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Politeness and impoliteness are not just expressed by words. People communicate polite and impolite attitudes towards each other through their intonation, tone of voice, their facial expressions, their gestures, the positioning of their bodies towards each other, and so on. This volume brings together eleven empirical studies that investigate these various modalities of im/politeness across signed, spoken and written languages, plus a detailed introductory chapter that establishes a framework for the multimodal investigation of im/politeness. The papers cover a range of languages and cultures, including Swiss German Sign Language, Catalan Sign Language, English (as a native language and as a lingua franca), Korean, Catalan, Persian, Japanese and Spanish. Using a range of data sources and state-of-the art methodologies, the papers reveal that these multimodal features are essential aspects of im/politeness across different languages, cultures and modes of interaction. Put together, the findings from these studies lay the groundwork for a new understanding of im/politeness which is fundamentally multimodal.

References: - Aijmer, K., & Simon-Vandenbergen, A. M. (2006). Pragmatic Markers in Contrast. Elsevier. - Fischer, K. (2006). Approaches to Discourse Particles. Elsevier. - Fraser, B. (1996). Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 167–190. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.6.2.03fra - Friginal, E., Pearson, P., Di Ferrante, L., Pickering, L., & Bruce, C. (2013). Linguistic characteristics of AAC discourse in the workplace. Discourse Studies, 15(3), 279–298. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445613480586 - Weid-Goldschmidt, B. (2013). Zielgruppen Unterstützer Kommunikation. Looeper Verlag., Discourse markers and backchannels play an important role in connecting parts of as well as contributing to fluency in discourses (e.g. Fraser, 1996). While research on discourse markers on the verbal level in “typical” language use is abundant (e.g. Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen, 2006; Fischer, 2006), little is still known about the manifestation of discourse markers and backchannels in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) (see Friginal et al., 2013 for an exception). AAC discourses are “atypical” in that they are characterised by AAC users’ pauses for utterance production and overlaps with interlocutors’ turns using spoken language. To our knowledge, no multimodal approach has been taken so far to analyse the discourse of persons who communicate using AAC. To fill this gap, we address the question of how discourse markers, backchannels and pauses are employed multimodally in AAC. The data stems from six interviews with persons belonging to AAC groups 3 and 4 (cf. Weid-Goldschmidt, 2013) who communicate through speech-generating devices. Despite representing a close range in terms of AAC users, their communication shows a wide range of diversity and complexity. The interviews were carried out as part of an interdisciplinary project investigating the challenges experienced by AAC users during the transitions after compulsory school, entering higher education, a workplace, or an adult institution (Kollmar et al., 2018). Each interview lasted approximately two hours and was transcribed orthographically first. In each interview, key passages were selected where pragmatic stance-taking or discourse interventions on the part of the AAC users took place. These then underwent a detailed multimodal transcription in EXMARaLDA. Preliminary analyses of the data show that a wide variety of multimodal features characterize AAC discourse such as body movements, hand and head gestures, facial expressions, gaze, PORTA signs and conventionalized signs, vocalization and spe

This contribution focuses on the multimodal aspects of apologies. In terms of politeness and face management, apologies are ambivalent. They are redressive and indicate a concern for the hearer, but they also include a certain amount of self-blame and thus threaten the speaker’s own positive face. Narrative descriptions of apologetic gestures were retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) through the collocation profiles of apology expressions. Such gestures may occur in isolation without a spoken apology, or they may occur together with a more or less explicit apology. In many cases, the apologetic gesture helps to discursively negotiate the severity of an event that may have been perceived as an offence and the speaker’s responsibility for it.

This paper investigates gesture as a resource for marking politeness-related meanings. We asked 14 Korean and 14 Catalan participants to retell a cartoon, once to an unknown superior and once to a close friend. Participants in both languages curtail gestures when interacting with a socially distant superior. Speakers of both languages produced fewer gestures when addressing the superior, reduced their gesture space, decreased the encoding of manner, and reduced the use of characterviewpoint gestures. We see the decrease in gesture frequency and the less frequent encoding of manner as indicators of lower levels of iconicity when talking with status superiors. Curtailing gesture marks a less playful communicative context, and a more serious and deferential persona. Altogether, our research speaks to the importance of politeness in gesture production, and the social nature of gestures in human communication.

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.

Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. Thirty-one typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed four tasks to assess multimodal imitation, object-based imitation, narrative abilities, and sociopragmatic abilities. Results revealed that both narrative and sociopragmatic skills were significantly related to multimodal imitation, but not to object-based imitation, indicating that preschoolers’ ability to imitate socially relevant multimodal cues is strongly related to language and sociocommunicative skills. Therefore, this evidence supports a broader conceptualization of imitation behaviors in the field of language development that systematically integrates prosodic, gestural, and verbal linguistic patterns.

While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less attention. This study sets out to explore how young preschoolers develop the ability to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings while taking into account children's Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Though ToM has been suggested to be linked to the development of receptive prosody, little is known about its relationship with expressive prosodic skills. A total of 102 3- to 4-year-old Catalan-speaking children were assessed for their pragmatic prosody skills using 35 picture-supported prompts revolving around a variety of social scenarios, as well as for their ToM skills. The responses were analyzed for prosodic appropriateness. The analyses revealed that 3- to 4-year-olds successfully produced prosody to encode basic expressive acts and unbiased speech acts such as information-seeking questions. Yet they had more trouble with complex expressive acts and biased speech acts such as the ones that convey speakers' beliefs. Further analyses showed that ToM alone is not sufficient to explain children's prosodic score, but the prosodic performance in some pragmatic areas (unbiased pragmatic meanings) was predicted by the interaction between ToM and age. Overall, this evidence for the acquisition of pragmatic prosody by young preschoolers demonstrates the importance of bridging the gap between prosody and pragmatics when accounting for prosodic developmental profiles, as well as taking into account the potential influence of ToM and other socio-cognitive and language skills in this development.

Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. Thirty-one typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed four tasks to assess multimodal imitation, object-based imitation, narrative abilities, and sociopragmatic abilities. Results revealed that both narrative and sociopragmatic skills were significantly related to multimodal imitation, but not to object-based imitation, indicating that preschoolers’ ability to imitate socially relevant multimodal cues is strongly related to language and sociocommunicative skills. Therefore, this evidence supports a broader conceptualization of imitation behaviors in the field of language development that systematically integrates prosodic, gestural, and verbal linguistic patterns.

This study investigates the effectiveness of training preschoolers in order to enhance their social cognition and pragmatic skills. Eighty-three 3–4-year-olds were divided into three groups and listened to stories enriched with mental state terms. Then, whereas the control group engaged in non-reflective activities, the two experimental groups were guided by a trainer to reflect on mental states depicted in the stories. In one of these groups, the children were prompted to not only talk about these states but also “embody” them through prosodic and gestural cues. Results showed that while there were no significant effects on Theory of Mind, emotion understanding, and mental state verb comprehension, the experimental groups significantly improved their pragmatic skill scores pretest-to-posttest. These results suggest that interactional interventions can contribute to preschoolers’ pragmatic development, demonstrate the value of the new embodied training, and highlight the importance of multidimensional testing for the evaluation of intervention effects.

The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative phenomena through the acoustic projection of body size. The set of phenomena includes size sound symbolism (using /i/ to signal smallness in words such as teeny), intonational phonology (using rising contours to signal questions) and the indexing of social relations via vocal modulation, such as lowering one's voice pitch to signal dominance. Among other things, the frequency code is commonly interpreted to suggest that polite speech should be universally signalled via high pitch owing to the association of high pitch with small size and submissiveness. We present a cross-cultural meta-analysis of polite speech of 101 speakers from seven different languages. While we find evidence for cross-cultural variation, voice pitch is on average lower when speakers speak politely, contrary to what the frequency code predicts. We interpret our findings in the light of the fact that pitch has a multiplicity of possible communicative meanings. Cultural and contextual variation determines which specific meanings become manifest in a specific interactional context. We use the evidence from our meta-analysis to propose an updated view of the frequency code hypothesis that is based on the existence of many-to-many mappings between speech acoustics and communicative interpretations. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)'.

Research on prosodic development has mostly focused on infants’ skills, and there is much less research on preschool and older children’s prosodic abilities and in particular on the advanced pragmatic uses of prosody (i.e., pragmatic prosody). The present crosssectional study assesses children’s expressive pragmatic prosody profiles in three developmental stages. A total of 167 3-to-8-year-old Catalan-speaking children undertook the Audiovisual Pragmatic Test, which includes 35 everyday scenarios and elicits different speech act types. A total of 5697 answers were scored for prosodic appropriateness: 34%, 73% and 90% of the prosodically felicitous answers were produced at ages 3–4, 5–6 and 7–8, correspondingly. The results showed that, at all ages, children successfully produced basic expressive acts, unbiased assertions and requests. A significant difference was found between the performance of biased vs. unbiased, and basic vs. complex expressive acts at ages 3 and 5 (ps < .010, ps < .05), but not at 8 (ps > .05). Between ages 3 and 6 years, children develop pragmatic unbiased and basic expressive marking through prosody, while the biased and complex expressive meanings are refined later, between ages 6 and 8 years. Our finding suggest that prosodic abilities undergo developmental changes throughout childhood.

