MITIGATION IN ONLINE CONTROVERSIES IN COMMENTS ON DIGITAL NEWS AND ON TWITTER

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of mitigation in a corpus of comments to digital press articles and contributions on Twitter about the Moors and Christians festival, a tradition that led to controversies in the Spanish public debate.  Based on Albelda and Briz (2020), we define mitigation as a rhetorical and pragmatic strategy that proceeds from the need to protect the participants’ face and that allows the speaker to achieve more efficiently his conversational goals. For this reason, this paper not only looks into the linguistic strategies used to mitigate, but also into the specific interactional contexts in which they appear and the functions they carry out regarding face. To that end, this investigation is based on previous research on mitigation and on the methodology developed by Albelda and al. (2014), adapted to the situational features of the online interactions studied in this research. The results show that mitigation appears mainly with preventive function in interactional contexts of disagreement or attack to an identified interlocutor, but also frequently as self-protection in responding moves to the entire discussion.