One major objection to Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory [Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 56–311; Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987] raised by Matsumoto [J. Pragmatics 12 (1988) 403; Multilingua 8 (1989) 207; Japanese/Korean Linguistics, vol. 2, Center for the Study of...

In recent years, politeness theory has increasingly focused on speakers’ own conceptualizations of polite behavior, viewing politeness concepts as a type of language ideology. This article examines the construction of Japanese politeness concepts in the business etiquette training provided for new employees in Japanese companies. Drawing on participant-observation of business etiquette seminars...

In our study „Polite responses to polite requests‟, 1 we reported four experiments. In Experiment 1, people rated the politeness of 18 types of indirect requests, such as Could you tell me where Jordan Hall is? In Experiments 2, 3, and 4, other people rated the politeness of various responses to these requests, such as Yes, I can—it's down the street and Down the street. From the findings, we a...

While most dialogue systems restrict themselves to the adjustment of the propositional contents, our work concentrates on the generation of stylistic variations in order to improve the user’s perception of the interaction. To accomplish this goal, our approach integrates a social theory of politeness with a cognitive theory of emotions. We propose a hierarchical selection process for politeness...

Politeness research to date has generally adopted one of two views: the “traditional” view based on the dual premises of Grice’s Co-operative Principle and speech act theory (Lakoff 1973, Brown and Levinson 1987 [1978], Leech 1983), or the “post-modern” view, which rejects these premises and substitutes them by an emphasis on participants’ own perceptions of politeness (politeness1) and on the ...

Patterns of Politeness in Teacher-Student Interaction: Investigating an Academic Context AbstractThis study investigated politeness strategies used in instructor-student relationships, in an academic environment. To conduct the study, four university classes with different instructors were randomly selected, observed and analyzed. Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness was drawn on as the an...

Every language may have some entities which may not be owned by another language. The uniqueness of a language is strongly influenced by the culture of its native speakers. Therefore, languages vary cross-culturally. I strongly believe that the way the Javanese people (one of the Indonesian ethnic groups) express politeness is also influenced by the Javanese culture. This article tries to exami...

Politeness may play a role in tutorial interaction, including promoting learner motivation and avoiding negative affect. Politeness theory can account for this as a means of mitigating the face threats arising in tutorial situations. It further provides a way of accounting for differences in politeness in different cultures. Research in social aspects of human-computer interaction predict that ...

We present a demo of our conversational system POLLy (POliteness in Language Learning) which uses a common planning representation to generate actions to be performed by embodied agents in a virtual environment and to generate spoken utterances for dialogues about the steps involved in completing the task. In order to generate socially appropriate dialogue, Brown and Levinson’s theory of polite...