Although there is a strong link between the right hemisphere and understanding emotional prosody in speech, there are few data on how the right hemisphere is implicated for understanding the emotive "attitudes" of a speaker from prosody. This report describes two experiments which compared how listeners with and without focal right hemisphere damage (RHD) rate speaker attitudes of "confidence" ...

The ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) is a way of re-imagining the traditional teacher-student hierarchical relationship. This practitioner research study uses computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 1996) to investigate the potential of email to facilitate such ‘third space’ communication. It is based on 279 emails exchanged between 10 international ESL students and their lecturer at an Aust...

this paper was aimed at investigating the persian-speaking translation trainees perception of politeness of english request strategies. they judged the strategies for requesting (e.g. can, could, will, do, etc.) using the paired comparison method. the findings showed great divergence between the judgment of english native speakers with respect to the degree of politeness of 14 generic request s...

The present study examined email communication practices of two groups of students in Iran and the United States to uncover the probable differences between Iranian and American email communication norms. The study also aimed at investigating how power distance in academic centers influences students’ choices of communication strategies in email writing. The use of two politeness strategies nam...

This study examines variation in evaluations of im/politeness of a recording of a naturally occurring intercultural apology, focusing in particular on potential cultural differences in these evaluations across speakers of (Australian) English and (Mandarin) Chinese. We first closely analyse the apology itself as a form of social action, and suggest in the course of this analysis that evaluation...

Sociolinguistic research suggests that women are more likely than men to use politeness strategies in their speech. Researchers have reported that women pay more compliments than men, that women in talk with same-sex peers use a large number of positive-politeness strategies while men in analogous situations do not, and that women are more likely to apologize, soften criticism or express thanks...

This paper presents a corpus-linguistic case study on the usage of Attitudinal Past in spoken communication. As representatives of the phenomenon, the two forms ‘I wondered’ and ‘I was wondering’ were selected. The aim is twofold: the first aim is to discuss frequent collocations, to analyse grammatical and structural features and to examine discourse factors governing the use of Attitudinal Pa...

This paper describes the exploration of text-independent speaker identification using novel approaches based on speakers’ phonetic features instead of traditional acoustic features. Different phonetic speaker identification approaches are discussed in this paper and evaluated using two speaker identification systems: one multilingual system and one single language multiple-engine system. Furthe...