It is very difficult for overseas students to learn Japanese polite expressions because these expressions change in a complicated manner according to context, for instance, hyponymy, social distance, and the formality of the conversational situation. Moreover, the notion of social distance in Japan often differs from that in the learner's country. This difference may result in misunderstanding ...

Japanese linguistic politeness has long been observed by linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, educators and many others who are interested in Japanese language and culture. It has become a common impression that Japanese people as a whole, whether they are old or young, well educated or less educated, rich or poor, men or women, behave in a polite manner in human...

every language involves friendly and polite as well as hostile and impolite situationsin which language users have to use the context-appropriate language. however,unlike politeness which has generated a great number of studies, few studies havebeen conducted on impoliteness especially in efl contexts. the present study aimedto see whether language learners and teachers hold the same idea conce...

While children’s acquisition of lexically encoded politeness formulas has been investigated to a certain extent, little is known about their sensitivity to prosody and facial expressions as cues to politeness. The goal of this paper is to test the ability of 3-year-old American English-speaking children to recognize a speaker’s polite stance in their native language based on prosodic and facial...

Every language involves friendly and polite as well as hostile and impolite situationsin which language users have to use the context-appropriate language. However,unlike politeness which has generated a great number of studies, few studies havebeen conducted on impoliteness especially in EFL contexts. The present study aimedto see whether language learners and teachers hold the same idea conce...

Conveying information in a false or indirect manner in consideration of listeners’ wants (i.e. being polite) seemingly contradicts an important goal of a cooperative speaker: information transfer. We propose that a cooperative speaker considers both epistemic utility, or utility of providing the listener new and accurate information, and social utility, or utility of maintaining or boosting the...

It is very difficult for the overseas students to learn Japanese polite expression (JPE) during their course of learning the Japanese language. In this paper, in order to support the foreigners learning JPEs anywhere anytime, we propose a ubiquitous language-learning environment which works without any input of the context information. In the traditional Japanese class, learners only learn the ...

Indirect requests vary in politeness, for example, Can you tell me where Jordan Hall is? is more polite than Shouldn't you tell me where Jordan Hall is? By one theory, the more the literal meaning of a request implies personal benefits for the listener, within reason, the more polite is the request. This prediction was confirmed in Experiment I. Responses to indirect requests also vary in polit...