Excerpt: This timely book presents a comparative empirical study of politeness phenomena in the English requests of native speakers and of speakers whose first language is Korean.

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This essay aims to discover differences and similarities in the linguistic behavior ofpoliteness in apologetic expressions between men and women in emails. Material wastaken from the Enron Corpus. This Corpus includes information about the senders andrecipients of the chosen email, the context, and an email thread. We searched for twodifferent apologetic expressions, "sorry" and "I apologize", and chose 25 of eachexpression to analyze superficially. We also compared them to each other and by thegender of the user. Out of those 25, we chose ten to analyze more in-depth, five ofwhich used "sorry" and the other five used "I apologize" as apologetic expression. Weanalyzed the emails through the lens of politeness theory, which apologetic expressionwas used, if humour occurred, and to what email genre it belonged. Our results basedon this study showed that women used the apologetic expression "I apologize" morethan men, and that men used "sorry" more frequently than women. One possibleconclusion of this is that women appeared to be more formal in their emails. They alsoindicated tendencies to be nurturing, cohesive, and cooperative in their language. On theother hand, men showed less tendencies of formal behavior and more informallanguage.

This paper examines some individual variables that affect adult Japanese learners’ self-perceptions related to learning and utilising Japanese polite speech styles in spoken dialogue. As Japan is considered a high context society, as well as having both horizontal and vertical social hierarchies; those wishing to be cohesive social group members must adopt different communication styles according to each relevant scenario. Speakers of the Japanese language utilise socially established linguistic features and strategies in order to orient one’s position within each social interaction relative to others, to navigate between different social groups, and to show respect or politeness towards others as a form of social lubricant. As such, utilising polite speech styles is an important- but complex- sociolinguistic skill to develop. There are two main aspects to consider when discussing how second language (L2) learners of Japanese become proficient in using politeness strategies. These are: acquiring the knowledge of how politeness strategies work and gaining the ability to apply this knowledge ad hoc in real communication situations. A survey was conducted for the purpose of identifying variables that affecta learner’s self-perception related to both these aspects. The results show a statistically strong connection between a learner’s perception of their own understanding and/or perceived abilities related to utilising polite speech styles in Japanese, and the variables of language proficiency, and lived experience within Japan. The results also indicate a potential connection related to the variables of native language, and age. Considering the results, advice is given regarding the way educational materials can be more tailored towards L2 Japanese learners’ specific needs related to polite speechstyles with the intention of better supporting the individual learner.

Traditional healers are one among professionals that are viewed as the most significant people in African Society. They are accorded the highest esteem because of the role they play in saving people’s lives and promoting cultural aspects such as ukuhlonipha amasiko in isiZulu. It should be remembered that this word ukuhlonipha which means to respect, is used across cultures to maintain peace within family and society. It all depends on which culture promotes it more than others. It is sociolinguistic truism that ukuhlonipha is essentially linked to the ubuntu philosophy of African people. However, traditional healers more than other people follow ukuhlonipha culture in numerous ways, especially when they meet, being consulted and during traditional ceremonies. They serve and promote what in IsiZulu is known as ukuhlonipha, which to the uninitiated and sometimes even to the scholars of this philosophy is a mystery. It is for this reason and others that people view them as the soul of society. This study looks at relevant sociolinguistic theories especially the politeness theory to analyze most of the hlonipha features shown by traditional healers, apprentice and people during consultation. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)

