Multimodal mitigation: how facial and body cues index politeness in Catalan requests

Citació

  • Hübscher I, Sánchez-Conde C, Borràs-Comes J, Vincze l, Prieto P. Multimodal mitigation: how facial and body cues index politeness in Catalan requests. Journal of Politeness Research. 2023;19(1):1-29. DOI: 10.1515/pr-2020-0033

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Descripció

  • Resum

    Recent cross-linguistic research has demonstrated that speakers use a prosodic mitigation strategy when addressing higher status interlocutors by talking more slowly, reducing the intensity and lowering the overall fundamental frequency (F0). Much less is known, however, about how politeness-related meaning is expressed multimodally (i.e., combining verbal and multimodal channels). The present study investigates how Catalan native speakers encode politeness-related meanings through facial and body cues. We test whether speakers apply a gestural mitigation strategy and use specific hedging devices in socially distant situations (e.g., when asking an older person of higher status for a favor). Twenty Catalan speakers were video-recorded while participating in a discourse elicitation task where they were required to produce requests in polite and non-polite contexts. In the resulting recordings, a set of 21 facial and body cues associated with speech were coded and analyzed. The results show that politeness-related meanings are expressed through gestural mitigation strategies that go hand-in-hand with previously reported prosodic mitigation strategies.
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