Giulia Lombardi, Principal Investigator of the project, participated in the XVIII Congress of the Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana (SILFI), held at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków on 27–29 May 2026.

During the conference, she presented a poster entitled “Contestare parte avversa: un’analisi delle strategie di mitigazione e rafforzamento negli atti di parte italiani”.

The poster reported the preliminary results of an ongoing study on the pragmatic construction of disagreement in Italian legal pleadings. Drawing on a corpus of 370 legal briefs collected through the Minerva database, the analysis examined how lawyers combine mitigation and strengthening strategies when contesting the arguments of the opposing party.

Particular attention was devoted to the interaction between hedges, shields, and upgraders, as well as to the pragmatic functions these devices perform in the management of institutional conflict. The findings suggest that mitigation and strengthening do not necessarily operate as opposing strategies; rather, they frequently coexist and contribute to the regulation of disagreement and the construction of argumentative authority in legal discourse.

The presentation forms part of the broader research activities of the project, which investigates the linguistic and pragmatic features of contemporary legal writing with the aim of promoting a deeper understanding of legal communication and professional discourse.