LITOTES AS A MEANS OF MITIGATING COMMUNICATIVE AGGRESSION

Abstract

The importance of communication in society is invaluable for modern science. Aggression, expressed in verbal and non-verbal forms, produces a particularly significant effect on the effectiveness of communication. There is no doubt, however, that communicative aggression can in no way serve the success of communication. Modern research is aimed at identifying strategies, tactics and lexical units, the use of which allows communicants to have successful and effective communication. The communicative category of mitigation is of increasing interest to researchers and is regarded within the framework of pragmalinguistics. The implementation of the mitigation strategy is implemented, among other things, through meiotic means, combining euphemisms, meiotisms and litotes. The peculiarity of litotes lies in its ability to be used for controversial purposes. The contradictory nature of litotes significantly broadens its application and widens the meanings it can reveal. Litotes is used to express both understated and categorical statements, the importance and modesty of something or someone, to sound polite and ironic or sarcastic, to convey admiration and disapproval, to accept a compliment or express insult. One of the functions litotes performs is mitigating a negative description of a person or an object. It makes litotes a device with a huge pragmatic capacity that can be used in all types of discourses, especially in such manipulative and argumentative ones as political and publicistic, thus, achieving the effect of softening the categorical nature of assessments.