This thesis investigates help-seeking and effects of help-seeking on causal attributions for helping (i.e., what people believe caused help or lack of help). Additionally, it examines self-serving and other-serving attributions (i.e., to augment a person's positive sides and diminish the negative ones). Help-seeking was investigated in questionnaires, describing situations where spouses collaborate in doing household chores. A first study showed that women and men report using direct styles (i.e., explicitly verbalising the requests) more often than indirect ones. A second study showed that spouses inaccurately believe that wives in general would report more indirect and less direct styles than husbands in general. Causal attributions for helping were investigated in four studies with different methods, settings, and types of relationships (questionnaires, laboratory experiment; spouses doing chores, students and strangers doing computerized exercises). Consistent support was obtained for a predicted interaction between helping and the clarity of the request for help in determining the attributions. It is suggested that this finding is an effect of people comparing the behavior of one person with their beliefs about how other persons behave (i.e., consensus). Additionally, the findings did not support the claims that people make self-serving attributions and that the latter would be more pronounced among men than women. However, the attributions were other-serving. The thesis gives a novel understanding of everyday life by combining the issues of help-seeking and causal attributions. It also offers a discussion of the previous literature and of theoretical and applied implications of the findings.

本篇研究目的在於藉由分析句法直接性(syntactic directness)、語意修飾(semantic modification)以及內容 (content)來探討漢語母親規範語中的控制行為(control acts)，也就是指令(directives)和禁止(prohibitions)。語料來自一名以漢語為母語的母親與兒童之間的日常對話。研究結果顯示，指令隨著兒童年紀增長而遞減，而禁止卻隨著兒童年紀增長而遞增。句法直接性分析結果發現，不論指令或是禁止的情況下，漢語母親常使用祈使句(imperative)的句式。語意修飾方面結果發現，漢語母親主要是採用未修飾(bald)以及縮小(minimization)。內容方面顯示，指令常使用在從事能力活動(competent action)，而禁止常使用在得體行為(appropriate behavior)和自立(caretaking)。 / The purpose of this study is to investigate Mandarin maternal control acts including the directives and prohibitions in maternal regulatory language by analyzing syntactic directness, semantic modification, and content. The data collected were natural conversations of one Mandarin-speaking mother-child dyad. The data of maternal regulatory language was analyzed when the child’s ages were 2;1, 2;7, 3;1, and 3;7. The results show that the frequency of directives decreases with the child’s age, but the frequency of prohibitions increases. In addition, the preferred sentence type is imperative in both directives and prohibitions. The child’s cognitive development and the culture factors which would determine the style of regulatory language used by the Mandarin mother are discussed. Furthermore, the results of semantic modification reveal that bald and minimization are two dominant modifications. The mother’s adoption of bald and minimization may be influenced by her power status and politeness. Two major kinds of semantic combinations are also discovered in this study. Finally, the results of contents show that competent action often occurs in directives. As for prohibitions, appropriate behavior and caretaking are most related. Our finding would shed some light on the Mandarin maternal regulatory language.

i Abstract The MA thesis examines the politeness strategies which native speakers and non-native speakers of English employ in written English requests addressed to the faculty. The requests represent by nature the category of Face threatening acts and require a certain level of politeness. The account of politeness is based on the Face management theoretical framework by Brown and Levinson (1987). The empirical part compares on-record (positive and negative) and o↵-record politeness strategies and the level of directness (Blum-Kulka, 1987) comprised in two hundred email messages sent by students of British and Irish, German, and French nationality. The analysis discovered that the nationality/native language is to some extent a determinative feature in the choice of politeness strategies, while the gender of the student influences the level of directness of the request. The Appendix contains the full sample of examined emails. Keywords politeness theory, face management, request, on- record politeness (negative and positive), o↵-record politeness, directness of request

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect that a writing teacher's written comments had on improvement in L2 writing; whether the types of changes students made in their drafts after teacher comments were substantial at the content level and/or language level; to what extent the focus (content- and language-focused) and the directness (direct and indirect) of teacher feedback predicted improvement in L2 writing; and the teacher's and students' attitudes toward and perception of good writing and the role of teacher comments. The study had three major components. First, a quantitative study was conducted to examine the rate of students' successful revisions in response to the teacher written feedback. Using descriptive statistics, it was found that students revised more successfully in response to language-focused comments and direct comments than in response to content-focused comments and indirect comments. The next phase of the study investigated how the focus and directness of teacher comments resulted in and predicted improvement in writing. Using paired sample t-tests, it was found that teacher's comments on student drafts did lead to overall improvement in the grades on the revised essays. Employing hierarchical regressions, it was also found that higher rates of successful revision in response to content-focused comments and direct comments resulted in higher grades in the subsequent revisions. Using a one-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), it was also found that while students' writing improved significantly for new essay assignments in the area of content, there was no statistically significant improvement in students' linguistic accuracy in their writing over the course of the semester. The final part of the study examined the students' perceived need for teacher feedback and revision, and the teacher's view on writing. Using surveys and interviews, it was found that the teacher and students had different opinions about the role and importance of feedback. The students reported that direct corrections of linguistic errors were less beneficial to them, even though the teacher gave much more direct corrective feedback than indirect feedback over the course of the semester. In addition, while the students expected to have received the grades of each writing assignment, the teacher only commented on the drafts and gave out a single overall grade at the end of semester. The study, using quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze multiple sources of data, presented strong empirical evidence that the content-focused comments and direct comments provided by the teacher contributed to higher grades in the subsequent revisions of the same essay assignment, and that there was no effect of teacher comments, especially direct corrections on linguistic features, on longer-term improvement in L2 writing. These results suggest that when giving written feedback, writing teachers should take into account whether students are developmentally ready to learn the lexical and grammatical forms and structures corrected by teachers. The study, designed as longitudinal study in a real world setting, provided a rich description of the effect of a teacher's commenting practice and L2 writers' revision behaviors. / CITE/Language Arts