Based upon a theoretical framework of politeness and face-threatening acts (FTAs), an ethnographic investigation of naturally occurring apologies and politeness strategies in Cuernavaca Spanish was accomplished. Using a modified version of BlumKulka et al.’s (1989) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project Coding Manual for Apologies and a corpus of (200) naturally occurring apology events,...

There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax– semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at the interface between lexical semantics and synta...

Using a discourse analytic qualitative approach, we investigated the naturally-occurring discourse that arose as part of two kinds of regular course activities, synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated discussions. The messages contributed by members of a graduate course were analyzed for the kind of discourse functions and the kind of politeness strategies they displayed. Results indicat...

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 ...

politeness is a phenomenon which is common to all cultures. each culture has a different perception of what is polite and each language has various devices for expressing politeness. one of the important aspects of politeness which is the central focus of many studies is the polite behaviors of men and women. the focus of this study is on the politeness strategies of males and females from diff...

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 ...

If politeness makes society a nicer place to be, by lubricating the interaction of its human parts, then the same is important for online society. As the Internet becomes more social, software can mediate social interactions, serve as a social agent or act as a personal assistant, but to succeed in these roles it must learn a new skill politeness. This article proposes politeness as the disting...

This study investigates the contribution of voice quality to the expression of “positive politeness” under varying conditions of relative social status between male speakers of Japanese. In previous studies, suprasegmental features have been found to express politeness. Bandwidth of the first formant (BW1) was also found to be relevant to perceived politeness. However, the association between B...

The identification of the key concepts in a set of documents is a useful source of information for several information access applications. We are interested in its application to multi-document summarization, both for the automatic generation of summaries and for interactive summarization systems. In this paper, we study whether the syntactic position of terms in the texts can be used to predi...

While French degree words have been assigned several syntactic categories, we show that they are rather highy ‘polymorphic’ adverbs (they occur in all syntactic domains), which select the expression they modify on a purely semantic basis. Like French adverbs in general, they occur both to the left and to the right of the head they modify. Following previous work (a.o. van Noord and Bouma 1994, ...