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This paper aims to reach a better understanding of the relationship between polite strategies and the phonic features displayed to express them. To do this, an oral corpus has been collected comprising interventions of academic committees (PhD and master theses). From this corpus, a set of fragments were analysed, namely countervailing positive fragments included in negative blocks and negative fragments embedded in positive blocks. The expected phonic behaviour is an increased phonic prominence in the former case and a decrease in the latter one. Despite this tendency being satisfied in most cases, however, a percentage of the examples do not follow this expected behaviour, where the tendency towards (lack of) phonic prominence is inverted. When comparing the phonic data with the degree of planning, it can be seen that abnormal results do frequently appear in interventions with a high degree of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the function and the use of un poco and of its morphological alterations (un poquito, un poquitín, etc.) in different levels: in speech acts, in propositions, in speech, in social relationship established between speaker and hearer, and, finally, in context. Theoretical framework of the analysis is, primarily, modality, a notion applying to utterances and indicating the compromise level which the speaker maintains in respect of the utterance faithful. Secondly, I refer to mitigation within the most general theory of Politeness, in which this is a strategy to modulate speech act effects (Lakoff, 1972; Caffi, 1999, 2002, 2007). Here I examine the function of un poco from a semantic-pragmatic perspective also taking into account discourse's dimensión and the situations in which they occur. To study the phenomenon, I use real conversations' data proceeding by the Corpus de Conversaciones Coloquiales Val.Es.Co and by the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual CREA, to which I add some fragments proceeding by conversations that I recorded and transcribed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]