The Role of the Speaker’s Emotional State in Im/politeness Assessments

Vergis, Nikos; Terkourafi, Marina

doi:10.1177/0261927x14556817

Cited by 22 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…These all agree with the findings in Economidou-Kogetsidis' (2013) natural data and with the postulation that people feel the pressing need in real encounters to be more polite and thus less direct, with the underlying motivation for engaging in face-work (Rintell & Mitchell, 1989). What is more, the hearer of the requests in this study had a relatively higher status as the current or prospective teacher of the requesters and, as the related literature puts it, less direct strategies would be used more in low-high request situations (Blum-Kulka et al, 1989;Brown & Levinson, 1987), where people tend to deem conventional indirectness 'least impolite' (Culpeper, 2011;Vergis & Terkourafi, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Naturally occurring requests in Turkish: A case from an academic context

Çetinavcı¹

2020

Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics

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In terms of their directness and modification strategies, this study investigated how undergraduate speakers of Turkish formulate their naturally occurring requests in an academic context, in which they request things from an academic in his office. After a 4-year data collection period, the researcher analyzed 395 of the requests (hand-recorded as immediate field notes) made to him. The findings on levels of directness revealed that the strongest tendency is towards conventionally indirect strategies, while the female tendency towards them is even clearer. The dominance of conventional indirectness is in parallel also with the degree of imposition of the requests. 'Zero marking' is what dominates the findings on internal modification strategies, while some preferences, such as unfinished sentences, could suggest language or context-specific results. In light of these descriptive findings on a part of everyday language in academia, the study could in practical terms help learners and teachers of Turkish and Turkish learners/teachers of English or any other language as well. Moreover, it could contribute to the efforts towards handling the methodological concerns in pragmatics research about the extent to which elicited data can represent what people actually say in natural conversation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Naturally occurring requests in Turkish: A case from an academic context

Çetinavcı¹

2020

Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics

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“…Our study's evaluation of role-based relations is grounded on previous research on power and distance that used similar relationship designations (e.g., 'close friends', 'new colleague') to analyze the influence of the relation on politeness [18], [27]- [29]. Even though relationships change over time and during interaction [18], we assume that a basic evaluation is possible based solely on an agent's role forming the relationship designations.…”

Section: Research Expectations and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of Power and Distance in Human-Human and Human-Robot Role-Based Relations

Lumer

Buschmeier

2022

2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)

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The use and interpretation of social linguistic strategies such as politeness is influenced by multiple factors, e.g., the speaker-hearer relation. Such relations influence an interlocutor's expectations regarding the interaction and thus also its perception. This makes speaker-hearer relations constituting a partner model highly relevant for the user experience in human-robot interaction as well. This paper presents a questionnaire-based study on the perception of human-robot relations in comparison to human-human relations across different roles (e.g., colleague, assistant) and spaces of interaction (home, work, public). It was found that participants perceive robots differently based on space, as they do for human-human relations in corresponding roles. Overall, humans were evaluated to have more power over and more distance to a robot interaction partner compared to another human. Our results provide insights into an intuitive interactioninitial partner model based on roles.

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“…Each were formed by substituting the valence of the adjective in the corresponding root sentence. These sentence pairs were taken from a previous study (Vergis & Terkourafi, 2015), in which they were matched for offensiveness, emotional damage, and emotional state of the speaker. There were 12 positive adjectives (syllables: M = 2.83, standard deviation [sd] = 1.27; frequency: M = 9.24, sd = 1.69) and 12 negative adjectives (syllables: M = 2.50, sd = 0.90; frequency: M = 8.79, sd = 0.92), each used in two sentences.…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Immediate online use of prosody reveals the ironic intentions of a speaker: neurophysiological evidence

Mauchand

Caballero

Jiang

et al. 2021

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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In social interactions, speakers often use their tone of voice ("prosody") to communicate their interpersonal stance to pragmatically mark an ironic intention (e.g., sarcasm). The neurocognitive effects of prosody as listeners process ironic statements in real time are still poorly understood. In this study, 30 participants judged the friendliness of literal and ironic criticisms and compliments in the absence of context while their electrical brain activity was recorded. Event-related potentials reflecting the uptake of prosodic information were tracked at two time points in the utterance. Prosody robustly modulated P200 and late positivity amplitudes from utterance onset. These early neural responses registered both the speaker's stance (positive/negative) and their intention (literal/ironic). At a later timepoint (You are such a great/horrible cook), P200, N400, and P600 amplitudes were all greater when the critical word valence was congruent with the speaker's vocal stance, suggesting that irony was contextually facilitated by early effects from prosody. Our results exemplify that rapid uptake of salient prosodic features allows listeners to make online predictions about the speaker's ironic intent. This process can constrain their representation of an utterance to uncover nonliteral meanings without violating contextual expectations held about the speaker, as described by parallel-constraint satisfaction models.

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The Role of the Speaker’s Emotional State in Im/politeness Assessments

Cited by 22 publications

References 34 publications

Naturally occurring requests in Turkish: A case from an academic context

Naturally occurring requests in Turkish: A case from an academic context

Perception of Power and Distance in Human-Human and Human-Robot Role-Based Relations

Immediate online use of prosody reveals the ironic intentions of a speaker: neurophysiological evidence

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