In this study, we investigate politeness and frustration behavior of children during their spoken interaction with computer characters in a game. We focus on automatically detecting frustrated, polite and neutral attitudes from the child’s speech (acoustic and language) communication cues and study their differences as a function of age and gender. The study is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dialog co...

This paper investigates the extent to which perceptions of cultural variation correspond to actual practice with reference to (national) cultures in Britain and Italy. More specifically, the aspect of im/politeness which is addressed is mock politeness, a subset of implicational impoliteness (Culpeper 2011) which is triggered by an im/politeness mismatch. In the first phase of the study, two se...

The use of polite agents is a new approach in order to improve efficiency and naturalism in navigation for PCs in crowded virtual worlds. This paper aims to model the politeness of virtual humans using logic based approaches, subject to theory of politeness decomposed of conventional and interpersonal politeness. To do so, we propose a high level agent architecture combined with normative frame...

In Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, every speech act is potentially face-threatening to an aspect of the hearer’s or the speaker’s face. Though imminent, face-threat is present in varying degrees, represented as the seriousness or weightiness (W) of FTAx. Interlocutors calculate this using the formula Wx 1⁄4 D(S;H)þ P(H;S)þ Rx, where D(S,H) represents the social distance between interloc...

This paper describes a framework for the representation and interpretation of indirect speech acts, relating them to the politeness phenomenon, with particular attention to the case of requests. The speech acts are represented as actions of a plan library and are activated on the basis of the presence of syntactic and semantic information in the linguistic form of the input utterance. The speec...

Identity implications theory (IIT) is applied to analyze how young adults manage identity concerns associated with the goals of initiating, intensifying, and disengaging from romantic relationships. Participants wrote their responses to one of six hypothetical romantic (re)definition scenarios, indicated whether they actually would pursue the relational goal if their scenario were real, and rat...

Research in the past few decades has claimed that high or rising fundamental frequency (F0) signals a set of meanings related to the expression of politeness (e.g., deference, submission or lack of confidence (Gussenhoven, 2004; Ohala, 1984)). In this regard, the Frequency Code has been proposed to explain the universal tendency for high pitch to be interpreted as related to politeness and othe...

This paper introduces a more nuanced view of face and facework than the commonly used frameworks in interlanguage pragmatics. It argues that ILP not only prioritizes research on the expression of politeness in the L2 and the acquisition of politeness strategies, but that the field also does that in an extremely decontextualized manner that takes little account of the situatedness of linguistic ...