Sociolinguistic variation of mitigating mechanisms: usage differences according to age and sex

This paper studies the sociolinguistic variation of pragmatic mitigation regarding gender and age. To do so, a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the mitigating devices and the mitigating functions in the high sociolect of the corpus preseea-Valencia (Gómez Molina et al. 2001) has been carried out. In total, 24 semiformal interviews have been studied (720 minutes). The interviews are proportionally distributed into three age groups (20-34 years old; 35-55; 55 and onwards) and two genders (women and men).

The analysis has yielded, in total, 960 mitigated speech acts and 1838 mitigating devices.

The highest percentage of mitigation is found in young men and middle-aged women (20 % in each group). The group of eldest men has the lowest mitigation rate (11 %). There is also variation in the type of mitigating devices and functions used by each gender and age group. It is to be highlighted that women employ more devices related to speaker involvement, as opposed to men, who used more devices aimed at the detachment of the speaker (as mentioned by Cestero, in press). It is also remarkable that, regarding the kind of mitigating functions, young interviewees behave more similarly to the senior group than to middle-aged interviewees.