In Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the degree of indirectness of an utterance is presumed to be commensurate with the sum of the variables of Distance, Power and Ranking of an imposition. This claim was tested with reference to a corpus of spontaneous requests from Cypriot Greek. It emerged that, rather than motivating the choice of a ‘generic’ politeness strategy corresponding to a cer...

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...

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...

We present an interpretable neural network approach to predicting and understanding politeness in natural language requests. Our models are based on simple convolutional neural networks directly on raw text, avoiding any manual identification of complex sentiment or syntactic features, while performing better than such feature-based models from previous work. More importantly, we use the challe...

Automatic assessment of subjective characteristics of customers like politeness, satisfaction or competence could provide services companies with information needful for improving service quality. In this work, we construct a regression model for politeness estimation of customers, which uses a) set of linguistic indicators and b) manual estimations of expert(s). We apply the suggested methodol...

Sociolinguistic research suggests that women are more likely than men to use politeness strategies in their speech. Researchers have reported that women pay more compliments than men, that women in talk with same-sex peers use a large number of positive-politeness strategies while men in analogous situations do not, and that women are more likely to apologize, soften criticism or express thanks...

This study examines variation in evaluations of im/politeness of a recording of a naturally occurring intercultural apology, focusing in particular on potential cultural differences in these evaluations across speakers of (Australian) English and (Mandarin) Chinese. We first closely analyse the apology itself as a form of social action, and suggest in the course of this analysis that evaluation...