Positive Politeness & Social Harmony in Literary Discourse

Politeness Orientation in Social Hierarchies in Urdu

The present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of Urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. The researcher took politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. To observe politeness of Urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different strategies was selected. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used as an instrument to...

Erlbaum Associates. 321-355. 9 Literary Discourse

Literary reading has been a topic of inquiry among scholars of literature and educationalists for nearly three quarters of a century (Richards, 1929; Rosenblatt, 1937). Among empirical researchers, in contrast, attention to literature is quite recent, with most studies having been carried out only over the last 20 years. The literary field is fraught with controversy, however. Basic differences...

Politeness and Variation in Synthetic Social Interaction

“Get lost!” or “I think you should leave now” or “Ok, perhaps I’ll see you around some other time”, humans seem to be expressing things differently in different situations based on various factors: Social relationship between the two people, urgency of an action, their personality, etc. Social interaction of synthetic agents appears believable when it has at least some characteristics of human-...

Simultaneous Application of Negative and Positive Politeness

Politeness as a Social Software Requirement

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...