Linguaggio intemperante e linguaggio temperato. Ovvero intensificazione arrogante e attenuazione cortese

Untamed vs. tamed speech: Aggravation vs. polite mitigation in language The paper focusses on untamed, aggravated language, the verbal behaviour of an individual who is does not bother to abide by the social super-norm of polite mitigation. Such an individual uses a type of speech that is emotionally conditioned or is the expression of a free, energetic personality who chooses to be direct and maximally perspicuous in his/her intentions and wants. As a linguistic phenomenon, aggravation is relevant especially in pragmatics and in particular in an area globally definable as modification of speech acts, i.e. the ways in which the intensity of the illocutionary force of an act is strengthened or weakened. Aggravation upgrades intensity through various mechanisms, which this paper investigates. From a theoretical perspective, various points are raised, especially concerned with: a) the locus of aggravation vis à vis other phenomena with which it is normally conflated in the literature, namely conflict talk, face-threatening speech acts, dispreferred actions; b) its significance and stance in relation to polite mitigation, whether two independent phenomena or two poles of the same continuum; c) the illocutionary vs. perlocutionary character of the two discursive modalities, speaker-centred aggravation and addressee-oriented mitigation. An extensive portion of the text is devoted to the analysis of aggravators, the linguistic expressions that achieve aggravation-driven intensification. It is shown how the various linguistic levels, morphological, lexical and syntactic, autonomously and synergically contribute to the aggravated effect.