You-attitude: A Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

You-attitude is a pedagogically convenient cover term that subsumes considerable complexity, both with resped to the text effects it may include and the text characteristics that create these effeds. Some of the insights on politeness, tact, and deference found in the work of Brown and Levinson, Leech, and Fraser and Nolen can help provide guidelines for assessing how important a you-attitude may be in writing about a particular real-world situation, and case grammar and infonnation structure can inform strategies to enhance the expression of a you-attitude. Rather than being a binary variable, you-attitude appears to be gradable, and an informal student assessment of the you-attitude expressed in ten versions of the same passage suggests that the various strategies for enhancing the you-attitude conveyed by a text appear to have a cumulative effed, so that a greater sense of you-attitude is created when more strategies are used. L' « attitude centree sur la deuxieme personne » est une expression generique commode en pedagogic, mais elle cache une grande complexite, tant en ce qui concerne Jes effets produits que Jes caraderistiques du texte qui en sont a I' origin e. Certains des points de vue concernant la politesse, le tact et la deference, exprimes dans les travaux de Brown et Levinson, Leech et Fraser et Nolen donnent des indications pour evaluer I' importance d'une attitude centree sur la deuxieme personne lorsqu'on decrit une situation particuliere du monde reel; de plus, la grammaire des cas et la structure de /'information viennent en aide aux strategies pour accroitre l' expression de I' attitude centree sur la deuxieme personne. Plut6t que d'etre une variable binaire, cette attitude opere par gradation. Une evaluation informelle aupres d' etudiants, au sujet de /'attitude centree sur la deuxieme personne exprimee dans dix versions du meme passage, indique que Jes diverses strategies utilisees a cet egard semblent avoir un effet cumulatif, de sorte qu'on accroit la perception de I' attitude centree sur la deuxieme personne lorsqu'on a recours a des strategies diversifiees.

Performance‐based service quality model: an empirical study on Japanese universities

“…Therefore, a total of 67-items are developed for collecting data. Respondents are asked each question from "you" or "I" point of view in order to involve them more enthusiastically and to get the answers as to what they have experienced, in particular, following the suggestions of Engerrand (1975) and Rodman (2001). The structured questionnaires are designed in English language.…”