Approximators and mitigators in Chilean Spanish: the case of 'como' and 'como que'

This article analyses the use of the approximators como and como que in Chilean Spanish, and the link between their approximative semantic value and pragmatic mitigation. Previous works have given the marker como an approximative value (Mihatsch, 2009, 2010; Jørgensen and Stenstrøm 2009; Jørgensen, 2011; Holmvik, 2011; Kornfeld, 2013; Kern, 2014; Jiménez and Flores-Ferrán, 2018), and also a mitigating one (Puga, 1997; Briz, 1998; Jørgensen, 2011; Holmvik, 2011; Kornfeld, 2013, Panussis, 2016; Mondaca, 2017; Panussis and San Martín, 2017). Thus, the objective here is to analyze the relationship between semantic approximation and pragmatic mitigation through these particles, in order to establish whether all those approximative uses of como and como que also perform a mitigating function. Likewise, this paper seeks to propose a general description of those contexts that motivate Chilean speakers to approximate and mitigate their discourse through como and como que. For this purposes, 24 sociolinguistic interviews extracted from the corpus compiled in the Fondecyt Project 11110211 have been used. The main results show that como is a semantic approximator that, in those contexts where the speaker seeks to safeguard his or her face, acquires a pragmatic mitigation function, while como que, on the other hand, is a particle which predominant function is to mitigate.