Politeness issues in virtual commercial contexts received rare attention from both practitioners and researchers. This work developed an instrument for gauging degree of politeness in online retailers’ storefronts. The instrument’s reliability and validity were confirmed through empirical data analysis. A second-order confirmatory factor analysis revealed that online consumers' tendency in payi...

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...

A number of researchers have recently argued that politeness is not always inferred in the form of an implicature as claimed by Brown and Levinson (1987), but rather can be anticipated by addressees when it involves expected behaviour. The distinction between anticipated and inferred politeness is thus an important area for further development of politeness theory. In this paper, the way in whi...

The paper focuses on requests in written forms, where we describe a novel approach to computational modelling of specific features of politeness in speech act of requesting. We examine the similarities and differences in the use of specific social and expressive factors in two languages (mother tongue and a foreign language). The requests collected from different social situations among student...

Successful out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) resuscitation relies upon effective team communication, which is evaluated as an aspect of non-technical skills. However, this communication has been largely neglected from a dialogue perspective. We propose addressing this issue by examining the structure of OHCA interaction and its characteristic dialogue features. We explore how speakers verba...

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...

Title of dissertation: SPEECH RECOGNITION BASED ON PHONETIC FEATURES AND ACOUSTIC LANDMARKS Amit Juneja, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Carol Espy-Wilson Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering A probabilistic and statistical framework is presented for automatic speech recognition based on a phonetic feature representation of speech sounds. In this acoustic-phone...

The present study sought to investigate the translation strategies in an American sitcom in Iranian EFLclasses with emphasis on politeness. The participants were 50 male and female Iranian undergraduateB.A. and M.A. students majoring in English Translation, and English language teaching at the IslamicAzad University, North Tehran. The participants were administered three tests. A multiple choic...

Unsupervised learning of broad phonetic classes by infants was simulated using a statistical mixture model. With the phonetic labels removed, hand-transcribed segments from the TIMIT database were used in model-based clustering to obtain data-driven classes. Simple Hidden Markov Models were chosen to be the components of the mixture, with Mel-Cepstral coefficients as the front-end. The sound cl...

This article discusses the use of phonetic features in automatic speech recognition. The phonetic features are derived from acoustic parameters by means of Kohonen networks. Behind the use of phonetic features instead of standard acoustic parameters lies the assumption that it is useful to help the system to focus on linguistically relevant signal properties. Previous experiments using very sim...