ISLP99 - ABSTRACTS

 In this paper I take issue with Brown and Levinson’s conception of politeness. In particular, I will argue that politeness is not communicated, it is not an implicature, and the absence of communicated politeness should not to be taken as a lack of a polite attitude. Expanding on an earlier proposal (Fraser, 1990), I will argue that in any normal conversation, politeness is the expected state of affairs, where what constitutes politeness is dictated by the  elevant socio-cultural norm for that interaction. Participants note not when someone is being polite but rather when the speaker is violating this norm. On this view, politeness is not communicated but is a type of perlocutionary effect, and any adaptation of linguistic form for purposes of so-called “negative” and “positive politeness” is done pursuant to achieving this expected state.

 Brown & Levinson's work on linguistic politeness is often regarded as having universal applicability, though scholars working on East Asian languages have often felt that something was missing or that their results did not fit that framework.  The search for a fruitful approach leads to Rule 1 of Robin Lakoff's 1973 article "Logic of politeness: minding your P's or Q's".  Rule 1, "Formality: Keep aloof", is a rule that bears reexamination in connection with an overall theory of politeness.
 Prevalent in Asian languages, honorifics are key linguistic features for linguistic politeness in the languages which use them. When the honorific forms used are appropriate according to the socially expected norms, they reflect appropriateness of context, and can best be understood as linguistic politeness rituals.
 This type of politeness differs from what has been viewed as the universal principle of linguistic politeness in that it is not the interactant that is central, but the context of speaking.  This context is constituted by the relationship of the speaker and the hearer and the speaker's attributes vis a vis the society as a whole.  By choosing the proper formal honorific forms while speaking, the context is indexed appropriately.  This is analogous to the proper use of such greeting rituals as 'Good morning.' Or 'How do you do?' in appropriate contexts and can be seen as politeness according to etiquette and protocol.
 A substantial amount of politeness is performed by people's acting in accordance with socially expected norms.  So why is it polite to obey socially expected norms?  The case can be made that it is because it serves the indirect kind of positive politeness.  One of the overlying strategies of positive politeness is to establish common ground, and it is in that connection that the use of such linguistic rituals as honorifics works as politeness.  One reason for the use of this etiquette-oriented politeness is that it provides a way to preserve distance by observing social norms.
 In this paper, Rule 1 of linguistic politeness (Formality:  Keep aloof) will be reexamined in the light of a number of questions surrounding honorifics, and it will be shown that it provides the basis for the union of strategy-oriented politeness with etiquette-oriented politeness, which is one more step towards a true universal of linguistic politeness.

 Linguists have tended to approach politeness from the perspective of pragmatics or sociolinguistics. In the first case, they have looked at it as an aspect of Austinian speech act theory or Gricean conversational implicature. In the second, they have examined it from a cross-cultural perspective, looking at differences in politeness systems or their realizations across cultures, including genders.
 Both of these approaches have yielded valuable insights and deepened our understanding of the workings of politeness. But here I want to consider another way in which linguists and other scholars can approach the general questions: what is politeness and how does it work? Using some of the methods and theories of discourse analysis, I will look at the prolific discussions, over the last decade or so in the American mass media, of the decline of "civility," politeness, or manners in American life. The topic has been the subject of much agonized (in both senses) debate, yet it often seems that the discussants aren't quite sure what they mean by these terms, much less how one might assess or evaluate their disappearance. Have we, indeed, become rude, uncompromising or vulgar? If we have, is it a new thing? If we have, why have we, and is it necessarily an augury of disaster, as conservative commentators often suggest?

 This paper is an attempt at analysing intercultural communication between Malays and Japanese, focusing on Linguistic Politeness in conversational interactions in Japanese. Firstly, linguistic politeness is approached not only from the western tradition of "volition" but also from the viewpoint of "discernment" as proposed by Hill et al (19860 and Ide (1989). This is central in Japanese communication. Secondly, however, the analysis is different from previous analyses on intercultural communication in that it is done not simply on the basis of cultural differences. It is done on the basis of conversational participation (Shea 1994). Thus, even if culture is said to be crucially linked to communication, this study is novel in the sense that it is able to find out what takes place in a particular type of intercultural communication , i.e. conversational interactions, in terms of how politeness is communicated without recourse to cultural differences and stereotypes.

