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JSAI International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence

JSAI-isAI 2013: New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence pp 69–81Cite as

Discourse-Level Politeness and Implicature

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8417))

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. 1.

    Actually anta and kimi seem to be relatively close in level of formality.

  2. 2.

    Thanks to Daisuke Bekki for extensive and useful discussion here.

  3. 3.

    As usual, whether this commitment is accepted by the hearer is independent of its introduction; cf. e.g. [6].

  4. 4.

    Surely most of these cases involve ‘himself’ rather than the other option(s).

  5. 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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

    Elin McCready

  2. CNRS-IRIT, Toulouse, France

    Nicholas Asher

Authors
  1. Elin McCready
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  2. Nicholas Asher
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elin McCready .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Seikei University, Musashino-shi, Tokyo, Japan

    Yukiko Nakano

  2. National Institute of Informatics Research Division, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Satoh

  3. Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan

    Daisuke Bekki

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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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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10061-6_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-10060-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10061-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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