Project B3 contributes to the CRC by investigating Spanish mitigators as devices for managing non-default Common Ground updates. Its central focus is to develop a detailed taxonomy of non-default CG updates associated with mitigator uses and to characterize their properties across different communicative contexts in Argentinian and European Spanish.
Mitigation may arise via implicature, but also through highly conventionalized markers such as tipo, como (que) and digamos. Mitigators can be employed to weaken speaker commitment to an utterance and frequently occur in contexts involving epistemic asymmetries, social hierarchies, controversial topics, or potentially face-threatening content. The project examines how such devices facilitate the entry of propositions into the CG and whether they themselves contribute to, or remain absent from, the subsequently represented CG content.
A core focus lies on differences between more and less conventionalized mitigators with respect to at-issueness, syntactic position, and their morphosyntactic, prosodic, and phonetic profiles. Special attention is paid to prosodic and acoustic features and their relation to not-at-issue status and update type.
Methodologically, the project combines qualitative and quantitative corpus analyses with corpus-based prosodic analyses, and acceptability-judgment and text-evaluation experiments. The project ultimately seeks to determine how mitigation support non-default CG updates and what this implies for theoretical models of CG management.
The project staff are Prof. Dr. Wiltrud Mihatsch (PI), Prof. Dr. Inga Hennecke (PI), Patricia Dasì (PhD student) and Valentín Torres (PhD student).
