This work is part of a research effort to understand and characterize the morphological and dynamic features of polite and amused smiles. We analyzed a dataset consisting of young adults (n=61), interested in learning about banking services, who met with a professional banker face-to-face in a conference room while both participants’ faces were unobtrusively recorded. We analyzed 258 instances ...

A significant amount of contribution to pragmatics research comes from cross-cultural and developmental pragmatic studies with L2 learners in focus; however, despite broad interest in such analyses, the role of lecturers has been relatively ignored. As the lectures’ perceptions/opinions of L2 learners’ e-mail requests are important, L2 learners must become familiar with their lecturers’...

in this paper, by analyzing some data from persian andenglish, it is shown thatpragmatically there are two main kinds of euphemisms.the first (common euphemisms) are used to be polite and not to hurt other'sfeelings on several subjects like sexual relations, death, birth, body parts,disability, mental illness, intelligence and insults. on the other hand,language users by substituting the f...

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...

We investigated the correspondence between perceived meanings of smiles and their morphological and dynamic characteristics. Morphological characteristics included co-activation of Orbicularis oculi (AU 6), smile controls, mouth opening, amplitude, and asymmetry of amplitude. Dynamic characteristics included duration, onset and offset velocity, asymmetry of velocity, and head movements. Smile c...

Subject ellipsis is one of the characteristics of informal English. The investigation of subject ellipsis in corpora thus reveals an abundance of pragmatic and extralinguistic information associated with subject ellipsis that enhances natural language understanding. In essence, the presence of subject ellipsis conveys an ‘informal’ conversation involving 1) an informal ‘Topic’ as well as famili...

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children's conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3-6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation (to be informative and avoid redundancy, speak the...