Mitigation strategies in everyday situations: a comparative study between Latin American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese

This paper belongs to the area of Sociocultural Pragmatics and consists of a descriptive-comparative study with the objective to explore mitigation strategies used in an ordinary communicative situation requiring the exercise of politeness, understood as face work (GOFFMAN, 1967, p. 12). To elicit our corpus of analysis we adopted a semi-structured interview, most frequently used in qualitative research. As part of the interview, the participants were prompted to express literally what they would say if they were to inform to the owner that they would not be able to pay next month rent. In a previous stage of this research, we conducted twenty interviews with Spanish speaking participants, half men and half women, ten of them from Santiago de Chile and the other ten from La Plata, Argentina. All of them were university student, aged nineteen to thirty three. For the present research, we followed the same criteria to interview ten Brazilian Portuguese speakers from Salvador. Their answers revealed a rich variety of mitigation strategies, available in Spanish and Portuguese, variety that also allowed us to explore aspects of politeness within the groups observed. Thus, with the object to describe and contrast mitigation strategies, our observations were based on Goffman (1967), Brown and Levinson (1987), Haverkate (1994), Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2004), Briz (2004), Briz (2006), and Albelda Marco; Briz Gomez (2010).