego-hic-nunc), at the core of Benveniste's (1970) instance
d'~nonciation. As I have already pointed out under section 4, in shields, there is no
explicit operator of mitigation which works on a more abstract level.
In fact, in shields, the act is not mitigated by explicit linguistic means, but rather
it is dislocated, displaced; there is backgrounding, de-focalization, or even deletion
of the utterance source.
The idea, though it so far lacks a systematic account, has to some extent been
anticipated by the rhetorical notion of aversio (Lausberg, 1967: §431), Greimas and
Courtrs' (1979) notion of d~sembrayage, by Brown and Levinson's notion of
'impersonalization mechanisms' (1987: 273), by Haverkate (1992), and others.
As will be clear from the following examples, shields do not work in a scalar way,
but in a yes-no way, releasing their various interactional effects through a process of
contrast with the unmarked, expected, preferred choice. More precisely, there appear
to be some basic strategies of displacement linked with the three basic components
of the deictic origin, the source of the utterance act: the first (based on the 'I'),
which could be labeled 'actantial', to borrow a term from narratology, is represented
prototypically by cases where the act is ascribed to someone else, or by cases where
the author is simply deleted, as in impersonal constructions or agentless passive con-
structions. Symmetrically, we can have a deletion of the 'you' when no reference is
made to the actual addressee of the message. Objectivization, with impersonal sub-
jects like uno/a, si ('one') in sentences like uno sta in pensiero ('one worries'), is
one of these shields. In discourse production there can be various shifts to and from
the 'I', and there are several ways in which the responsibility for the speech act can
be subtly shifted away, as in Goffman's (1979) cases of 'footing' (Levinson, 1988).
The other two means of displacement are interconnected and can be labeled 'spatio-
temporal', since the displacement involves the 'here-now', for instance, when a nar-
rative replaces a discourse focussed on the present context, as in example (13)
below. The displacement can even involve another possible world, opened up
through the use of an hypothetical device, the 'as if', which is very frequent in psy-
chotherapeutic sessions (Gaik, 1992), or a hypothetical sentence: I call these shields
'fictionalization' and 'eventualization' (Haverkate, 1992) shields respectively. These
shields can work locally, at the level of a single utterance, or globally, as textual
strategies.
Example (8) illustrates a non-ego strategy of objectivization:
(8) D. c'~ un'i:perplasia estrogenica - c'~ scritto qui. (SV)

'there's an estrogenic hyperplasia - it is written here'
The scope of the mitigation is the utterance-source, the deictic origin. There is a de-
focalization of the speaker as the agent of the utterance, which is ascribed to another
impersonal source, that is made more authoritative and unquestionable by the chan-
nel (written code) and by the use of the technical register. Shifting the responsibility
to another source - which is not shared by, or immediately accessible to, the
addressee - amounts to weakening the doctor's personal commitment to his diagno-
sis. Moreover, no reference is made to the two interlocutors: not only is there a 'not-
I' but also a 'not-you'. There is no reference to the patient either: the disease 'is
there', and it is a fact for which a piece of evidence is invoked. At the same time, the
disease is very clearly identified, with a high-value assignment to the 'precision of
propositional content' parameter. Thus, while the cognitive informativeness of the
act is reinforced, and with it, its argumentative power, the overall relational effect is
one of distancing.
A somewhat similar case, where the doctor shifts to using 'we' (meaning some-
thing like 'one' in impersonal constructions), is discussed in Gumperz (1982).
Gumperz claims: "Perhaps .... the underlying motive [for the use of 'we', CC] is to
signal personal distance and to distinguish descriptions of impersonal laboratory pro-
c. Caffi /Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909 897
cedures from statements about personal opinions or self-initiated actions" (1982:

184-185).
Example (9), interesting also since it overtly deals with negotiations about respon-
sibility for saying and doing, illustrates different shields of objectivization and
impersonalization. Further, it shows oscillations between downgrading and rein-
forcement:
(9) C. non ci sono pensieri.

T. non ci sono.
C. non c'~ ideazione, non ci sono pensieri, non c'~ (h) emotivittt, non c'~ reat-
tivittt agli stimoli dell'ambiente, non c'~:: ->- b 6 .
T. e quindi ha distrutto la propria intelligenza.
C. ma. 'ho' (ripresa polemica dellaformulazione di T). ~: ~ stata, si ~. adesso
non mi vorrei proprio assumere la responsabilittt completamente (ride) (PsS)
C. there are no thoughts.

