La mitigazione: Un approccio pragmatica alla communicazione nei contesti terapeutici (review)

I am honored to be able to review this fundamental, important, and well-written volume by Claudia Caffi. I am persuaded that this is a very good book, one that is striking for its clarity and that deserves attention from linguists with an interest in sociolinguistics and pragmatics (what a pity that it was not translated into English!). It is unlikely that there will be a more authoritative and detailed book on its subject, mitigation strategies. Her approach is interdisciplinary and she draws heavily on sociology, psychology, and sociolinguistics (politeness phenomena). Her synthesis, in my view, is successful in that all the elements of knowledge used are subordinated to the main idea. I must acknowledge and applaud the importance of this book (and it is significant that the author commands respect in other quarters of linguistics as well).

I greatly appreciated the rigor of her analysis and that it is based on a corpus of real conversations (the situation explored is therapeutic discourse). The originality of her observations reminds us of eminent and celebrated authors such as Harvey Sacks (see his Lectures on conversation, ed. by Gail Jefferson and Emanuel A. Schegloff, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). C looks at conversation as a source of regularity, seeing rules as emanating from the mechanisms of conversation. This kind of approach involves delving into the conversation to see how the rules emerge, without having a preconceived idea as to what one will find there. Among the very few people who are really devoted to this kind of study, C certainly counts as one of them.

The author tackles the issue of mitigation by investigating discourse strategies in therapeutic situations. These situations are particularly problematic as they give rise to tension between the patient and the therapist, thus requiring the latter to employ linguistic strategies aimed at softening up the patient and at achieving a compromise between the transactional nature of the rapport and the interactional dimension. The author considers the utterance in its context and thus analyzes what J. L. Austin referred to as ‘the total situation in which the utterance is issued—the total speech act’ (How to do things with words, 2nd edn., ed. by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975, p. 52). She considers mitigation as diminishing the obligations of the speaker and the hearer in the epistemic and deontic dimension. Mitigators are divided into bushes, hedges, and shields. ‘Bushes’ are those mitigators that involve the propositional content, ‘hedges’ involve illocutionary force, and ‘shields’ address the deictic center of the discourse and may involve acts of distancing from this center.

Summing up, I recommend this volume wholeheartedly and suggest that all scholars in the area of conversation analysis acquire it for their library. Readers will be impressed by C’s erudition, balance, and open-mindedness, as well as by the passion shown in her meticulous research.