Las estrategias de atenuación lingüística en el español coloquial de Cuba: Una muestra de hablantes habaneros

The purpose of this study is to find out what mechanisms native speakers use in colloquial speech of Havana in five different communicative situations. We provided a detailed account of the mitigation functions and strategies used in 10 semi-structured interviews in the speech performance of a group of speakers (n=10; 5 F) with university education. The data are addressed both in a general way (age and gender) and with regard to the social distance between interlocutors. Descriptive statistics are used to analyze the data and relevant elements are pointed out for understanding the corpus. The results show that the relativization (Briz y Albelda, 2013), especially, the use of the conditional tense and subjunctive was the most used strategies in the speech act of advice and suggestion for all the five communicative situations. In addition, women, more than men, tend to use more mitigation strategies and the speakers used more devices when the social distance between interlocutors was high.