This book offers a pioneering investigation into how multimodal speech acts, particularly compliments, are perceived, interpreted, and evaluated across cultural and technological contexts. Introducing the Multimodal Compliment Perception Model, it offers a fresh framework for understanding evaluative practices in everyday interaction.

Drawing on pragmatics and (im)politeness research, it examines how factors like culture, age, gender, and personality shape compliment perception, and how different modalities—text, emoji, audio, video, gesture—impact evaluations in digital and face-to-face settings. Using mixed methods and data from over 400 participants across Chinese, Swiss German, and English-speaking backgrounds, the study develops three innovative tools to measure perceptions of sincerity, politeness, and emotional authenticity. The book contributes to multimodal pragmatics by extending facework and relational work into dynamic, culturally sensitive environments. It offers practical tools for researchers in speech act theory, intercultural pragmatics, and digital sociolinguistics.

Aimed at scholars in pragmatics, especially (im)politeness, speech act theory, and multimodal interaction, this book offers both theoretical insights and practical tools for analyzing digital and embodied communication. It’s also a valuable resource for researchers in intercultural pragmatics, discourse analysis, gesture studies, multimodal analysis, and digital sociolinguistics.

Fang Xie is a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature 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.