Abstract
This paper considers politeness at the discourse level in terms of strategic choice. We begin with a discussion of the nature and levels of linguistic politeness from semantic and pragmatic perspectives, then turning to the way in which such strategies can be realized in natural language. A distinction is drawn between formal and polite linguistic behavior. We then provide a formal analysis in terms of the topological analysis of game strategies in an infinitely repeated game. This analysis extends that of [2]. It improves on that earlier work in three ways: (i) by considering a wider range of player ‘types’, (ii) by implementing the distinction between formality and politeness, and (iii) by analyzing a much wider range of kinds of politeness strategies, together with their positions in the Borel hierarchy [8].
We would like to thank the audience of LENLS 13 for helpful comments and discussion. The first author would also like to acknowledge the support of JSPS Kiban C Grant #25370441, which partially supported this research.
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Notes
- 1.
Actually anta and kimi seem to be relatively close in level of formality.
- 2.
Thanks to Daisuke Bekki for extensive and useful discussion here.
- 3.
As usual, whether this commitment is accepted by the hearer is independent of its introduction; cf. e.g. [6].
- 4.
Surely most of these cases involve ‘himself’ rather than the other option(s).
- 5.
Presumably this dialect also has a strategic use, by those who wish to appear lovelorn. We will disregard this complexity here.
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McCready, E., Asher, N. (2014). Discourse-Level Politeness and Implicature. In: Nakano, Y., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8417. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10061-6_5
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