T. there aren't.
C. there is no capacity of thinking, there are no thoughts, there's no (h) emo-
tivity, there is no capacity of reaction to stimuli from the environment, there
isn't:: ->- I don't know.
T. so you have destroyed your mind.
C. just a minute. 'I have' (polemical quotation ofT's formulation), it is: it has
been. it has. now I wouldn't want to take the whole responsibility (laughs)
The client speaks of her feelings as a matter of fact; her utterance is objectivized (the
verbal aspect is perfective): she doesn't say 'I don't have thoughts' (io non ho pen-
sieri) but 'there are no thoughts' (non ci sono pensieri). Even grammatically, the 'I',
the ego, the utterance's source, has been deleted, and what is described is not an
action but a state of affairs. It is as if the client were watching her thoughts from the
outside, as an external observer. The therapist (a psychoanalyst) reformulates the
client's words using a reinforced, almost brutal paraphrasis, with a move that Wein-
garten (1990) would call Aktivierung/Dynamisierung. It is a move which, taking the
client's account literally, transforms it into an action which has actually been per-
formed by her. At this point, the client retraces her steps and, after a false start in
which she polemically echoes the therapist's formulation, uses other shields, i.e.
impersonal and passive constructions. These shields are still not enough to express
her refusal to completely undertake the responsibility for 'having destroyed her
mind' so that she feels it necessary to make the point explicit.
Example (10) illustrates a subcase of objectivization, a gnomic-proverbial state-
ment: instead of the second-person subject (when you get nervous etc.), there is a
generic, impersonal third-person subject whose behavior is assessed as prototypical.
At the same time there's no surface trace of the actual individual utterer: the expert's
opinion becomes a matter of common knowledge. It is a case of what in rhetoric
has been called a 'figure of communion' (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958:
§42):
(10) T. quando uno diventa nervoso fa cosL (PsV)

'when one gets nervous one acts that way'
The patient's behavior is treated as everybody's behavior, usual in such circum-

