Mitigation devices in spoken English: President Obama’s speech

The aim of this work is to analyze the mitigation devices that President Barack Obama employs while speaking, and how they are used for the construction of his positive public image. The theoretical framework of this research is based on the principles of Conversation Analysis, and the transcription of data was carried out according to the conventions suggested by Preti (2003). The corpus is composed of two interviews in which President Obama expresses different points of view about a polemical issue: homosexual marriage. Television interviews make up a significant form of social interaction, since through them one intends to obtain answers, exchange information, experiences and value judgments of the interactants. In this dynamic, dialogues are conducted, in general, between interviewer and interviewee, interviewee and audience, and interviewer and audience. Results show that these resources influence the interviewee’s linguistic attitude, especially when he or she is directly exposed to a wide audience. These are sociointeractional strategies that are drawn up to reduce potential threats to the image that the speaker wants to preserve, to get approval from the listeners, and to ensure the defense of what he or she does not want to see exhibited.