The gender aspect of an individual mitigative profile of a politician (based on the material of K. Harris’ speeches)

The article addresses the relationship between the gender factor and the individual factor in communicative mitigation in American political discourse. The tenet of gender linguistics that links the density of mitigating devices to the speaker's sex is put to the test. The aim is to establish which parameters of a politician's mitigative behavior vary with the generic frame. The material comprises five events of the 2020 and 2024 election campaigns featuring K. Harris – two television debates and three television interviews, amounting to 16,469 words, in which continuous sampling identified 198 mitigative uses in 125 microcontexts. The unit of description is the notion of the individual mitigative profile introduced by the author, which combines mitigation density, the ratio of the propositional and deictic strategies and the composition of preferred tactics. With the gender variable held constant, mitigation density ranges from 5.9 to 24.6 uses per 1,000 words and the generic differential amounts to +13.5 uses; the ratio of the strategies stays within a narrow corridor, the tactical core retains its composition, and the increase falls on deictic devices. The findings restrict the inference of mitigation density from gender at the level of the individual linguistic personality.

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