stances. Further, as the statement comes from an authority, it gains the status of an
unquestionable, atemporal, apodictic truth.
In (11), a directive, the shield is on the speaker, the 'I' of the deictic origin, and on
the addressee, the 'you':
(11) D. dobbiamo fare una radiografia dell'articolazione del femore con l'anca.
(GP)
'we'll have to do an X-ray of your hip joint'
The first-person plural pronoun in (11) signals a personal involvement on the part of
the doctor; its function here seems to be opposite to the above quoted function
hypothesized by Gumperz. 5 It is a pseudo-inclusive 'we' (Haverkate, 1992), a soli-
darity 'we', which replaces the 'I' (e.g. 'I suggest an X-ray') and the 'you' (e.g. 'you
must do an X-ray'): the shield is on the utterer, thus avoiding an explicit prescrip-
tion, as well as on the addressee, thus being exempted from an individual obligation.
The act is represented as shared; the performance of the action prescribed is depicted
as if it were somehow shared by the doctor, a sharing which has a grammatical trace
in the first-person plural. The dislocation of the act to someone else, which is
obtained by substituting the first-person pronoun with other personal pronouns, is
known in rhetoric as 'enallage of persons' (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958:
§42).
The use of the deontic modal dovere, ('must'), which imposes the obligation, is
the second mitigating device in (11). Modal devices can be both mitigating and rein-
forcing depending on the context and on the criterion of analysis: e.g. from a logical
standpoint, on a scale of modals, dovere ('must') is a downgrader compared to d ne-
cessario ('it is necessary'), while it is an upgrader compared to p o t e r e ('can',
'could'). Besides, from a psychological standpoint, 'must' could be seen as an
upgrader with respect to 'it is necessary', which is impersonal, hence less immediate
from the partner's point of view.
In (12) the architecture of the shield which I suggest calling 'eventualization' is
more complex:
(12) D. poi oltreattutto lui lavora al XXX ((nome di ospedale)) di XXX ((nome di
luogo)) ci fosse da fare non so paradossalmente da operare ->- (GP)
'what's more, he works at XXX ((name of hospital)) in XXX ((name of
place)) if they had, I don't know, paradoxically to operate ->-'
5 Amongthe many possible pragmatic values of the use of the first-personplural pronoun, it is worth
mentioning the following use, which is the precise opposite of the rhetorical device ofpluralis maiesta-
tis: "le persan et le turc se servent d'un pluriel 'nous' pour rrferer ~ l'adresseur, par fusion (drprrcia-
tive, et donc polie) de son individualit6dans l'anonymat d'une collection" (Hag~ge, 1985: 279).
What is mitigated in (12) is the speech act of supposition. This is done in order to
make the (actually realistic) hypothesis of an operation more distant and improbable;
in the background, an evaluation lurks, something like 'maybe an operation will be
necessary'. There is a cumulative use of linguistic devices: textual, i.e. oltreatutto,
which introduces the message as one among other possible topics, thereby decreas-
ing its importance; syntactic, i.e. the subjunctive in the hypothetical construction;
and lexical, i.e. a marker non so and the evaluative adverb paradossalmente. This
latter is a kind of metacommunicative gloss working both on the whole speech act
( ' I ' m only saying, as a paradox, that ... ') and on the propositional content, which is
thus further removed; it also is a stylistic cue that opens the way to a more formal
register.
The shifting away from an aspect of deictic origin can become a global strategy,
as in (13), which serves to introduce the category of topical shields. (13) is an exam-
ple of a 'narrativization' shield, i.e. a global strategy of de-actualization of a topic,
the patient's present state, which nevertheless is salient in that context, i.e., the first
session in a course of psychotherapy. A negative affect toward the topic can be
inferred from this removal, which signals a separation from the present communica-
tion. At another level of analysis, it can be claimed that this strategy aims at self-pro-
tection (traditional psychoanalysis would describe it in terms of 'resistance'), and the
client's shield is first of all for herself and her present pain. Whatever the interpreta-
tion of the strategy may be, what is crucial is an account of how this actual goal is
achieved, here by shifting a present feeling to the past, which is told in a rather
detached style instead of being enacted. To use Benveniste's famous distinction, the
client's discourse is an histoire which finds it hard to become discours. In narra-
tivization there is an 'I, not-here, not-now' vs. actualization or focalization on 'I-
here-now', which the analyst tries urgently to restore. This type of shield was
focussed by Labov and Fanshel (1977: 336) under the label 'narrative response', as
one of Rhoda's typical mitigation strategies.
(13) P. e poi: dall'85 a11'87 i due anni diciamo in cui: stavo male ma non: per altri
versi ma non cosi male come sto adesso sono comunque riuscita a conti-
nuare a lavorare mi hanno cambiato la respo*nsabilit~+
T. *adesso sta male?+in questo momento?
P. be' adesso io sono qua e sono entrata per degli accertamenti: ulteriori=
T. =no dico adesso ora qui.
P. si.
T. sta male?
P. be' - certo.
T. percM parla con me?
P. no: non mi d~ nessun fastidio parlare con lei. (PsS)
P. and then from 85 to 87 the two years when: let's say I felt bad but not in
other respects but not so bad as I feel now anyway I managed to keep work-
ing they changed my du*ties+:
D. *now are you feeling bad?+ at the moment?
P. well now I'm here and I've come in for further tests=
D. =no I mean now at this very moment here.
P. yes.
T. are you feeling bad?
P. well, of course.
T. because you are speaking to me?
P. no: I don't mind speaking to you.
(13) is suitable to close this section because it is a transitional case between deictic
shields, in particular 'objectivization', and topical shields, as sketched in section 6
below. The main difference between them is the following. While deictic shields, i.e.
shields based on the negation of one of the aspects of the deictic triad, work by an
overall substitution (e.g. one utterance is substituted by another bearing a non-ego,
non-hic, non-nunc feature), quotational and topical shields operate on 'something'
which actually appears on the linguistic surface. While deictic mitigation is in absen-
tia - deictic shields are in paradigmatic opposition to other unmarked choices in a
given context - quotational and topical mitigation, similar in that to bushes and
hedges, is in praesentia. Let us consider what this 'something' may be.
6. Other strategies of mitigation
My aim in this section is to list some discourse strategies in which mitigation can
be inferred as a second-degree effect. The operations I have in mind are of two basic
types: the first is the suspension of literal interpretation, and the second is the strate-
gic backgrounding of a topic, obtained through specific textual means. I'd like to call
the former 'quotational shields' and the latter 'topical shields'. Quotational shields
are those cases in which a metalevel is opened up by the use of expressions like fra
virgolette ('in quotes'), when the speaker distances him/herself from what s/he says
by the explicit signal that s/he is using words only as quotes (for an extended treat-
ment of metalinguistic expressions in French, see Authier-Revuz, 1994). In other
words, the signalled suspension of the literal meaning implies that the speaker's sub-
scription, both cognitive and emotive, to his/her utterance or part of it is suspended
too. Similar effects are obtained through the use of markers such as per cosi dire
('so to speak'), diciamo cosi ('let's say'). There is a sort of continuum between: (a)
true quotational cases, (b) the cautionary markers which call a metalevel into play,
e.g. per cosi dire, and (c) bushes, e.g. quasi, praticamente, which can be seen as
being placed along a scale of decreasing transparency (for the concept of 'trans-
parency', see H61ker, 1988). In order to clarify the difference between them, it may
be useful to observe that the first are linked to a yes-no property of communication
in general terms, namely literality, while the second cases signal metacommunica-
tively what can be seen as a non-complete fulfilment of Austin's (1962) first B-con-
dition, namely, the condition concerning the correct execution of the procedure. The
third cases, as already pointed out under 5.1., signal, without making reference to a
metalevel, what can be seen as a non-fulfilment of Austin's (1962) second B-condi-
tion, namely, the condition concerning the complete execution of the procedure,
which is related to the scalar parameter 'precision' which affects the propositional
content.
Topical shields are those cases in which there is a strategic backgrounding of a
topic whose occurrence is expected, typically an embarrassing, painful, thorny topic,
through the decreased value assigned to an interactional parameter that can be
labeled 'relevance of a topic for the present purposes of the exchange'. Topical
shields can be further subdivided into strategic digressions, and strategic examples.
Strategic digressions correspond to the rhetoric notion of aversio a materia (Laus-
berg, 1967: §434), where the mechanism is the 'lateralization' of a topic, obtained
through the use of connectives such as tra l'altro ('by the way', 'what's more'), or
p e r caso ('incidentally', 'by any chance') as in (14):
(14) T. ha avuto per caso qualche altra gravidanza che si ~ interrotta spontanea-
mente cosl o no ? =
C. =no. (PsV)
T. have you accidentally/incidentally had any other pregnancies with a miscar-

