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

Abstract

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.

A Multimodal Approach to Catalan Pragmatic Markers: An Exploratory Study

“…The data used in this study were collected at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and form part of a bigger corpus previously published by Brown et al (2023a) and Brown et al (2023b). For the current paper, we used the data of the natural conversation task and focused solely on the interactions between friends.…”

“…In our view, this behavior should be interpreted in light of certain interactional features: the genre (an informal interaction), the topic under discussion, the type of recording (speakers seated opposite each other), the interpersonal relationship between speakers (classmates and friends), and the cultural context (rooted in Spanish culture, characterized by solidarity and closeness). Different results are obtained when using distinct parameters, such as asymmetrical relationships between interlocutors or a different culture (Brown et al 2023a(Brown et al , 2023b.…”