Mitigation in English Language Doctor-Patient Interaction
The present article considers the problem of mitigation in English oral communication belonging to medical discourse, namely interaction between doctors and patients. The three mitigating operators (hedges, bushes and shields) and their language representation are analyzed. Various lexical and grammatical mitigating devices and their combinations are traced, which enables the author to establish interrelation between a particular means used and the pragmatic task set in the course of interaction.