Recent research on conversational agents emphasises the need to build affective conversational systems with social intelligence. Politeness is an integral part of socially appropriate and affective conversational behaviour, e.g. consider the difference in the pragmatic effect of realizing the same communicative goal with either “Get me a glass of water mate!” or “I wonder if I could possibly ha...

Every language may have some entities which may not be owned by another language. The uniqueness of a language is strongly influenced by the culture of its native speakers. Therefore, languages vary cross-culturally. I strongly believe that the way the Javanese people (one of the Indonesian ethnic groups) express politeness is also influenced by the Javanese culture. This article tries to exami...

This paper describes a model of politeness between intentional agents developed from sociolinguistic observations of human-human interactions (Brown and Levinson, 1987) and suggests a method for applying it to human-machine interactions. Applications in the context of a medication reminder system are presented including data which suggest that the Brown and Levinson model provides good predicti...

(Lancaster University, UK) Abstract: The theory of politeness of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) has remained the most seminal and influential starting point for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contrastive pragmatics. Yet is has also provoked countervailing arguments from Ide (1989, 1993), Matsumoto (1989), Gu (1990), Mao (1994) and others, pointing out a Western bias in Brown and Levinson’...

Scholarly peer review is a complex collaborative activity that is increasingly supported by web-based systems. Yet little is known about how reviewers and authors interact in such environments, how criticisms are conveyed, or how the systems may affect the interactions and use of language of reviewers and authors. We looked at one aspect of the interactions between reviewers and authors, the us...

Politeness is an integral part of human language variation, e.g. consider the difference in the pragmatic effect of realizing the same communicative goal with either “Get me a glass of water mate!” or “I wonder if I could possibly have some water please?” This paper presents POLLy (Politeness for Language Learning), a system which combines a natural language generator with an AI Planner to mode...

In Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, every speech act is potentially face-threatening to an aspect of the hearer’s or the speaker’s face. Though imminent, face-threat is present in varying degrees, represented as the seriousness or weightiness (W) of FTAx. Interlocutors calculate this using the formula Wx 1⁄4 D(S;H)þ P(H;S)þ Rx, where D(S,H) represents the social distance between interloc...

The study of compliments has attracted the attention of many scholars (e.g., Goffman 1971; Lakoff 1973; Brown and Levinson 1978; Amouzadeh 2001; Golato 2002; Sharifian 2005) and has become a major issue in the area of interactional sociolinguistics. To date, many models of politeness have been put forward in the literature. In this study, Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) politeness model was u...