The aim of this dissertation is to study how facework, mitigation and impersonality are configured in the discourse of jurists (judges and lawyers) during trials. To elaborate this work, we base our study in a corpus of eight trials (two for each jurisdiction in the Spanish legal system). This corpus has been transcribed following the transcription system of the group Val.Es.Co. (2003.) Our corpus contains 4 hours, 7 minutes and 9 seconds of recording (49,227 words), and has been analysed adapting Albelda et al.’s (2014) method to the needs of our genre and the four objectives that guide this research. The first of these objectives was to specify the characteristics of the communicative situation and the formal register in trials. This goal has been one of the key factors used to identify the contextual parameters of the genre, as well as the attributes of the face (Goffman, 1967 [1970]) of judges and lawyers during their professional performance. The second objective was to study facework, understood as the sum of enhancing, threatening and neutral activities involving face (Tracy, 2011), in trials. The analysis of our data has led to the conclusion that the enhancement of the face is associated mainly to ritual values. However, it is possible to identify a number of cases where face enhancement is related to strategic purposes. Regarding the cases where the face is threatened, we follow the proposal of Archer (2008), which distinguishes between face threat and impoliteness. Thus, in trials we can properly talk about impoliteness when an action involving a potential damage to the face of a participant is also a transgression of what might be expected from the genre, and from the particular communicative situation in which the trial occurs. In connection with facework, we pursue a third objective related to the study of attenuation, which is one of the discursive manifestations of facework. In our study, we assume that attenuation must be understood as a pragmatic strategy whose aim is not only related to face protection, but also aims to facilitate negotiation and agreement. Our analysis of the functions of attenuation in trials supports this latter idea: the functions found in our corpus range from the speakers’ concern for the face, in its social dimension (as in the cases of self-correction or mediation between the parties) to a rhetorical-argumentative use where the satisfaction of social needs is not that relevant (this happens, for example, when attenuation is used to bring objectivity to the discourse). Finally, the fourth objective is to undertake a more thorough study of impersonality in trials, since impersonality is one of the resources that most frequently relates to attenuation in court. According to the data, there is a tendency to use impersonality with an attenuating value when the speaker seeks for self-protection or acceptance. In fewer cases, impersonality is employed as an attenuation device in order to prevent a conflict. We found no cases in the corpus where impersonality serves to the function of redress the negative effects of a threat or a conflict. In conclusion, this study shows that, with regard to the concept of facework and, more specifically, impoliteness, it must be rethought the equation that has been done so far between ‘face threat’ and ‘impoliteness’. In some genres, such as trials, it can be proven that the relationship between these two types of facework is not equivalent. Regarding attenuation, the study of this pragmatic phenomenon from a genre such as trials, being intrinsically transactional and decidedly argumentative, has highlighted the need to understand attenuation as a pragmatic strategy whose motivation is not always taking care of the face, but which can also reflect the desire of convincing others or preventing a conflict. Lastly, with regard to the mechanisms of attenuation, impersonality has emerged as a resource where the de-focalization of one of the participants in the interaction relates primarily to self-protection or care of the own face.
