Politeness is a part of student-tutor interactions and research in affective computing has shown that this social convention may also be applicable when a computer plays the role of tutor. This study sought to build on previous work that examined the effect of the politeness of computer feedback through the application of social and cognitive theories. Employing a mixed-factor design, a sample of 150 college students completed a multiple cue probability learning task (MCPL) on a computer that provided feedback phrased in one of three different tonal styles (joint-goal, student-goal and baldon- record). Feedback tone was a within-subjects factor. Subjects received feedback as either text or as audio. Audio feedback was a between-subjects factor and was delivered in one of four different modes male/female human voice or a male/female synthesized voice. The study found gender differences in tone preference as well as a possible impact of the Tone x Mode interaction on learning. Specifically, men were more likely than women to prefer the student-goal style feedback prompts. It is hoped that this research can provide additional insight to designers of learning applications when they are designing the feedback mechanisms that these systems should employ.

This paper discusses Standard Kiswahili honorifics in Nairobi. It used observation as a means of obtaining data in Nairobi where Standard Kiswahili is also spoken. It points out that honorifics are a chief politeness strategy across many discourse domains; Kiswahili honorifics are conspicuously used and seem easy to learn; honorifics complement other politeness strategies; they are used in both formal and informal encounters. This paper also argues that honorifics in expressing face sav-ing ideals in Kiswahili language have both a social and individual appeal. There is, therefore, a strong suggestion for social face and communal based politeness as opposed to individual polite-ness in Kiswahili. This paper observes that politeness and especially by means of honorifics makes a Kiswahili conversational encounter fruitful. The honorifics also help to define, redefine and sus-tain social strata that are used as a basis of expressing face-saving ideals and politeness in Kiswa-hili and hence contributing to less conflict in interaction and strengthening cohesion in society in question.

<p>This essay investigates the relationship between gender and politeness, specifically in the areaof requests. The reason why this topic was chosen is that it is claimed that men and womencommunicate differently and express requests differently. The aim is to identify and clarifythe different manners men and women express politeness with regard to the phrases Canyou…? and Could you…?. A total of 200 occurrences of Can you…? and Could you…? wereselected and analyzed from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).</p><p>The working hypothesis was that, in accordance with their gender “regulations”,women use Could you much more than men and therefore act more polite. The findings,however, are contradictory and indicate that this was not the case. Men tend to use the morepolite form Could you, and women tend to use the less polite form Can you. Moreover,requests are in some contexts expressed similarly by men and women. Therefore, the generalclaim about women being more polite in their language may not be correct.</p>

Using the social networking site Facebook as a corpus, I collected 1,500 random samples of interactions between friends. I tracked the use of jokes and disparaging humor between same- and opposite-gender pairs to discover that there is a strong correlation between the style of joke-making evoked by the speaker and the gender of both the speaker and the hearer. The men in the study were about eight times more likely to make insulting or degrading jokes with other men than the women were with each other. Following the study is a discussion where I address methods of politeness across genders, approaches to humor, and how sex, culture, and gender expectations influence our communicative choices. Though the discussion is based in our linguistic choices, the results of the study reflect trends that are present in countless aspects of society, and the issues that are raised go far beyond the spoken word. / text

This study quantitatively and qualitatively examines honorific usage in casual first-encounter conversations between two relatively young people from similar backgrounds. The issues of concern are the frequency of use of addressee and referent honorifics, different types and forms of referent honorifics, reasons behind speech style shifts between honorific and non-honorific forms, and gender differences in honorific usage.Overall, addressee honorifics were predominantly used compared to plain forms, while the use of referent honorifics was limited in the data. The rate of honorific usage ranged greatly depending on the speaker and the conversation. Using too few addressee honorifics, however, has a possibility of offending the addressee in this speech context.Additionally, it was found that female speakers did not necessarily speak more politely (i.e., use more honorifics) than male speakers. The addressee's gender seemed to influence the rate of use of honorifics. Female speakers' use of addressee honorifics was higher in mixed-sex conversations than in single-sex conversations while the opposite was true with male speakers. As for referent honorifics, both genders tended to use more of them in single-sex conversations.As for speech style shifts between honorific forms and non-honorific forms, several contexts in which these were observed are reported. Self-directed questions and expression of feelings, thoughts, and opinions were the two most likely contexts for speech style shifts between addressee honorifics and plain forms. It appears that such style shifts occur to separate the utterances from the main course of conversation to signal that the utterance is not deliberately addressed to the addressee, that the focus is on meaning, or that the utterance constitutes a subspace embedded in the main floor rather than the main floor itself. Additionally, utterance type, increased familiarity with the addressee, speech style adjustment, and the introduction of new topics are suggested as possible contexts for speech style shifts between referent honorifics and non-honorific forms.

