It has been found that Korean speakers lower their average voice pitch when speaking politely [16, 17], contradicting the idea that high pitch is polite across all cultures, as proposed by Ohala’s Frequency Code hypothesis [e.g., 12]. This study looks at pitch as a perceptual cue to politeness in Korean. Ten Korean listeners heard short utterances from eight different speakers and judged whethe...

The current study investigated ambiguity errors that characterise the L2 tertiary-level writing of Chinese college students. Data were drawn from 56 authentic English writings 11 students different disciplines across 10 institutions. A thematic analysis was conducted to examine error patterns at lexical and syntactic levels. Lexical ambiguities found include Chinglish, ambiguous references, abs...

Analysis of sociointerpersonal communication patterns among discourse participants is essential to understand the manifestation of and the interpersonalcommunication features realized in online social interaction. The linguistic politeness theory provides an effective framework for such an analysis of sociointerpersonal communication features employed by online language users tomaintain and enh...

Politeness is an integral part of human language variation, e.g. consider the difference in the pragmatic effect of realizing the same communicative goal with either “Get me a glass of water mate!” or “I wonder if I could possibly have some water please?” This paper presents POLLy (Politeness for Language Learning), a system which combines a natural language generator with an AI Planner to mode...

A significant and prevalent aspect of human behavior (as opposed to attitudes and beliefs) which is affected by cultural differences is communication style. We have been developing computational models of an important culturallyvarying aspect of communication: ”politeness” and “etiquette” in social interactions and its role in establishing and managing power and familiarity relationships, urgen...

OBJECTIVE We investigate the use of adjectival modification as a way of assessing the systematic use of linguistic phenomena to represent similar lexical or semantic features in the constituent terms of a vocabulary. METHODS Terms consisting of one or more adjectival modifiers followed by a head noun are selected from disease and procedure terms in SNOMED. Frequently co-occurring adjectival m...

Previous studies on the Politeness Effect show that using politeness strategies in tutorial feedback can have a positive impact on learning (McLaren et al. 2010; Wang and Johnson 2008; Wang et al. 2005). While prior research efforts tried to uncover the mechanism through which the politeness strategies impact the learner, the results were inconclusive. Further, it is unclear how the politeness ...

This paper argues that degree modifiers such as flat-out, downright, positively, and straight-up constitute a distinct natural class specialized for modifying extreme adjectives (such as gigantic, fantastic, or gorgeous), and that extreme adjectives themselves come in two varieties: ones that encode extremeness as part of their lexical semantics and ones that can acquire it on the basis of cont...

Non-competitive and non-threatening aspects of social hierarchy, such as politeness, are universal among human cultures, and might have evolved from ritualized submission in primates; however, these behaviors have rarely been studied. Honorific language is a type of polite linguistic communication that plays an important role in human social interactions ranging from everyday conversation to in...

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...