Weakening or strengthening? A case of enantiosemy in Plato's Gorgias

ABSTRACT The present chapter is grounded in the assumption that mitigation – and, within it, hedging operations – is ambivalent between weakening and strengthening functions. In a word, mitigation is a rhetorical phenomenon. As such, its study can benefit from the reflection on language use as it developed through the centuries in the field of rhetoric. Since rhetoric is viewed as the pragmatics of classical world, the chapter sets out to foreground some general connecting points between the two disciplines. The chapter presents an in-depth analysis of the use of the approximation marker ‘‘so to say,’’ in a passage taken from Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, which is also relevant in that it contains a definition of rhetoric. The contextualized analysis of the marker shows that it can be given two opposite interpretations: attenuating and reinforcing. In other words, the marker in question can be seen both as an approximator and an underscorer and illustrates a peculiar case of enantiosemy (Lepschy, 1981, 1982). The interpretation of the passage and the overall argumentative strategy followed by Plato to denigrate rhetoric radically changes according to the function assigned to this micro-stylistic choice, that is, weakening or strengthening. This kind of ambivalence can be described from a rhetorical viewpoint in terms of an antiphrastic tension, inherent in mitigation and, more in general, in stylistically modulated choices (Bally, 1970 [1909]) to which approximators belong.