Introduction: mitigation in Spanish digital discourse

In comparison to the large number of existing studies on mitigation in oral and written Spanish, research on this pragmatic category in digital discourses is just beginning. Even though the importance of the strategic use of mitigation in digital discourses has been stressed by an increasing number of studies dedicated to the exploration of politeness in Spanish CMC and, especially, in social network sites, there appears to be yet no systematic treatment of this phenomenon in the literature. This volume, therefore, aims at encouraging investigation on mitigation in digital discourse, based on established approaches and tools of analysis of CMC in Spanish. To this purpose and from a qualtitative, a quantitive, and a functional perspective, the articles gathered in this volume focus on the relevance of technical affordances of digital media and communicative contexts as parameters of mitigation, by examining not only different types of platforms, such as TripAdvisor or WhatsApp, but also various mitigation strategies, e.g. diminutives or impersonal se.