Mitigation in discourse: Social, cognitive and affective motivations when exchanging advice

Abstract

The present study explores the mitigating meaning within an empirical discourse analysis framework that integrates its cognitive, emotive, relational, situational, and linguistic components. Mitigation is understood as a psychological category to cope with one or more stressors in communication. The mitigating apparatus is instantiated in discourse with the goal of managing interactants' vulnerabilities. This conceptual framework is applied to examine the mitigation strategies devised by participants in an online forum for recovery from an eating disorder. The analysis reveals that participants in the site resort to different mitigation patterns to perform the acts of advice solicitation and advice provision. Advice seekers use mitigation devices and discursive moves to tune the illocutionary force of their requests to the audience, to modulate their self-presentation agenda to the forum normative requirements (facework) and to cope with the stressor of the illness. Advice providers, in contrast, produce a comprehensive body of mitigating strategies related to the notions of empathy and perspective-taking, two cognitive constructs that are negotiated, represented and managed interactionally. Mitigation, therefore, constitutes an instrumental and motivational category that shapes the ways of dealing with multiple stressors and multidimensional vulnerabilities in discourse.