Space has been integral to the way that im/politeness has been theorized, most notably in the concept of “social distance” (Brown and Levinson 1987) and also Arundale’s (2006) “connection/separation face” dialectic. In this chapter, we show how previous research has positioned what we refer to as “socio-proxemic space” not merely as a theoretical concept, but as interactionally relevant in the ways that speakers understand and perform im/politeness across multiple languages. Speakers invoke the metaphor of space when talking about human relationships (“close”/”distant” relationships) and the language used within them (speaking in a “close”/“distant” way; speaking “up/down” to someone). In order to index various degrees of proximity and separation, research shows that speakers manipulate deictic expressions related not just to interpersonal distance but also to physical distance. Furthermore, speakers manipulate the spatial organization of communication in relation to im/politeness factors. When im/politeness is called for, research shows that physical proximity is modulated, along with bodily alignment and the use of large gestures that may threaten personal space. To illustrate how interaction is spatially organized in relation to im/politeness factors, we employ a case study of speakers of Catalan performing a map task in two contrasting social situations: (1) with an intimate and (2) with an unfamiliar status superior. Our analysis shows that speakers make subtle adjustments to the form of deictic gestures according to the relative socio-proxemic distance with the interlocutor. In sum, this chapter demonstrates the importance of space in the way that im/politeness has been conceptualized in im/politeness research.

While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less attention. This study sets out to explore how young preschoolers develop the ability to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings while taking into account children’s Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Though ToM has been suggested to be linked to the development of receptive prosody, little is known about its relationship with expressive prosodic skills. A total of 102 3- to 4-year-old Catalan-speaking children were assessed for their pragmatic prosody skills using 35 picture-supported prompts revolving around a variety of social scenarios, as well as for their ToM skills. The responses were analyzed for prosodic appropriateness. The analyses revealed that 3- to 4-year-olds successfully produced prosody to encode basic expressive acts and unbiased speech acts such as information-seeking questions. Yet they had more trouble with complex expressive acts and biased speech acts such as the ones that convey speakers’ beliefs. Further analyses showed that ToM alone is not sufficient to explain children’s prosodic score, but the prosodic performance in some pragmatic areas (unbiased pragmatic meanings) was predicted by the interaction between ToM and age. Overall, this evidence for the acquisition of pragmatic prosody by young preschoolers demonstrates the importance of bridging the gap between prosody and pragmatics when accounting for prosodic developmental profiles, as well as taking into account the potential influence of ToM and other socio-cognitive and language skills in this development.

Children might combine gesture and prosody to express a pragmatic meaning such as a request, information focus, uncertainty or politeness, before they can convey these meanings in speech. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of gestural and prosodic patterns and how they relate to a child’s growing understanding and propositional use of these sociopragmatic meanings. Do gesture and prosody act as sister systems in pragmatic development? Do children acquire these components of language before they are able to express themselves through spoken language, thus acting as forerunners in children’s pragmatic development? This review article assesses empirical evidence that demonstrates that gesture and prosody act as intimately related systems and, importantly, pave the way for pragmatic acquisition at different developmental stages. The review goes on to explore how the integration of gesture and prosody with semantics and syntax can impact language acquisition and how multimodal interventions can be used effectively in educational settings. Our review findings support the importance of simultaneously assessing both the prosodic and the gestural components of language in the fields of language development, language learning, and language intervention.

Infants have access to the prosodic aspects of their ambient language even prior to birth, but many aspects of prosody are produced and comprehended well after infancy. One of these aspects includes prosody related to internal states such as beliefs, desires, feelings and emotions. In this chapter, we review the literature on prosody related to internal states, paying special attention to prosodic meanings associated with emotions and belief states and drawing from production and comprehension studies of preschool- and school-aged children. We show that there are many parallels in the development of these two aspects of prosody, suggesting the usefulness of studying them in tandem. Implications for these findings are discussed as well as fruitful directions for future work.