Understanding Compliments in Multimodal Communication

Fang Xie is a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Wuhan University, China. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Andreas H. Jucker. Her research lies at the intersection of (im)politeness studies, speech act theory, and multimodal pragmatics. Her doctoral dissertation, Multimodality and Speech Act Perceptions across Cultures: The Case of Compliments, investigates how verbal and nonverbal resources, such as facial expressions, gestures, prosody, and camera framing, interact to shape the perception of compliments in English, Swiss German, and Chinese lingua cultures. Positioned within the broader framework of relational work and evaluative meaning, her work offers both theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of (im)politeness in mediated and multimodal contexts.She has published relevant articles “From text to multimodality: compliment perceptions across lingua cultures”, “A recipient-centered perception model for speech act analysis: Insights from compliments on screen” in Journal of Pragmatics, and serves as a reviewer for Journal of Pragmatics and Pragmatics. In her research, she integrates digital methods, such as R for statistical modelling, and Vosviewer for bibliometric visualization, to examine online discourse, prosodic variation, and the semiotic layering of politeness in media environments. Her proposed monograph builds on and significantly expands her dissertation, aiming to contribute a nuanced, data-driven account of how multimodal cues shape politeness perceptions.

• Chapter 1 Introduction.- Chapter 2 Literature Review.- Chapter 3 Data and Method.- Chapter 4 Using meme is sincere but childish.- Chapter 5 The audio message seems sincere, but I dislike it.- Chapter 6 Perceptions of FacetoFace Compliment in Private and Public Spaces.- Chapter 7 Fake, fake, too fake.- Chapter 8 He gives a short thumbsup.- Chapter 9 Body Movements in Multimodal Compliment.- Chapter 10 Multimodal Compliment Perception Model.