Politeness in ancient Rome: Can it help us evaluate modern politeness theories?

A Benchmark for Politeness

K. Allan () Monash University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Abstract (Im)politeness is never a depersonalized, decontextualized absolute but always a perception or judgement of appropriate behaviour on a given occasion—what one expects oneself and others to do in a particular social interaction. Nevertheless, it is normal for most tabooed words and phrases to be castigat...

Understanding of linguistic politeness

Communication is an act of cooperation between two or more partners (Grice, 1975), and people normally assume that their communicators would speak in a way that is maximally truthful and informative. Imagine two people in a conversation, Tom and Sally, who are talking about pets they own. Tom says to Sally: “I have two dogs.” Assuming that Tom is a cooperative speaker, and that Sally also belie...

Anticipated versus Inferred Politeness

A number of researchers have recently argued that politeness is not always inferred in the form of an implicature as claimed by Brown and Levinson (1987), but rather can be anticipated by addressees when it involves expected behaviour. The distinction between anticipated and inferred politeness is thus an important area for further development of politeness theory. In this paper, the way in whi...

Culture, Politeness and Directive

The Politeness Effect 1 Running head: THE POLITENESS EFFECT The Politeness Effect: Pedagogical Agents and Learning Outcomes

Pedagogical agent research seeks to exploit Reeves and Nass’s Media Equation theory, which holds that users respond to interactive media as if they were social actors. Investigations have tended to focus on the media used to realize the pedagogical agent, e.g., the use of animated talking heads and voices, and the results have been mixed. This paper focuses instead on the manner in which a peda...