Linguistic politeness (LP) refers to the set of “linguistic features mediating norms of social behaviour, in relation to such notions as courtesy, rapport, deference and distance” (Crystal 2008). Although researchers (e.g. Eelen 2001, Watts 2003) agree that it is intimately connected to normativity, group hierarchy and cooperation – the core questions of human ethology and human behavioural eco...

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...

this study was an attempt to investigate iranian and spanish intermediate nonnative english learners’ request strategies to their faculty. to this aim, 74 (50 iranian and 24 spanish) nonnative english intermediate learners participated in this study. a discourse completion test (dct) was used to elicit the request strategies used by the participants. the findings suggested the participants empl...

We consider the application of Game Theory in the modeling of different strategies of politeness. In particular, we examine how differences in the linguistic form of requests and proposals map onto the structure of the game being played by interlocutors. We show how considerations of social wants [1, 2] and coordination and cooperation motivate these differences. First, we adapt the notion of o...

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...

The aim of this contribution is twofold. On the one hand it will attempt to place various papers special issue in perspective vis-a-vis each other and notion ideology -the overall topic 6th International Pragmatics Conference driving theme behind present volume. goal provide a broader view on different as whole, summarize their claims without repeating what they have already said, but by lookin...

this study examined naturally-occurring university classroom interactions at iranian universities and provided an analysis of silence patterns as politeness strategies used by male and female students. since empirical studies of silence in classroom settings are scarce, this paper aimed to explain such phenomena using participant interviews, classroom observation and detailed discourse analysis...

This paper discusses some problems regarding the measurement of breathiness directly from the acoustic waveform, especially the estimation of aspiration noise found in the high frequency region, which is a prominent feature of breathiness. Klatt and Klatt (1990) suggested the noise rating method for this, which employed the subjective ratings of visual observation of the irregularity of wavefor...

Should an intelligent software tutor be polite, in an effort to motivate and cajole students to learn, or should it use more direct language? If it should be polite, under what conditions? In a series of studies in different contexts (e.g., lab versus classroom) with a variety of students (e.g., low prior knowledge versus high prior knowledge), the politeness effect was investigated in the cont...