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Makale Özeti:
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The principal motivation of this study is
to investigate how Macedonian learners of English
mitigate their disagreement. It is a follow-up of a
much broader study in the field of cross-cultural
pragmatics focusing on disagreement in
Macedonian and American English (Kusevska,
2012). Our cross-cultural analysis reveals that
Macedonian and American native speakers show
preference for different types of disagreement, the
major difference being the frequency of mitigation
as well as the linguistic means used for its
realisation.
For the purpose of this study, we have accepted the
definition that mitigation is the linguistic
communicative strategy of softening an utterance,
reducing the impact of an utterance, or limiting the
face loss associated with a message (Fraser, 1980;
Caffi, 1999, 2007; Martinovski, 2006; Clemen,
2010; Czerwionka, 2012). As mitigation in
disagreement is closely connected with politeness,
we have also relied on the model of politeness and
the strategies for FTA realisation proposed by
Brown & Levinson (1978/1987). We have looked at
lexical and syntactic devices such as modal
auxiliaries (e.g., can/could; may/might), hedges
(kind of, sort of), discourse markers (well, but,
look), verbs expressing uncertainty (I think, I don’t
think), verbs expressing vagueness (seem, assume,
guess), conditionals etc., that learners use to
mitigate their utterances.
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