riage or not?=
C. =no.
The funny effect of (14) for an Italian speaker is due to the ambiguity of the scope
of the Italian mitigator p e r caso (similar to the German zufiillig/zufiilligerweise),
another passe-partout downgrader similar to un attimo. Each of the two possible
English translations selects only one of the two simultaneous possibilities in Italian:
one is "accidentally" ('by any chance'), whose scope is the propositional content;
the other possible translation is "incidentally" ('by the way'), whose scope is the
whole question, presented as a side topic in a hypothetical hierarchy of topics. In this
latter case, it can be classified as a topical shield in which the inferable mitigating
effect is obtained through the 'lateralization' of the topic.
Obviously the topic itself is delicate, and negatively face-threatening for the
patient. Having recognized this, however, we also have to explain how the speaker
manages both to ask the embarrassing question and to protect the addressee's face:
these conflicting goals are simultaneously pursued by the use of the co-textual
shield, which introduces the topic and at the same time downgrades its relevance and
urgency in the context.
Strategic examples are those cases where again the parameter which is reduced is
the 'relevance of the topic for the present purposes of the exchange'. Crucially, this
reduction amounts to a contrast with the expected, preferred choice in that context.
The mechanism by which this reduction is achieved is the paradigmatization of the
topic, obtained through the use of connectives such as ad esempio, p e r esempio ('for
example', 'for instance'), as in (15) (on examples, Caffi and HSlker, 1995):
(15) C. va be' problemi in casa: li ho sempre avuti quindi:

T. che problemi ci sono?
C. va be'. ad esempio c'~ mio paph che: *ogni tanto beve +. (PsS)
C. well as to problems at home: I ' v e always had them
T. what are the problems?

