Guided by Robinson’s general belief that polite language yields trust from others, the authors examined the likelihood of apology acceptance in two cultures (Japan and the United States).Prior to reading a scenario in which they were to imagine being mistreated by their classmates, the participants were randomly assigned to one of three perspective-taking conditions: (a) recall times when they ...

Students rated 16 tutorial statements on negative politeness (i.e., how much the tutor ‘‘allows me freedom to make my own decisions’’) and positive politeness (i.e., how much the tutor was ‘‘working with me’’). Consistent with an adaptation of Brown and Levinson’s [1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge University Press, New York] politeness theory, (a) students rated dire...

This work investigated crosslinguistic perception of Mandarin utterances conveying six classes of attitudes, i.e., dominant/ submissive, friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and sincere/insincere. Five groups of subjects were tested: native Mandarin speakers, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, naïve Japanese without Mandarin ability, an...

Non-competitive and non-threatening aspects of social hierarchy, such as politeness, are universal among human cultures, and might have evolved from ritualized submission in primates; however, these behaviors have rarely been studied. Honorific language is a type of polite linguistic communication that plays an important role in human social interactions ranging from everyday conversation to in...

Research is motivated by the differences in language used men and women. Environmental factors society assume that women are gentle creatures, causing to be careful about choice of words speech. Characteristics women's coined Lakoff (1975) became a reference this study. The problem discussed research how characteristics short film Reunian men's Dodit Not Penculik. This study aims describe lingu...

Non-competitive and non-threatening aspects of social hierarchy, such as politeness, are universal among human cultures, and might have evolved from ritualized submission in primates; however, these behaviors have rarely been studied. Honorific language is a type of polite linguistic communication that plays an important role in human social interactions ranging from everyday conversation to in...

Department of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK High-functioning children with autism show a severe deficit in the development of pragmatics whereas their knowledge of syntax and morphology is relatively intact. In this study we investigated further their selective communication impairment by comparing them with children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normally ...

This paper discusses sexual behaviour findings collected through eleven homogenous focus group discussions conducted among women and men in a predominantly Zulu population in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The objective of this paper is to shed light on sexual behaviour in a rural community. The findings suggest that sex is a taboo subject and the discussion around it is concealed in the us...

CALL can be a route to learner autonomy, allowing students to use PC-based software to learn individually, without need of class or teacher. However, language is above all a medium for communication, implying a dialogue of two or more participants: although CALL can provide exercises and lessons in grammar, vocabulary, writing skills etc, it might seem that conversation practice still calls for...