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Article published In:
Gesture
Vol. 21:2/3 (2022) ► pp.167–200

Gestures are modulated by social context

A study of multimodal politeness across two cultures

 | Monash University
 | Kennesaw State University
 | University of Zurich | Zurich University of Applied Sciences
 | University of Birmingham
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 character-viewpoint 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.
Keywords: iconicity, perspective, pragmatics, social deixis, audience design, social distance
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • The multimodality of politeness
    • Gesture variation
    • Gesturing in different languages and cultures
  • Methodology
    • Data collection
    • Procedure
    • Participants
    • Coding and analysis
    • Statistical analysis
  • Results
    • Gesture frequency
    • Gesture size
    • Two-handed gestures
    • Hand configuration
    • path, manner and ground
    • Viewpoint
  • General discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.20034.bro
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