the topos of "Precaution" in the german Discourse on assistance to ukraine: iconic Reproduction through linguistics and Pragmatics.

The study of mitigation in political discourse deserves the closest attention since it concerns the manipulative dimension of politics in the modeling of public consciousness. This research is aimed at identifying linguistic and pragmatic mitigators associated with the topos of Precaution and its manifesting strategies in the discourse of assistance to Ukraine. It reached the main finding about the correlation of mitigators with the implementation of discursive strategies mediated by the influence of bushes, hedges, and shields on the illocution of speech acts. Since the illocution is influenced not only by hedges distinguished by this criterion, but also by other types of mitigators, we have introduced, in addition to the propositional, illocutionary, and deictic coordinates of the utterance, an additional criterion for the distribution of mitigators -- their correlation with discursive strategies. Bushes implement the strategy of reducing the speaker's responsibility for the asserted facts, promises -- indirect commissives and recommendations -- implicit directives by triggering conventional implicatures that imply the conditions for these acts feasibility. Shields transfer, generalize or depersonalize the speaker's responsibility for assertive facts, implicit promises and indirect recommendations, "blurring" the deixis to a denotative situation. Hedges in assertives transfer responsibility to the sphere of subjective epistemic modality with increasing probability instead of the certainty about what is being asserted. In directives, hedges generalize / depersonalize the speaker's responsibility thereby intersecting with the functional scope of shields. Polyfunctional mitigators implement several discursive strategies. The article specifies each group of mitigators in terms of its constituent linguistic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]