Mitigation of Criticism Towards the Interlocator in English Artistic Discourse

The article analyzes the speech means of mitigating criticism directed at the interlocutor. The data was selected from modern English-language fictional discourse, namely the episodes in which the characters tried to mitigate their criticism of the interlocutor. Criticism is seen as a verbally expressed negative assessment of a person’s traits or actions. Criticism of the addressee poses a potentially conflict-generating situation. Mitigation helps the person who expresses criticism of the interlocutor’s traits or behavior reduce the possibility of conflict. It is seen as a speech technique that minimizes possible undesirable effects in communication. The critic seeks to focus the addressee’s attention on the fact that their actions do not comply with the norms of politeness, and to encourage the addressee to bring his behavior into line with these norms, as well as to release their own emotional feelings. On the other hand, the speaker who expresses criticism seeks to preserve harmonious relations with the interlocutor, the norms of politeness do not allow openly criticizing the interlocutor, therefore, in order to weaken the negative effect of the criticism, the speaker should use mitigation tactics. Mitigation of criticism is implemented by certain formulae of speech etiquette, which precede a potentially — “face-threatening” utterance. The article offers a new classification of communicative mitigating tactics that enable the speaker to soften the criticism of the addressee. These positive-evaluative tactics are approval, praise and compliment. The lexical means that embody the mitigating tactics of approval, praise and compliment are positive-evaluative adjectives, nouns and verbs, reinforced by intensifiers so, very, really, etc., which at the level of syntax are used in elliptical constructions. The transition from the mitigating part to the critical part is made with the help of the conjunction but.