C. well for instance there is: my father who *sometimes drinks +.
In other words, mitigation is obtained by downgrading the 'topical relevance' dimen-

sion, which, in turn, results from the fact that a topic is placed in a paradigm of pos-
sibilities, not presented in a hierarchy. The relational effect at work here is that the
downgrading of the relevance of a topic means implicitly the downgrading of the
emotive salience of the topic for the speaker in the actual communicative situation.
If the topic is actually recognizable as salient in that context, as in (15) the topic of
the father's alcoholism (also mitigated by the bush ogni tanto 'sometimes'), its back-
grounding triggers an implicature concerning the unwillingness on the part of the
speaker to handle it. There is a clear similarity between those types of shields and the
rhetorical figure of reticentia.
To sum up: topical shields are the surface means by which the interactional para-
meter of topical relevance, which is connected by implicature with the emotive
saliency of a topic, is de-intensified. In other words, from the fact that a topic is
given a reduced textual salience - since it is 'lateralized', or set in a paradigm of
equipollent possibilities - it is possible to infer that it is of a minor emotive salience
to the speaker in the given context.
7. Haley's 'disqualification' and potential anti-empathetic effects of mitigation

in therapeutic interaction.
It is possible to see a connection between the description of mitigation given above

and Haley's (1959) work on 'disqualification'. Haley's model has been repeatedly
exploited and modified in Beavin-Bavelas' works on 'equivocation', on which I can-
not dwell here (Beavin-Bavelas, 1985; Beavin-Bavelas et al., 1990). In order to point
out this connection, which in any case requires more systematic empirical work, it
will be useful to recall some of Haley's points. Jay Haley, Bateson's colleague at the
Veterans' Administration Hospital, in Palo Alto, and the founder of systemic family
therapy, studied schizophrenic dialogues by applying Bateson's and his own com-
munication model, where, as is well known, stylistic choices - in the first stage con-
fined to non-verbal communicative behavior - are viewed as choices defining the
relationship between interlocutors. Thus, style is related to the notion of metacom-
munication, qualifying the message from a relational viewpoint. Haley says:
"one cannot not qualify a message [...] subtle qualifications are always present [...] it is difficult for a
person to avoid defining, or taking control of, his relationship with another [...] Whenever a person tries
to avoid controlling the definition of a relationship, at a different level he is defining the relationship as
one in which he is not in control[...] However, there is one way in which a person can avoid indicating
what is to take place in a relationship, and thereby avoid defining it. He can negate what he says. Even
though he will be defining the relationship by whatever he communicates, he can invalidate this defini-
tion by using qualifications that deny his communications." (Haley, 1959: 323-325)
Of course, Haley does not mean 'deny' as a logical negation; rather, he regards it as
a qualification of the message which is somewhat incongruent with the message
itself. " B y qualifying his messages with implications that he isn't responsible for his
behavior, a person can avoid defining his relationship with another" (Haley, 1959:
325). By way of opening up a connection between the notions of disqualification and
mitigation in its broad sense, I would like to stress the following points.
Haley breaks down a message into four components, each of which can be
negated: 'I', 'am saying something', 'to you', 'in this situation'. In Haley's exem-
plification, the cases of 'not-I' are those in which the speaker speaks on behalf of
someone else, for instance, in the name of some authority, of his/her role or status
position, or under the influence of something external (a disease, a drug, etc.). The
speaker, in sum, "may indicate that he is only an instrument transmitting the mes-
sage" (Haley, 1959: 325), as in example (8) above.
The negation of the 'am saying something' component is exemplified by cases in
which the speaker says something in a contradictory, ambiguous, or unclear way, as
in (12), or signals s/he is not using words but only mentioning them, thereby indi-
cating "one is not communicating a message but merely listing letters of words"
(Haley, 1959: 326), a case close to 'quotational shields'.
The negation of the 'to you' component is exemplified by cases in which the
speaker signals s/he is not talking to the interlocutor but to someone else, for
instance, indicating that s/he is speaking "to the person's status position rather than
to him personally" (Haley, 1959: 326).
The negation of the 'in this situation' component is exemplified by cases in which
the speaker indicates his/her utterance is referring to some other time or place, dif-
ferent from that of the actual interaction s/he is engaged, as in (13). 6
In sum, Haley considers de-responsibilization, i.e. avoiding defining the relation-
ship, as the basic core of incongruent communication, which has its systematic and
dramatic instantiation in schizophrenic behavior. Now, what emerges from the pre-
