Who's Responsible for What? Mitigation in Spanish and British Parliamentary Speeches

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the mitigation strategies politicians use in parliament. We will compare the different strategies that two different head of states use in their speeches. Specifically, we will study the speeches uttered by Mr. Cameron (Ex-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) and Mr. Rajoy (President of Spain). Both of them delivered speeches that dealt with, among other subjects, the European Council. When dealing with mitigation strategies, Fraser and Caffi say that there are “shields” that “dislocate,” “displace” or “de-focalize” the source of the utterance. These displacement strategies are related to any of the three basic components of the deictic expressions: the “actantial” and the  spatiotemporal component. In this specific corpus, we will analyse the role of the first person plural pronouns as mitigation strategies. As we will see, in both cases we could observe a dislocation of the action but they go in different directions depending on the nationality of the head of the government. In the case of the British Ex-Prime Minister the dislocation is going inwards (House of Commons and British citizens) and in the case of the Spanish President is going outwards (EU).