Propositional Mitigation in German Political Discourse: ethnocultural origin

The paper deals with the analysis of the communicative category of mitigation in German political discourse. The author provides a summarized overview of the theoretical background of the issue under study. The article is the second part of a complex research aimed at comparing ethno-cultural features of communicative mitigation in British and German political discourse. The relevance of the subject is due to the increasing politicization of the society, the growing scientific interest in the issues related to the interaction of language, culture and society, as well as in the study of communication and mitigation. This study aims to identify the means of realization of propositional mitigation in German political discourse and to determine the key principles of mitigation in German political sublanguage. The research was conducted on the basis of the Bundestag debates minutes posted on the official website of the German Bundestag. The material under study covers the period from November 8 to December 15, 2023. The total sample size is about 8.5 million characters, comprising 1 815 pages. The research is based on the following methods: contextual and linguocultural analysis, method of linguistic descriptions formalization, synchronous analysis of contexts and categories, as well as segmentation of certain verbal phenomena with their subsequent generalization, abstraction and characterization of ethnomental entities underlying them. At the first stage of the study, we compiled a matrix of propositional mitigation and identified lexical and grammatical indices of this type of mitigation. At the second stage we analyzed the material containing about 4 550 units of propositional mitigation collected with the help of continuous sampling. The paper provides instances of propositional mitigation for each of the means of propositional mitigation identified in the matrix. Most common appeared to be the mitigation expressed by the categorical mitigation modus: 2 525 units, 55 % of the total number, followed by the mitigation expressed through the assumption modus: 1 273 units, 28 %, and the least common proved to be the one expressed by means of supposition modus: 752 units, 17 %. The obtained results confirm the generally accepted characteristics of the political communicative style of Germans: suggestiveness, pragmatic categorization of political reality, and preventive approach to conflict resolution.

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