Mitigation in Language

Language mitigation enables interlocutors to avoid face-threatening situations in their goal-directed communicative behavior and thereby to linguistically repair the damage done to someone's face by what one says or does. While several studies investigating language mitigation have been carried out from different perspectives, there are still some unanswered questions in this field; including the following: (a) how can mitigation help speakers/writers as a polite strategy to reduce the possible damage, i.e. face-threatening acts, that might be done to their face and that of hearers/readers?; (b) how can the mitigating force be achieved via employing hedging and euphemism?; (c) what is the scope that mitigating devices operate on?; and (d) how do speakers/writers bring about self-serving mitigation and altruistic mitigation? The present work is an attempt to explore language mitigation; more specifically hedging and euphemism as politeness strategies which are the backbone of mitigation devices as they subsume a variety of forms and functions.