Language and learning: mitigation in portugues and spanish

Abstract

In this paper, we will develop an interlinguistic (Spanish-Portuguese) and a intralinguistic analysis to stablish what elements could be mitigators in Spanish and in Portuguese. First it has been taken into account what is the importance given to the pragmatic phenomenon of mitigation in the Common European Framework of Reference and in the Plan Curricular (Instituto Cervantes). Then, we establish an analysis based on the literature about the mitigation and what resources exist in the student’s mother tongue. After that, we Focus on Form and in the learning process (it could be also applied in reverse, for learning Portuguese in Spanish natives). Finally, we propose a didactic sequence with a contrastive analysis in both languages, for learning mitigation.