Chapter 3. Politeness in Catalan Sign Language (LSC)

Abstract

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.