This paper examines the manifestation of downstep and intonation in the Tokyo and Kochi dialects of Japanese by using three types of syntactically balanced material adjective phrases, adverbial phrases, and sentence modifiers. The main conclusion is that Kochi speakers produce a smaller Major Phrase consisting of fewer lexical accents than in the Tokyo dialect, the Major Phrase being defined as...

one of the chief discussions within the phrase structure theory is the analysis of the projection level of modifiers of different grammatical categories. this study provides an analysis of the noun phrase structure in persian, considering the projection levels of the post-modifiers. the study is within the framework of the extended standard theory (est) and, in particular, x-bar syntax. data an...

the present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. the researcher took politeness theory of brown and levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. to observe politeness of urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different strategies was selected. a discourse completion task (dct) was used as an instrument to...

This paper discusses some of the problems regarding the unnaturalness of speech data currently used in research on oral Japanese politeness and proposes improved techniques. Two experiments were carried out. First, to extract natural unscripted utterances, within a specific vocabulary and context, the experimental design of the Map Task was employed with the population controlled for social sta...

This paper presents politeness as a key social requirement for computer human interaction (CHI). Politeness is defined, in information terms, as offering the locus of control of a social interaction to another party. Software that creates pop-up windows is not illegal, but is impolite, as it preempts user choice. It is proposed that impolite software drives users away, while polite software att...

In order to examine potential acoustic cues for politeness in Japanese speech, F0 and temporal aspects of polite and casual utterances of two question sentences spoken by 6 male native speakers were acoustically analysed. The analysis showed that F0 movement of the ®nal part of utterances and speech rate of utterance were consistently di€erently used in these di€erent speaking styles across all...

There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax– semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at the interface between lexical semantics and synta...

Based upon a theoretical framework of politeness and face-threatening acts (FTAs), an ethnographic investigation of naturally occurring apologies and politeness strategies in Cuernavaca Spanish was accomplished. Using a modified version of BlumKulka et al.’s (1989) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project Coding Manual for Apologies and a corpus of (200) naturally occurring apology events,...

Using a discourse analytic qualitative approach, we investigated the naturally-occurring discourse that arose as part of two kinds of regular course activities, synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated discussions. The messages contributed by members of a graduate course were analyzed for the kind of discourse functions and the kind of politeness strategies they displayed. Results indicat...

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 ...