A Study Of The Interpersonal Meaning Of Mitigation Of Negation In Oral English

In human language, negation is a common phenomenon with its various expressions and is active in grammatical category. However, its functions of refusal, denial, and disagreement threat communicators’faces and lead to the failure of communication. In oral English, people have the preference to attach the mitigation to the negation which may cause the negative effect.In this paper, by collecting and classifying166conversations from the situational comedies, daily conversations and celebrities interviews, the author finds out that speakers are favor of using various devices in their conversations.The author analyzes the devices performing the mitigation of negation at two levels: one is at lexical level, including modal verbs, modal adjuncts and pronouns. The other one is at syntactical level, such as transferred negation, tag questions and parentheses. Among these mitigating devices, the author finds that modal adjuncts and parentheses are most frequently used to express probability, to reduce imposition, and to express sincerity, which keep the image of participants in the conversation or enhance the feelings. Modal verbs are used to show a possibility that speakers are not completely sure about what they say. Transferred negation like "I don’t think..." can realize the interpersonal meaning to show subjective with the avoidance of affirmation. Moreover,"I don’t think..." is the modality metaphor of "Probably not...", and as an indirect expression of negation, it makes the expression more gentle and polite. Compared with other devices, tag questions and pronouns occupy the least ratios; however, they are also very essential in our conversation. Pronouns are used to shorten distance, and impersonal pronouns can blur information, which reduce the imposition in some time. Tag questions can make one speech function expressed in an incongruent way. They are used to switch roles between speakers and hearers and to realize the interpersonal function of calming emotions.In a word, based on the theory of Systemic Functional Grammar, we can use various language forms better to achieve a pleasant communication goal in oral English; meanwhile, it will be valuable for the further study on the mitigation of negation.