"Praticamente hanno la visione dell'infinito completamente diversa": strategie di attenuazione in contesto scolastico

This paper aims at analyzing a group of strategies for epistemic mitigation used by Italian students engaged in activities implying the use of spoken skills. Mitigation strategies are extremely common in informal conversation, yet students may use them in significant different ways in formal contexts. Following a functional perspective, we analyze qualitatively a corpus of oral expository discourses produced by students aged 17-19; according to global and local contextual parameters (Miecznikowski & Bazzanella, 2007), we describe how forms belonging to different linguistic levels are used to attenuate the illocutionary force of speech acts and how they seem to specialize on specific functions.