PARA UN ANÁLISIS SEMÁNTICO, PRAGMÁTICO Y SOCIOPRAGMÁTICO DE LA CORTESÍA ATENUADORA EN ESPAÑA Y AMÉRICA.

Verbal politeness is one of the principles which regulate interactional dynamics. Success in communication is the outcome of a conjoint activity carried out by co-communicators. Hence, linguistic activity is also social activity. In this picture, politeness is one of the main social activities contributing to success. Two of the most important semantic and pragmatic ways to express politeness are Face Flattering Acts and mitigating (attenuating or hedging) acts. The former are used to intensify or to enhance the speaker's expressions (in compliments, acknowledgements, and so on), whereas the latter are employed to minimize the speaker's point of view, especially when it affects the hearer's face. If the main goal of conversation is to reach some kind of mutual agreement --be it linguistic or social--, having a good command of both kinds of politeness is a most important advantage for speakers. The present article is an attempt to study mitigating acts, from a threefold approach. Firstly, a semantic approach deals with the meaning encoded in some attenuating devices; attention will be paid to the concept of scale, which provides a partial ordering of terms according to their semantic structure. Secondly, a pragmatic approach studies mitigation as a strategy to gain the hearer's acceptation. Finally, a sociopragmatic approach explains mitigation and politeness on the light of cultural differences, and makes use of concepts such as approach or communicative immediateness. The main hypothesis of this paper is that the threefold approach described above can account for some differences in the use of attenuating devices in American and Peninsular Spanish: for instance if cultures of approaching promote immediateness, this could favour a preference for boosting over attenuating strategies, without being regarded as impolite, threatening or excessively flattering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]