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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. 163–183

Chapter 6
Multimodal manifestation of ta’ârof in Persian

| Sorbonne Nouvelle University | National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations
ORCID logo | Utrecht University
The present research investigates the multimodal aspect of ta’ârof, a politeness ritual essential in many interpersonal interactions in Persian. We studied the opening sequences of interactions in an Iranian talk show to illustrate how gestures are used to express self-lowering and other-raising strategies between the host of the show and his guests. To analyze our corpus, we used NEUROGES® coding system to annotate gestures. Three categories of gestures (on body, on person, and egocentric deictic) were investigated and the results showed that they all have a pragmatic performative function and contribute to the meaning construction of ta’ârof in greeting sequences. In addition, age and gender have been identified as influential factors in the use of gesture to express politeness in Persian.
Keywords: Ta’ârof, Persian, politeness, gesture, multimodality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Linguistic and behavioral ta’ârof
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
Published online: 21 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.333.06far
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