Multimodal investigation of Egyptian Politeness in Relation to Gender, Social Distance, and Power

: As how it is to be said is as important as what is said, being polite does not depend only on polite uttering but more on behaving politely. To argue for this regard, this study investigates the influence of speech-behavior matching on the perception of politeness in Egyptians’ social interactions. By multi-modally analyzing the verbal expressions and their synchronous nonverbal behaviors in relation to the social variables of gender, social distance, and power in 165 scenes collected from three Egyptian television series, this study aims at fulfilling a multimodal attitude of politeness through covering its linguistic and non-linguistic manifestations in the light of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory. With respect to the disparity of the social variables of gender, social distance, and power among Egyptian interlocutors, the attitude of politeness is appeared to be highly influenced by matching the verbal expressions with their co-nonverbal behaviors. The results reveal that perceiving positive social attitudes of politeness are only checked on speech-behavior matches. Nevertheless, not all mismatches are impolite. Considering some consolation attitudes, the interlocutors are found to mismatch their speech-behavior to save the other’s face.