Mitigation in Legal Pragmatics: The Interplay of Illocutionary Force, Modality, and Register in International Law

Abstract

This study investigates the role and functional variation of mitigation strategies in international legal discourse, focu-sing on their impact on illocutionary force and modality within normative utterances. It demonstrates that mitiga-tion operates not only through traditional hedging devices but also through a wider array of linguistic mechanisms, including syntactic transformations, nominalizations, ge-neralized formulations, and reservations. These elements influence the force of directive and commissive speech acts, challenging traditional functional classifications of mitigators such as Caffi’s tripartite model. Theoretically, the study extends the understanding of mitigation beyond conventional hedging, offering new insights into how illo-cutionary force is modulated in institutional legal contexts not only by hedges (traditionally related to the illocutionary scope) but also by bushes (interpreted in pragmatics as affecting the propositional scope). The findings emphasi-ze the centrality of register parameters – Field, Tenor, and Mode – in shaping discursive strategies and pragmatic functions in international legal discourse. Field, anchored in the supranational goal of norm-setting, and Tenor, re-flecting the collective communicative subject, mediate the Mode’s structural and interactional dimensions. Mitigation

emerges as a discourse strategy that balances normative clarity with diplomatic flexibility, enabling the harmoniza-tion of divergent legal traditions within unified instruments. Practically, the paper offers guidance for legal drafters, translators, and interpreters, underscoring the strategic use of mitigation to achieve consensus, maintain legal adaptability, and enhance discursive cohesion in interna-tional law-making