In two experiments, children's use and understanding of polite forms and the relationship these abilities share with an ability to adopt the perspective of another were examined. Development in the understanding of polite forms seemed best characterized as sensitivity to the function of these forms in an increasing number of sentence types. Development in the use of polite forms could be viewed...

Many languages use honorifics to express politeness, social distance, or the relative social status between the speaker and their addressee(s). In machine translation from a language without honorifics such as English, it is difficult to predict the appropriate honorific, but users may want to control the level of politeness in the output. In this paper, we perform a pilot study to control hono...

Although there has been extensive research on children's moral knowledge about lying and truth-telling and their actual lie- or truth-telling behaviors, research to examine the relation between these two is extremely rare. This study examined one hundred and twenty 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds' moral understanding of lies and their actual lying behaviors in a politeness situation. Results revealed ...

The purpose of this paper is to consider the contribution of prosody to discourse analysis in interaction by means of a concrete example, i.e., the analysis of bonjour, a French greeting. In this experiment, naïve subjects were made to listen to a series of French politeness formulae taken from real interactions and asked to evaluate the degree of politeness they perceived. Two hypotheses were ...

lexical concepts. Furthermore, more specific sets of the modifier relation (MO) and its subclasses may model the verbs in a more meaningful way. At last, future studies will need to address the problem of polysemy of the verbs both in corpus-based evidence and human association scores. To summarize, using dependency parses allows us to exploit verbs with separated verb particles. This enlarges ...

This paper argues that Korean lacks a distinct, open category of Adjective; what have been traditionally analyzed as adjectives are a kind of stative verbs. I propose that apparent noun-modifying adjectives in Korean are predicates inside relative clauses. The proposed analysis makes several predictions about the syntax and semantics of noun modifiers in Korean. In particular, it predicts that ...

In most research on concept acquisition from corpora, concepts are modeled as vectors of relations extracted from syntactic structures. In the case of modifiers, these relations often specify values of attributes, as in (attr red); this is unlike what typically proposed in theories of knowledge representation, where concepts are typically defined in terms of their attributes (e.g., color). We c...

The topic of the present study is adverb-adjective combinations in narrative writing by lower secondary school pupils Norway and UK. investigation based on subsets TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) GiG (Growth Grammar) corpora thus compares English as a second language with first-language usage (EL2 EL1). A number differences were identified between two writer groups. While construction...

In this paper, we contend that interpersonal circumplex theories and politeness strategies may be combined to inform the generation of social behaviours for virtual agents. We show how stances from the interpersonal circumplex correspond to certain politeness strategies and present the results of a small pilot study that partially supports our approach. Our goal is to implement this model in a ...