vious sections is that de-responsibilization is also at the core of mitigation. Again, as
I have repeatedly stressed, there is no guaranteed inferential automatism: relational
aspects, like instrumental ones, have to be negotiated between communicators, and
ambivalence is pervasive. However, as I have tried to sketch in this paper, it is pos-
sible to specify the ways in which this ambivalence is achieved and reconstruct some
steps through which mitigation can contribute to defining (or not defining) the rela-
tionship and the speakers' co-identity. I would suggest that some prototypical cases
of the mitigated choices I have called 'shields', i.e. the displacement of the act to
another source, correspond to Haley's disqualification of the 'I', 'to you' and 'in this
6 Hereis the point of main difference,not made explicit as it should have been, between Haley's model
and Beavin-Bavelas' (1985, 1990) reformulation of it. In fact, 'in this situation' is reinterpreted by
Beavin-Bavelas as 'in this sequence, in this co-text': it is the dimension of evaluation of the message
centered on its sequential relevance, as an (in)adequate, inappropriateresponse to the preceding interac-
tion. This change is probably due to the different kinds of data on which Haley and Beavin-Bavelas
focus their research, i.e. schizophreniccommunication(where the negation of the 'in this situation' com-
ponent, taken literally, is frequent) and everyday communication.Co-textual relevance is also the main
focus in Sluzky et al.'s (1967) concept of 'transactional disqualification'.
situation'. While using different mechanisms, they all seem to entail the benefit of
avoiding the direct assumption of responsibility for the utterance as well as, in
Haley's terms, the cost of not defining the relationship, thereby indirectly defining
the relationship as one where the speaker is not in control. Further, on the relational
level, it is precisely this avoidance at the core of the shield which is potentially con-
trary to empathy. The extent to which this correlation between shields and emotive
distance can be generalized clearly requires further inquiry. Also needed, are further
constraints which would account for cases like (10) and (11), where shields are, in
fact, empathetic figures of communion. Nevertheless, it can be argued that when
shields increase the emotive distance, as they do in the majority of cases I have stud-
ied, this is due to the margin of uncertainty about the definition of the relationship:
Who is speaking to whom? Whose 'project' is enacted by the utterance? On whose
behalf is one speaking? And why does s/he need to hide his/her voice behind anoth-
er's voice?
Other aspects of Haley's T component, i.e. the speaker as the utterer of an illo-
cutionary act, and Haley's 'am saying something' component, i.e. the proposition
expressed, are simultaneously at play in bushes and hedges. As regards these kinds
of mitigation, the margin of uncertainty about the definition of the relationship is
reduced because there is no displacement to another utterance source or to another
space and time, but only a reduced subscription to the proposition or a reduced
endorsement of the illocution. In other words, there is no disqualification, as in
shields, but a weaker qualification, a weaker claim to truth or a weaker claim to ful-
filment (Hiibler, 1983). This weakening may, however, also imply some costs,
although they are not as high as in the case of shields, on the relational level. For
instance, by saying 'probably', with respect to shields such as impersonal construc-
tions, I don't disqualify my message by avoiding responsibility for its content.
Rather, I assume responsibility for reducing the responsibility, even if this means
'leaving the field', at least in the sense that the path is still open to a possible subse-
quent retraction. On the other hand, a downgrading of the subscription to the propo-
sition, a sort of cognitive withdrawal, may be paralleled by a downgrading of the
relational emotive subscription, a sort of emotive withdrawal. The hearer's co-oper-
ation is necessary in order to reconstruct the act on both the content and the rela-
tional levels, that is, on both the propositional, cognitive level and on the non-propo-
sitional, emotive level. The hearer's problem will also be to decide at what level to
interpret the downgrading: with respect to the content or with respect to the rela-
tionship with the speaker? In other words, is the doctor's uncertainty real or strate-
gic, is it related to instrumental aspects or to relational aspects, is it centered, in
Haley's terms, on the 'am saying something' component or rather on the '1', 'to
you', 'in this situation' components? In sum, is the doctor cautious because s/he
really doesn't know or because s/he actually knows but doesn't want to say
(Bergmann, 1992)? It is this twofold uncertainty that is at the basis of the potential
anti-empathetic effects of the use of bushes and hedges in therapeutic contexts. In
conclusion, these mitigation mechanisms may amount to micro-cases of double-bind
since the doctor risks undoing at one level what s/he is doing at another. And this is
particularly true for activity-types such as doctor-patient interaction and psychother-
apeutic interaction, where, respectively, reliability in the decision-making process

