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...

In recent years, politeness theory has increasingly focused on speakers’ own conceptualizations of polite behavior, viewing politeness concepts as a type of language ideology. This article examines the construction of Japanese politeness concepts in the business etiquette training provided for new employees in Japanese companies. Drawing on participant-observation of business etiquette seminars...

OBJECTIVE To research computational methods for discovering body site and severity modifiers in clinical texts. METHODS We cast the task of discovering body site and severity modifiers as a relation extraction problem in the context of a supervised machine learning framework. We utilize rich linguistic features to represent the pairs of relation arguments and delegate the decision about the n...

In this paper we describe a semantic dependency model for estimating probabilities in a stochastic TAG parser (Resnik, 1992) (Schabes, 1992), and we compare it with the syntactic dependency model inherent in a TAG derivation using the flat treatment of modifiers described in (Schabes and Shieber, 1994).

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...

We report about tools for the extraction of German multiword expressions (MWEs) from text corpora; we extract word pairs, but also longer MWEs of different patterns, e.g. verb-noun structures with an additional prepositional phrase or adjective. Next to standard association-based extraction, we focus on morpho-syntactic, syntactic and lexical-choice features of the MWE candidates. A broad range...

Not a great deal is known about please, other than that it is syntactically unique, it is used to express politeness, and occurs most commonly with requests. The close association with requests has led some to define it as an illocutionary marker rather than as a politeness marker. However, since its omission makes a request less courteous rather than less like a request, its function is, at le...

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 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...