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Multimodal Im/politeness: Signed, spoken, written
Edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Iris Hübscher and Lucien Brown
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 333] 2023
► pp. 65–98

Chapter 3
Politeness in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

Mitigation of criticisms in spontaneous discourse in LSC

ORCID logo | Universitat Pompeu Fabra
ORCID logo | Universitat Pompeu Fabra
ORCID logo | Universitat Pompeu Fabra

This paper focuses on politeness in Catalan Sign Language (LSC), concretely on criticisms. The main goal is to analyze linguistic mitigation, specifically through the discourse strategy that consists of expressions for restricting opinions. The data comes from a TV show in LSC, which features real and spontaneous productions of Deaf adult signers. The results show the existence of three different strategies: lexical units that work as hedges of subjectivization, the use of the first-person pronoun to emphasize the personal point of view, and the use of the vertical palm sign with a mitigating function. Moreover, particular non-manual markers are also involved, namely, shrugs, head tilts or raised eyebrows, which work at the prosodic and pragmatic level for mitigation purposes.

Keywords: Catalan Sign Language (LSC), politeness, criticisms, linguistic attenuation, discourse analysis, mitigation, hedges, non-manual markers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Politeness, face, and face-work
    • 2.2Mitigation strategies: Attenuation and opinion expression
    • 2.3Previous research on politeness in sign languages
    • 2.4Non-manual markers, doubling and vertical palm sign
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Expressions for restricting opinions with lexical units
    • 4.2Expressions for restricting opinions with pointing signs
    • 4.3Expressions for restricting opinions with vertical-palm sign
    • 4.4Summary
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.333.03moy
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