and the need for authenticity call for a refraining (r~calibrage) of the whole system
of relevances and inferences. Both medical and psychotherapeutic encounters are
indeed types of interaction where congruent qualification is crucial for the building
of the 'working alliance' and the actual achievement of practical professional goals.
Recent ethnomethodological research on interaction in institutional settings (e.g.
Drew and Heritage, 1992) has higlighted a distinctive feature of professional lin-
guistic behavior: cautiousness. However, the link between this feature and surface
choices has not yet been fully clarified. We are now able to express this fmding more
precisely and say that cautiousness results from the use of bushes, hedges, and
shields through the mechanisms which have been at least partly analyzed in this
paper. Reasonable as they may be on the practical level, these mechanisms can all
produce distancing effects on the relational level because they are ways of avoiding
defining the relationship. In particular, deictic shields, or, to use Haley's distinction,
the mitigating choices clustering around a negation of the 'I', 'to you', and 'in this
situation' components, seem to imply more risks of distancing than bushes or
hedges, which can be clustered around the 'am saying something' component. In
fact, while in bushes and hedges the speaker, though weakening some aspects of
his/her responsibility, is nevertheless still present, in shields s/he 'leaves the field'
and somehow disappears.
8. Conclusions
Pragmatics offers the theoretical space where psychological, sociological, and

(micro)-linguistic dimensions can be integrated. Compared to the omnipotent subject
of early pragmatics, mitigation projects a wary, tiptoeing, self-effacing subject, on
his/her guard. I think there's no contradiction between these two images, which I see
as complementary. It's precisely because saying is doing that we have to be cautious
and weigh words against contexts.
With regard to my first hypothesis, the examples cursorily discussed above show
clearly that mitigation works at many levels and on many dimensions, affecting
responsibility management in discourse both in cognitive and in emotive terms. The
inferable effects of mitigating devices include both instrumental and relational
aspects, which can be congruent and mutually reinforcing, or somehow in conflict.
With regard to my second hypothesis concerning the gathering of mitigating
means around different scopes in the utterance, it proved useful to enlighten differ-
ent semantic and pragmatic aspects which can be modified by mitigation, as well as
to clarify the connection between types of mitigation and their relational impact. The
latter was also the subject of my third working hypothesis, which finds external sup-
port in theories such as Haley's disqualification, and which however needs to be
tested on more data.
In conclusion, mitigators mitigate because they manage the responsibility of the
speech act in different ways: in the case of bushes, what is weakened is the sub-
scription to the proposition; in the case of hedges, what is weakened is the endorse-
ment of the illocution; in the case of shields, what is avoided is the self-ascription to
the utterance, which is then ascribed to another source or shifted to another situation.
While bushes and hedges are scalar devices, e.g., they work along a scale of degrees
of epistemic commitment to the proposition (this is the case with many bushes) or of
degrees of endorsement of one of the scalar dimensions of illocution (this is the case
with hedges), shields are yes-no devices (e.g. ' I ' / ' n o n - I ' , 'now/not-now', etc.) cen-
tered directly on the core of the utterance, the deictic origin, the formal support of
subjectivity (l'appareil formel de l'~nonciation, in Benveniste's 1970 terms). Fur-
ther, while bushes and hedges work in praesentia, i.e. they are lexicalized expres-
sions, shields operate in absentia, by substitution: what is involved is not a down-
grading of the quality of some interactional scalar dimensions, but rather, at a more
abstract level, a clash between the co- and contextually bounded expectations and
the actual choice which gives rise to an emotive contrast. The rhetorical categories
closest to bushes and hedges are euphemism, litotes, understatement, and periphra-
sis, while the closest psychological categories are immediacy (Wiener and Mehra-
bian, 1968), disqualification (Haley, 1959), equivocation (Beavin-Bavelas et al.,
1990) and, among the emotive devices listed in Caffi and Janney (1994), in particu-
lar those of specificity, evidentiality, and volitionality. The rhetorical categories
closest to shields are enallage and reticence, while the closest psychological cate-
gories are avoidance strategies (Lewin, 1935), what in psychoanalysis are viewed as
defense mechanisms at work in the 'resistance', and proximity devices (Caffi and
Janney, 1994). Finally, some types of quotational and topical shields can be con-
nected with the rhetorical categories of aversio ab oratore (in particular the case of
sermocinatio, Lausberg, 1967: §432) and of aversio a materia (Lausberg, 1967:
§434) respectively. These categories exhibit the strategic mitigating potential of dis-
course texture, thereby offering new themes for future research on the visibility of
the speaking subject.
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Claudia Caffi got her tenure at the University of Genoa, Italy, where she teaches in the fields of prag-
matics and applied linguistics. Since 1981, she has been one of the editors of the Journal of Pragmatics
(review editor for Continental Europe 1983-1993; since 1993, editor). Since her thesis in semiotics on
J.L. Austin discussed in 1976 at the University of Pavia, where she also got a postgraduate degree in
epistemology, her research work has been devoted to pragmatics, a field in which she has widely pub-
lished. Her main research interests are: pragmatics, rhetoric, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics (insti-
tutional interaction, especially doctor-patient and psychotherapeutic dialogues). Her recent publications
in English include: 'Metapragmatics', and 'Pragmatic presupposition' (in: Asher and Simpson, 1994),
with Richard W. Janney, 'Toward a pragmatics of emotive communication' (in: Journal of Pragmatics
22(3-4), which she co-edited with Richard W. Janney) and Examples, a special double issue of Versus,
70-71 (Milano, Bompiani, 1995) which she co-edited with Klaus Htilker. Currently she is working on a
book on mitigation.

