From Mitigation to Cohesion. On the Polyfunctionality of Pragmatic-Discursive Mechanisms Beyond Discourse Markers

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to set out to show how, in dialogic interaction, expressions are used that simultaneously contribute to two very different macrofunctions: the interactional, which includes the mitigation of the illocutionary force of the utterance, and the metadiscursive, which relates to the establishment of cohesion or the structural or informative segmentation of discourse. The main objective pursued here is to feed the so far scarce interest that linguistics specialized in the analysis of spoken language has shown both in the joint analysis of cohesion and mitigation and in the study of the type of polyfunctionality, which, apart from discourse markers, can be detected in many other discursive-pragmatic mechanisms. In the examples selected to illustrate the article’s hypothesis, special attention is paid to anaphoric recoveries brought about by concession moves in argumentative sequences, to reformulation, to speech segments built on the basis of I don't know-expressions that serve both to feign ignorance and to yield the turn, and to a set of expressions which both bound the speech act to the realm of personal opinion and seem to be specializing for turn-taking.