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.

Jing Han & Chengtuan Li, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, in Journal of Pragmatics 216 (2023).:
This engaging and critically illuminating volume, edited by Andreas H. Jucker, Iris Hübscher and Lucien Brown, presents cutting-edge contributions on an understudied subject matter. [...] This timely and intellectually stimulating volume contributes to our comprehensive understanding of im/politeness by offering a fresh multimodal perspective and opens up various possibilities for further studies. [...] It is highly recommended for scholars and researchers in im/politeness and multimodal discourse studies to read this informative volume.