Research on mitigation in the Chinese language

Abstract

Mitigation is one of the central topics in research on pragmatics and discourse analysis. Nevertheless, some questions about its description remain. In addition, if most of the research on mitigation concerns occidental languages, its description could be conditioned by a Eurocentric perspective. It would be necessary, therefore, to adopt a broader perspective to verify the universality of this category and how it works. Consequently, it is essential to promote research on mitigation in other languages, such as, for example, Chinese. In order to do so, the aim of this work is to present a literature review of mitigation in the Chinese language. The review includes not only the results of such studies, but also their methodology because it aims to achieve two secondary goals: to highlight which aspects of mitigation in Chinese need to be reviewed or studied in more depth, and to identify what methodological aspects should be taken into consideration to achieve the desired results. The studies reviewed are divided into three subtopics: mitigation research in speech acts studies, mitigation research in specific communicative contexts, and, finally, studies about specific mitigation resources.