An Interpersonal Pragmatic Study Of Mitigation In Court-related Mediation

China’s court-related mediation under the “blend of trial and mediation” system,known as “great oriental experience”,strategically integrating rigid repression with flexible management,serves as an effective way to reconcile conflicts and resolve disputes.Mitigation,as an important linguistic strategy,could reduce the negative effects of speech acts,thereby helping to defuse potential or actual conflicts,which is in line with the supreme goal of court-related mediation to resolve conflicts and rebuild interpersonal harmony.However,slight attention has been devoted to the use of mitigation in court-related mediation.From the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics,based on Haugh’s three dimensions of interpersonal pragmatics and Spencer Oatey’s rapport management theory,this study will explore the use of mitigation in Chinese court-related mediation recorded in a total of 14 episodes of two seasons of CCTV-12’s original legal program “Family Affairs Matter” in a qualitative and quantitative analysis.This study aims to answer the following three key questions:(1)What are the specific realizations of mitigation in court-related mediation discourse,and what characteristics are reflected in the distribution?(2)What interpersonal functions can be achieved by mitigation in court-related mediation discourse?(3)How do the mediation participants manage rapport by mitigation in court-related mediation discourse?In this study,it is found that firstly,mitigation serves as a conspicuous linguistic phenomenon in the court-related mediation,which helps to alleviate conflicts to a certain extent,and ultimately to achieve the success of mediation.Mitigation can be divided into internal mitigation and external mitigation.Internal mitigation is realized by understaters,subjectivizers,epistemic models,evidentials,personal pronouns,indefinite references,address terms and tags.External mitigation is realized by hesitators,truth claimers,self-deprecators,accounts,dissuasion and sweeteners.The frequency of internal mitigation is much higher than that of external mitigation,which fully reflects the metapragmatic awareness of the participants.Specifically,the judge’s use of mitigation is overwhelming,followed by the defendant,and finally the plaintiff.By mitigation,the judge presents himself as a leader of mediation activity,a service provider who helps civilians to solve their problems,a guardian of genuine human affections,with the deep connotation of “Justice for the people” vividly manifested with actual linguistic practices.Secondly,the use of mitigation in court-related mediation,displays profound interpersonal pragmatic functions,including decreasing psychological distance in interpersonal emotions,weakening negative evaluation and facilitating alignment stance in interpersonal evaluations,and building solidarity in interpersonal relations.The functions are interlinked.Positive convergence in interpersonal emotions and evaluations could contribute to eventual interpersonal solidarity,which in turn promotes deeper interpersonal affective bonding and positive interpersonal evaluations.In addition,the same function can be achieved by two or more mitigating devices in a specific context.A specific mitigating device may also serve multiple functions in different contexts.Third,mediation participants adopt various mitigating devices to manage interpersonal relations in rapport enhancement orientation or rapport maintenance orientation,out of consideration of the four dimensions of interpersonal interaction: face,sociality rights,affectivity and interactive goals.Specifically,to maintain or save the other party’s quality face and social identity face,to endow and guard the other party’s equity rights and association rights,to achieve the common interpersonal goals,to elevate the other party’s positive affectivity or ease the other party’s negative affectivity,mediation participants will adopt different mitigating devices for positive rapport management.To sum up,by constructing an interpersonal analytical model of mitigation in court-related mediation,this study helps to broaden the scope and depth of existing research on mitigation to a certain extent,and accelerate the localization of interpersonal pragmatic theories.By exploring the utilization of mitigation by different participants in court-related mediation,this study presents certain social and practical enlightenment for improving the mediation efficiency and promoting interpersonal solidarity.