One of the best tools we have for probing the lexical semantics of adjectives is degree modification. Different degree modifiers impose different requirements on the adjectives they combine with, and the patterns these restrictions reveal can be used to establish a typology of adjectives. This line of research—pursued by Kennedy & McNally (2005), Rotstein & Winter (2004), and many others since—...

We present a fully automated algorithm for expanding an affective lexicon with new entries. Continuous valence ratings are estimated for unseen words using the underlying assumption that semantic similarity implies affective similarity. Starting from a set of manually annotated words, a linear affective model is trained using the least mean squares algorithm followed by feature selection. The p...

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...

This study aims to explore the variables in perceptions of (im)politeness in an intercultural apology, focusing on discussion of the cultural and gender differences. Through the study’s instrument, a conversation between an Australian and a Taiwanese Chinese speaker, the study suggests that there are indeed some differences in perceptions of (im)politeness across d...

Many languages have morphological devices to turn a noun into an adjective. Often this morphology is genuinely derivational in that it adds a semantic predicate such as ‘havingN’ (proprietive), ‘lacking-N’ (caritive’), ‘similar-to-N’ (similitudinal) and so on. In other cases the denominal adjective expresses some vaguely defined notion of possession as in Russian Ivan-ovo (detstvo) ‘Ivan’s (chi...

It has been proposed in the literature that prosody plays a role in the expression of politeness. The present paper attempts to explore the contribution of tonal scaling to the expression of paralinguistic meanings. More specifically, it examines the relationship between pitch height and the degree of perceived politeness in yes–no questions in Central Catalan. Studies on the biologically–deter...

In our paper we focus on analysing textual information usage (selected politeness factors of speech act) in mother tongue and in foreign language to identify phenomena of a language consciousness transfer from the mother tongue into a foreign language communication – transference phenomena – and their impact on textual structures of politeness in chosen languages. Our aim was to make an analysi...

Individuals in two studies listened to statements or questions that were either consistent or inconsistent across verbal content and tone of voice. Results showed that tone of voice substantially affected judges’ ratings of the politeness for positive content statements but did so only minimally for negative content statements. Tone of voice affected judges’ politeness ratings of both positive ...

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...

Recent research on conversational agents emphasises the need to build affective conversational systems with social intelligence. Politeness is an integral part of socially appropriate and affective conversational behaviour, 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 ha...