Mitigation revisited. An operative and integrated definition of the pragmatic concept, its strategic values, and its linguistic expression.

This paper provides a definition of mitigation based on three interconnected dimensions: cognitive, rhetorical/social, and linguistic. According to the definition provided, some specific requirements from all three dimensions must be met for a linguistic expression to be considered an instance of pragmatic mitigation (self-image protection, communicative effectiveness and some specific semantic-pragmatic characteristics mainly related with Levinson's (2000) M-heuristics, respectively). The definition builds on previous contributions and considers important descriptive problems, such as the heterogeneity of the linguistic mechanisms used to express mitigation and the partiality or incompleteness of some definitions, which consider mitigation from a single perspective and are therefore only valid for specific contexts, genres or varieties. • An integrated and operative definition of pragmatic mitigation has been provided. • Three dimensions are addressed: cognitive, socio-rhetorical and linguistic. • The proposal deals with the problems of the recognition of mitigation in corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]