This conceptual paper suggests how Politeness Theory [6] – well known in anthropological and linguistic literatures – can contribute to the study of role relations in computer-mediated communication. Politeness, phrasing things so as to show respect and esteem for the face of others, occurs throughout social interchange. The paper reviews politeness theory and enumerates specific linguistic ind...

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...

A number of researchers have recently argued that politeness is not always inferred in the form of an implicature as claimed by Brown and Levinson (1987), but rather can be anticipated by addressees when it involves expected behaviour. The distinction between anticipated and inferred politeness is thus an important area for further development of politeness theory. In this paper, the way in whi...

The isiZulu verb is known for its morphological complexity, which is a subject for on-going linguistics research, as well as for prospects of computational use, such as controlled natural language interfaces, machine translation, and spellcheckers. To this end, we seek to answer the question as to what the precise grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb are (and, by extension, the Bantu verb...

The present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of Urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. The researcher took politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. To observe politeness of Urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different strategies was selected. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used as an instrument to...

According to politeness theory (P. Brown & S. Levinson, 1987), politeness serves to both reflect and regulate social distance. On the basis of this notion and on construal level theory (N. Liberman & Y. Trope, 2008; N. Liberman, Y. Trope, & E. Stephan, 2007), it was predicted that politeness would be related to abstract construal, temporal distance, and spatial distance. Eight studies supported...

To search a large dictionary for a collocation expressing a desired meaning, the human reader needs some kind of hierarchical structure that would facilitate such search. In this paper, fragments of semantic classification of modifiers are elaborated based on several highly modifier-productive nouns, namely, common nouns person, action, look, corporation, and price, as well the terms coating, m...

An issue of interest to work in areas ranging from lexical semantics to natural language processing (especially automatic text generation) to language pedagogy is the semantics of degree modification by expressions like very, well, and much. Focusing on the case of deverbal gradable adjectives (such as acquainted), we show that the selective behavior of different degree modifiers provides an im...

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...

We describe TINE, a new automatic evaluation metric for Machine Translation that aims at assessing segment-level adequacy. Lexical similarity and shallow-semantics are used as indicators of adequacy between machine and reference translations. The metric is based on the combination of a lexical matching component and an adequacy component. Lexical matching is performed comparing bagsof-words wit...