This paper aims to cast light on the somewhat neglected area of mock politeness. The principle objectives are to describe the ways that mock politeness is talked about and performed. In order to investigate such usage, I analyse data from informal, naturally occurring conversations in a UK-based online forum. The paper introduces a range of metalinguistic expressions which are used to refer to ...

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...

A previous study showed that pedagogical agents that offer feedback with appropriate politeness strategies can help students learn better [21]. This work studied the Politeness Effect in a foreign language intelligent tutoring system, and provided further evidence that tutorial feedback with socially intelligent strategies can influence motivation and learning outcomes.

1. Introduction Typological research has uncovered a surprising amount of variation in which parts of a complex motion event (Bohnemeyer et al 2007) or causal chain (Bohnemeyer et al 2010) can be described as a single event across the languages of the world. The intuitive property of presenting a scenario as a " single event " has been operationalized in these studies in terms of the Macro Even...

This course sets out with an examination of the role of events in accounting for inferential properties of modification. It presents a model of the logic of modification following the neo-Davidsonian mode of composition but reworking the Davidsonian framework. The approach is shown to accord with more intuitively appealing notions of event individuation and to afford a uniform treatment of indi...

One of the main objectives of research in Natural Language generation (NLG) is to account for linguistic variation in a systematic way. Research on linguistic politeness provides important clues as to the possible causes of linguistic variation and the ways in which it may be modelled formally. In this paper we present a simple language generation model for choosing the appropriate surface real...

Politeness, as a universal phenomenon in society, is a reflection of specific cultural values, which can be observed in all languages and cultures. This thesis attempts to make a comparative study of politeness behavior between English and Chinese on the contrastive analyses on such linguistic behaviors as addressing, greeting, complimenting. Owing to different beliefs and values, and different...

This paper presents a perception experiment to measure the ability of Japanese children in fourth and fifth grade elementary school to recognize culturally encoded expressions of politeness and impoliteness in their native language. Audiovisual stimuli were presented to listeners, who rate the politeness degree and a possible situation where such an expression could be used. Analysis of results...

One of the tasks of language learning is the discovery of the intricate division of labour between the lexical-semantic content of an expression and the pragmatic inferences the expression can be used to convey. Here we investigate experimentally the development of the semantics-pragmatics interface, focusing on Greek-speaking five-year-olds' interpretation of aspectual expressions such as arxi...