Hübscher, IrisSánchez-Conde, CristinaBorràs-Comes, JoanVincze, LauraPrieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-2023-04-032023-04-032023Hübscher 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-2020-00331612-5681http://hdl.handle.net/10230/56392Recent 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.application/pdfeng© 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licenseinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttps://dx.doi.org/10.1515/pr-2020-0033CatalanMultimodal mitigationMultimodal politenessRequestsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess