This article extends the validity of politeness theory ( P. Brown & S. Levinson, 1987 ) by investigating the nonlinguistic aspects of politeness in 2 cultures. Politeness strategies expressed through different channels of communication (silent video, speech, full-channel video and audio, and transcripts of speech ) were examined, and it was found that politeness strategies were communicated non...

According to politeness theory (P. Brown & S. Levinson, 1987), politeness serves to both reflect and regulate social distance. On the basis of this notion and on construal level theory (N. Liberman & Y. Trope, 2008; N. Liberman, Y. Trope, & E. Stephan, 2007), it was predicted that politeness would be related to abstract construal, temporal distance, and spatial distance. Eight studies supported...

Students rated 16 tutorial statements on negative politeness (i.e., how much the tutor ‘‘allows me freedom to make my own decisions’’) and positive politeness (i.e., how much the tutor was ‘‘working with me’’). Consistent with an adaptation of Brown and Levinson’s [1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge University Press, New York] politeness theory, (a) students rated dire...

Nowadays, intercultural communication via email among various groups and societies has been increasingly important as an aspect of communication. This research aims at investigating aspects of politeness meaning negotiation via emails exchanged between English and Persian speakers with different cultural backgrounds. The present study also reveals the potentials for using emails to experience c...

We present a demo of our conversational system POLLy (POliteness in Language Learning) which uses a common planning representation to generate actions to be performed by embodied agents in a virtual environment and to generate spoken utterances for dialogues about the steps involved in completing the task. In order to generate socially appropriate dialogue, Brown and Levinson’s theory of polite...

Politeness research to date has generally adopted one of two views: the “traditional” view based on the dual premises of Grice’s Co-operative Principle and speech act theory (Lakoff 1973, Brown and Levinson 1987 [1978], Leech 1983), or the “post-modern” view, which rejects these premises and substitutes them by an emphasis on participants’ own perceptions of politeness (politeness1) and on the ...

This paper describes a conversational system POLLy (POliteness in Language Learning) which uses a common planning representation to generate actions to be performed by embodied agents in a virtual environment, and to generate spoken utterances for dialogues about the steps involved in completing the task. In order to generate socially appropriate dialogue, Brown and Levinson’s theory of politen...

This study attempts to investigate politeness strategies and politeness markers in email-request sent byIranian male and female EFL learners to professors. The comparison between strategies used by malesand females in email-request were also analyzed. 52 actual emails of M.A students of TEFL studying atAzad University consisted the data in this research. To analyze the corpus, politeness strate...

When humans interact with one another, socially intelligent conversational behaviors arise from the interaction of a number of different factors: the conversants’ personality, cultural knowledge, the ability to observe and reason about social relationships, and the ability to project and detect affective cues. For virtual agents to be socially intelligent, they must have an expressive conversat...