Evidentiality, shared knowledge and mitigation: The case of '[o] eso dicen'

This paper focuses on analyzing the meaning and pragmatic functions of construction [o] eso dicen ('[or] so they say'), as well as observing the discursive patterns in which it appears. The departure point is the consideration that this construction conveys indirect evidential meanings of different degrees of accessibility or intersubjectivity (reportative and folklore), and therefore its use could be related to the function of pragmatic attenuation activated by the displacement of the origin of the enunciation. In the empirical part of this work, we analyze 65 examples recovered in the analysis of five oral and one written corpus. The results of the study indicate that most of the uses of this construction fulfill strategic mitigating purposes related to the protection of images. One of the key parameters to describe the discursive behavior of this construction is the level on which it performs: it behaves differently in monological contexts than in dialogical ones.