Abstract  The present work is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of pragmatic strategies for delivering critique, and types of politeness, used by undergraduate L2 students of English at different stages of peer-review discussion. The material examined consists of four corpora of authentic conversations between students, the main purpose of which was to give feedback on each other’s contributions during an English A-level course, at Mid-Sweden University. The conversations explored were carried out electronically, and represent four different online environments, or modes of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The material from the two asynchronous modes of CMC is comprised of L2 students’ written discussion board messages and spoken posts recorded using online software. The two synchronous environments under investigation are text-based and voice-based chat. Taking Brown and Levinson’s (1987) framework of politeness as a point of departure, the present study uses a combination of corpus and conversation analytical methods. The basic unit of analysis has been defined as the shortest message of peer-review critique that constitutes a thematic unit: these have been examined in terms of their content and politeness features associated with them, and analyzed in terms of the pragmatic strategy and type of politeness adopted. The types of pragmatic strategies or message organization patterns at different stages, i.e. initial versus subsequent feedback, of the peer-review discussion have also been analyzed. The results of the study show that the pragmatic strategies aimed at praise and agreement prevail in the corpus data produced by predominantly native speakers of Swedish. Even though the pragmatic strategies used for disagreement and negative evaluation are rich in propositional content, their occurrences and distribution vary across the four modes of CMC examined. These results seem to have wider implications in the context of online L2 learning activities, providing insights about the language of peer-review critique in a Swedish academic setting.   Keywords: computer-mediated communication (CMC), Conversation Analysis (CA), conversation management, discussion boards, feedback category, mode of CMC, peer-review discussion, politeness theory, pragmatic strategy, speech act of critique, text-based chat, type of politeness, voice-based chat, VoiceThread

Traditional healers are one among professionals that are viewed as the most significant people in African Society. They are accorded the highest esteem because of the role they play in saving people’s lives and promoting cultural aspects such as ukuhlonipha amasiko in isiZulu. It should be remembered that this word ukuhlonipha which means to respect, is used across cultures to maintain peace within family and society. It all depends on which culture promotes it more than others. It is sociolinguistic truism that ukuhlonipha is essentially linked to the ubuntu philosophy of African people. However, traditional healers more than other people follow ukuhlonipha culture in numerous ways, especially when they meet, being consulted and during traditional ceremonies. They serve and promote what in IsiZulu is known as ukuhlonipha, which to the uninitiated and sometimes even to the scholars of this philosophy is a mystery. It is for this reason and others that people view them as the soul of society. This study looks at relevant sociolinguistic theories especially the politeness theory to analyze most of the hlonipha features shown by traditional healers, apprentice and people during consultation. / African Languages / M.A. (African Languages)

<p dir="ltr">The present dissertation addresses the gap of how the three contextual variables (power, distance, and imposition) affect the use and perception of pitch range and final pitch contours in Central Peninsular Spanish polar questions. The methodological approach in this dissertation combines a production experiment in the form of a contextualized sentence-reading task (e.g., Brown et al., 2014; Henriksen, 2013) and a perception experiment using a pragmatic judgment task (e.g., Nadeu & Prieto, 2011). Both tasks systematically incorporated a set of situations that included the contextual variables of power, distance, and imposition. Thus, this dissertation provides a systematic analysis of power, distance, and imposition to investigate their influence on the use and perception of pitch range and pitch contours. To analyze pitch in the production experiment, a categorical analysis of final pitch contours (e.g., low-rising contour) and a quantitative analysis of prosodic features (i.e., pitch range and its conversion into semitones) were conducted. For the perception experiment, analyses included the comparison of linear mixed models to examine the perceived degree of politeness.</p><p dir="ltr">The findings presented in this dissertation support the Frequency Code Hypothesis in that they showed the relevance of pitch for signaling and perceiving politeness in requests in Spanish. The results from the production experiment suggested there are no effects of power, distance, and imposition on the selection of final intonational contours. Regarding the analysis of pitch range, the results from the production experiment indicated that the use of greater pitch range was associated with an increase in the social distance between the speakers. In the perception experiment, the results indicated that an increase in pitch range was directly associated with an increase in the perceived degree of politeness. Furthermore, the findings from this dissertation provided evidence for including a systematic analysis of the contextual variables of power, distance, and imposition to conduct analyses within the politeness framework instead of analyzing the formal/informal dimension in isolation The overall results of this dissertation contribute to the understanding of how suprasegmental features are employed in showing and perceivicing politeness.</p>