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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. 131–161

Chapter 5
Indexing social distance through bodily visual practices in two languages

ORCID logo | Monash University
ORCID logo | University of Zurich | Zurich University of Applied Sciences
| Kennesaw State University
ORCID logo | University of Birmingham
This paper explores the multimodal indexing of social distance in two unrelated languages/cultures: Korean and Catalan. Participants performed several tasks: once with a status superior (“socially distant” condition) and once with a friend (“socially close”). Catalan speakers exhibited more body movements but were less consistent in modulating them according to social distance. The frequency of head nodding increased in the socially distant situation for both languages, and haptics never occurred with superiors. Only Korean speakers consistently reduced their rate of head shaking with the superior, and also reduced their use of adaptors. Gaze aversion showed weak results only for Catalan. The results add to a growing body of evidence that social distance is marked multimodally in similar ways across cultures.
Keywords: bodily visual practices, gesture, social distance, power, Catalan, Korean, multimodality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Universality versus specificity in multimodal politeness
    • 2.2Bodily visual practices analysed in the current study
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Procedure
    • 3.3Participants
    • 3.4Coding
    • 3.5Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Head nodding
    • 4.2Head shaking
    • 4.3Adaptors
    • 4.4Haptics
    • 4.5Gaze aversion
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 21 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.333.05bro
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

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2024. Prosodic features of polite speech. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) DOI logo

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