The purpose of this paper was to discover the politeness schemes in two languages – American English and Lithuanian – and then compare the means of expressing politeness strategies in the two mentioned languages. The method used in the paper is a survey, evaluated by both qualitative and quantitative methods. The research illustrated that the two mentioned cultures do indeed use the speech acts of gratitude and apology. It also showed that American Female and American Male groups tend to choose more polite reactions, while Lithuanian Female and Lithuanian Male groups tend to use less polite reactions more often. Americans (both genders) do not imply the feeling of gratitude or apology, they say it directly. The Lithuanians (both genders) expressed gratitude or apology in everyday situations not as often and not as directly. In other words, the Lithuanian culture tends to use positive politeness; and vice versa, the American culture tends to use negative politeness. Besides that, the research revealed that gender plays a significant role in the answers of the survey respondents. The Female Americans and Female Lithuanians seem to be more polite than their male counterparts. It was also revealed that the respondents of American nationality express gratitude or apology in a more polite way and use more speech acts of gratitude or apology in both private and public spheres than the group of Lithuanian respondents. I believe, that my research is very important and relevant as it... [to full text] / Šio mokslinio darbo tikslas yra atskleisti mandagumo schemas dviejose kalbose – amerikiečių ir lietuvių – o veliau palyginti mandagumo raiškos priemones abiejose paminėtose kalbose. Tyrimo klausimas šiame darbe yra: Kas yra mandagu ir nemandagu amerikiečių ir lietuvių kultūrose ir kas yra laikoma mandagiu ir nemandagiu amerikiečių ir lietuvių kultūrose, kai tai būna pateikta kasdienėse situacijose (išreiškiant dėkingumą ir atsiprašymą)? Šiame moksliniame darbe aš pirmiausia gilinausi į teorinius aspektus, kurie susiję su mandagumo strategijomis pragmatikoje, vėliau tyrinėjau mandagumo raiškos priemones lietuvių ir amerikiečių kalbose, ir galiausiai lyginau mandagumo strategijų panašumus ir skirtumus, pagal tai, kaip jie yra išreikšti abiejose paminėtose kalbose. Tyrimo metodas, naudotas šiame darbe, yra kokybinė ir kiekybinė analizė. Tyrime dalyvavo 154 dalyviai: 75 amerikiečiai (50 moterų ir 25 vyrai) bei 79 lietuviai (48 moterys ir 31 vyras). Visi jie savanoriškai atsakė į klausimus. Tyrimas buvo pravestas internetinio tyrimų puslapio Survey Monkey pagalba (www.surveymonkey.com), kuris yra vienas populiariausių tyrimo atlikimo būdų pasaulyje. Jis suteikia galimybę tyrėjui ne tik gauti informaciją apklausos būdu iš respondentų iš viso pasaulio, bet ir apskaičiuoja rezultatus. Atliktas tyrimas parodė, kad dvi minėtosios kultūros tikrai naudoja dėkingumo bei atsiprašymo kalbos aktus. Jis taip pat atskleidė, kad Amerikiečių Moterų ir Amerikiečių Vyrų grupės yra linkę... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

The aim of this study is to investigate the politeness phenomena (particularly isiHlonipho) within the isiZulu speaking community in KwaZulu Natal. The study focuses on the understanding of isiHlonipho within the isiZulu speaking community and whether males and females from the urban and rural areas share a similar or different understanding of isiHlonipho. Furthermore the thesis investigates which of the existing Western/non-Western models of politeness are relevant for describing the politeness phenomena in the target community. In order to achieve triangulation, qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection were used. These comprised of interviews with cultural/religious leaders, discourse completion tasks, and interviews with males and females from urban and rural areas in Mdumezulu and Umlazi Township. My findings reveal that the understanding of politeness phenomena within the target community is more in keeping with that in other non-Western cultures than in Western cultures. Females from the rural area are found to utilize isiHlonipho more than those females from the urban area. On the basis of this limited sample, it is argued that females from the urban area may be beginning to reject traditional Zulu femininity in favour of more westernized identities. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.