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ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 881-909

"Vostra Signoria mi scriva quali parole pare a lei che

If saying is doing it must be an effective doing. Mitigation (or 'downgrading', German

2. Extending the concept of mitigation

To define mitigation as it has been employed in pragrnatics, it is necessary to dis-

Mitigation is a relational concept. Logically, it is a three argument predicate:

3. Mitigation: Interactional and relational aspects

3 Thispoint is madeby Ray Birdwhistellin Batesonet al. (1981 : 296).

In this section, I will discuss some examples integrating different perspectives, in

4 Abbreviations used are the following:

prosodic and kinesic means of mitigation, such as changes in pitch prominence,

5.1. Bushes (propositional hedges)

In bushes, the focus of the mitigating device is on the propositional content,

(1) D. le do uno sciroppino da prendere. (GP)

(2) D. la sua non 6 una vera e propria emia. - ~ solo un pochino:=

D. yours is not a real hernia. - just a bit =

this effect: the co-production of the problem definition is an interactional achieve-

(3) D. ma quello 6 un problemino. - non 6 mica un problema grosso. (GP)

In (4), the mitigating devices are the following:

(1) io le proporrei, a hedged performative: the verb in the conditional mood is a

(5) D. probabilmente 6: - dove c'~ l'attacapanni - probabilmente 6 una:: con-

5.3. Combinations of bushes and hedges

(6) D. magari ~ un periodo cosl - va a sapere - qualcosa del genere. (GP)

(8) D. c'~ un'i:perplasia estrogenica - c'~ scritto qui. (SV)

cedures from statements about personal opinions or self-initiated actions" (1982:

(9) C. non ci sono pensieri.

C. there are no thoughts.

(10) T. quando uno diventa nervoso fa cosL (PsV)

The patient's behavior is treated as everybody's behavior, usual in such circum-

6. Other strategies of mitigation

T. have you accidentally/incidentally had any other pregnancies with a miscar-

(15) C. va be' problemi in casa: li ho sempre avuti quindi:

T. what are the problems?

In other words, mitigation is obtained by downgrading the 'topical relevance' dimen-

7. Haley's 'disqualification' and potential anti-empathetic effects of mitigation

It is possible to see a connection between the description of mitigation given above

apeutic interaction, where, respectively, reliability in the decision-making process

Pragmatics offers the theoretical space where psychological, sociological, and

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