In our paper we focus on analysing textual information usage (selected politeness factors of speech act) in mother tongue and in foreign language to identify phenomena of a language consciousness transfer from the mother tongue into a foreign language communication – transference phenomena – and their impact on textual structures of politeness in chosen languages. Our aim was to make an analysi...

It has been proposed in the literature that prosody plays a role in the expression of politeness. The present paper attempts to explore the contribution of tonal scaling to the expression of paralinguistic meanings. More specifically, it examines the relationship between pitch height and the degree of perceived politeness in yes–no questions in Central Catalan. Studies on the biologically–deter...

A Conditional Random Field is a mathematical model for sequences that is similar in many ways to a Hidden Markov Model, but is discriminative rather than generative in nature. In this paper, we explore the application of the CRF model to ASR processing of discriminative phonetic features by building a system that performs first-pass phonetic recognition using discriminatively trained phonetic f...

Individuals in two studies listened to statements or questions that were either consistent or inconsistent across verbal content and tone of voice. Results showed that tone of voice substantially affected judges’ ratings of the politeness for positive content statements but did so only minimally for negative content statements. Tone of voice affected judges’ politeness ratings of both positive ...

Recent research on conversational agents emphasises the need to build affective conversational systems with social intelligence. Politeness is an integral part of socially appropriate and affective conversational behaviour, e.g. consider the difference in the pragmatic effect of realizing the same communicative goal with either “Get me a glass of water mate!” or “I wonder if I could possibly ha...

Listeners draw on their knowledge of phonetic categories when identifying speech sounds, extracting meaningful structural features from auditory cues. We use a Bayesian model to investigate the extent to which their perceptions of linguistic content incorporate their full knowledge of the phonetic category structure, or only certain aspects of this knowledge. Simulations show that listeners are...

Non-verbal communication or body messaging occurs when facial expressions, tone of voice, head and neck movements, smiling and ... affects others; which may be intentional or unintentional. Farhangi in nonverbal communication: the art of using movement and sound” defines this field as such: "Non-verbal communication is phonetic and non-phonetic messages which have been explained by other than l...

This paper describes a difference in social norms which results in a differing distribution of politeness markers in the Dutch and French speech communities. The use of politeness strategies is compared on the basis of a corpus of parallel Dutch and French requests. The differences in use can be explained by a different conception of the need for repair strategies.