The following study used politeness theory to explore the impact of simultaneously engaging in a face to face conversation and a text message conversation. Specifically the study used Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) five original politeness strategies to see whether strategy choice (in the face to face conversation) impacts the face threat present in engaging in multiple conversations. Multivariate analysis of covariance was used to understand the impact different politeness strategies had on the following variables: conversational appropriateness, relational/social appropriateness, immediacy, attentiveness, and politeness. Findings show that when a face to face partner ignores (no verbal/nonverbal politeness) a text message interruption the partner is seen as more relational/socially appropriate, immediate, attentive, and polite. Findings also indicate that aside from ignoring the text message, politeness messages that acknowledge the text message interruption and offer a relevant verbal message are viewed as more relationally/socially appropriate, immediate, attentive, and polite than those that indirectly deal with the text interruption. This study partially supports the popular belief that texting in the presence of others violates face to face conversational expectations and is perceived as “rude.” However, future studies need to look at the role and influence mediated conversational expectations play in overall conversational expectations.

The main purpose of the thesis is to explore the characteristics of politeness which are conveyed by the use of Japanese honorific forms (i.e honorific politeness). The perspective of the research is as follows: 1) the concept of politeness is regarded as being wider in scope than in major past studies of linguistic politeness in the West (e.g Leech 1983); 2) unlike many past studies of politeness related to Japanese honorific fonns, the research attempts to study the social effect of the use of an honorific form rather than the grammatical or semantic properties of such forms; 3) the analysis of honorific politeness is based on the findings about the mechanism by which honorific politeness mitigates discomfitlrre, and on the metalinguistic evaluations of honorific forms made by native speakers. Results from a questionnaire, which investigated the types of discomfiture which result from various kinds of inappropriate linguistic behaviom, suggested that the lise of an honorific form can mitigate two main types of discomfitme, which differ in degree of seriousness, depending on the social features of the situation in which the use occms. It is pointed out that the mitigation of either type of discomfiture should be regarded as flowing from a common type of linguistic choice, that is, compliance with a social nom1 goveming the appropriate use oflanguage in different kinds of communication situations, i.e. register rules. Furthermore, based on observations of the use of linguistic forms other than honorific ones, it is argued that honorific forms are one of many linguistic devices for realizing register differences, i.e. register markers. Results from the other questionnaire, which probed native speaker's evaluation of different types of language use for the communication of politeness, indicate that native speakers tend to place special aesthetic value on honorific forms and their use, independently of the seriousness of the discomfiture they can mitigate. Based on an analysis of the background to this tendency, it is argued that the value can be appropriately regarded as sharing many properties with the value which language users place on a certain part of register markers in a diglossic conmmunity. It is thus concluded that honorific politeness is a form of diglossia.

The dissertation is based on the analysis of thirty episodes of the American television series Friends with the focus on the CSIs (Culture Specific Items) and how these differences have been handled by Chinese translators who produced the subtitles for the English-Chinese translation. The analysis was based on the assumption that Mainland China’s culture is different from the US culture so people in these two countries may have problems in understanding CSIs if they are translated literally and if the subtitle translation is not adapted to the target audience. Such adaptation is normally known as localisation. The cultural differences that are ingrained in CSIs might have to be handled with caution in the production of subtitles. The main objective of the dissertation has been to analyse different translation choices which are currently used by the translators in questions, dealing with CSIs where cultural differences between mainland China and the US arise. The research discovered that repetition of CSIs is a strategy which underperformed, failing to help the Chinese audience to comprehend the cultural connotations associated with the CSIs. The paper has provided some recommendations as to how the subtitle translation of such CSIs might be handled in such a way that the audience will have a better understanding of the same.