Traditionally, and up to the late sixties, the use of pronouns in Swedish was characterized by rules similar to but not identical with those that still apply in European languages like French and German. Thus, the 2nd singular _Du_ was used in addressing intimate friends and relatives. The 2nd plural _Ni_ was used to address strangers, but only when particular politeness was not required. A form of the title of the addressee was required to show genuine politeness. This could take two forms. One was for the title to be used on its own, usually in its definite form. The other was for the title (without the definite article) to be followed by the persons's surname. In both cases the verb was in the 3rd person singular.
 In the late sixties, a reform was introduced, by government decree, requesting all Swedes to use the familiar _Du_ with each other, in all situations. Also, the greeting _hej_ was generalised. Until then, it had been reserved for use between intimates. In Sweden, the reform has been fairly successful, even if there was initial resistance, especially among older people. In the Swedish of Finland, traditional usage had been more in line with that of French and German, in that the use of the title was never as widespread as in Sweden. Concomitantly, _Ni_ could be used more widely, without loss of politeness. The Swedish reform has had some success in Finland too, but has not been universally adopted, even among young adults.  The norm among urban educated people is thus still fairly similar to that which applies in France or Germany.
Irish is unique among modern Western European languages in having preserved the inherited 2nd singular pronoun _tu_  for addressing all individuals, regardless of their status in relation to the speaker.  Likewise, the 2nd plural _sibh_ is reserved for addressing groups consisting of more than one person.
The paper will provide more examples from the two languages to show how this works. Also, some thoughts will be provided regarding the historical reasons for Swedish having and Irish not having adopted polite pronominal forms in the first place. Likewise, an attempt will be made to elucidate the reasoning behind the Swedish reform, setting it in its historical context of the important ideological events of the late 1960s.

 It has been widely noted that the system of personal reference in Japanese differs in a number of respects from that of English and other Indo-European languages (Miller, 1967; Suzuki, 1978; Barke & Uehara, 1999; etc.) such as the number and types of terms used. Indeed, Japanese personal pronouns provide a counter-example to the generally accepted characterization that pronouns "constitute a closed-class, in that few new pronouns ever enter a language"  (McArthur, 1996).
This paper takes a historical look at the strategies used in the maintenance of politeness within the referential system of the Japanese language based on a survey of 72 past and present second person singular pronouns. The open class status of the pronouns, it shows, arises from the existence of a taboo within the Japanese politeness system regarding direct personal reference.  It finds evidence of two major strategies: the first being what we call the "direct" strategy which involves the use of "title-like" Chinese terms in which politeness is embedded in the morphology of the word.  The second strategy is the "indirect" strategy which involves the adoption of new directional or locational nouns from other nominal categories into the referential system to refer indirectly (and thus politely) to the addressee.  Due to the effect of the taboo, as a term becomes more widely used in its new capacity, it becomes closely associated with its pronominal role, leading to an increase in referential directness and a reduction in politeness. A total loss of politeness results in an impolite term which limits the number of contexts in which it can be used. Eventually, such a term will fall out of use as a personal pronoun altogether, resulting in the necessity for the creation of new polite terms of address.
This paper, furthermore, finds evidence of gender differences in the types of strategies employed. The study receives strong support from a study of Modern Japanese usage by Ide (1992) who reports a tendency for women to use politer terms than men in similar contexts, and for them to judge terms as being less polite than men do.

 The aim of this paper is to consider the nature of impoliteness and related phenomena. Taking the largely theoretical exposition of impoliteness in Culpeper (1996) as a starting point, we investigate: 1) how impoliteness fits in with other modes of face threat, 2) the linguistic realisation of impoliteness, and 3) the defensive strategies participants use to counter modes of face threat. More specifically, we discuss the relationship between impoliteness phenomena and the kind of phenomena captured within Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model. We introduce the notion of ‘rudeness’ to account for some instances of incidental and unintentional face threat. We also emphasise the need to pay attention to both multiple goals and social and discoursal roles in interaction. Our data consists of extracts from ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentaries containing confrontational discourse between private car owners and traffic wardens in dispute over the legality of where a given car is parked.

Rome Chiranukrom
Department of English
Chiang Mai University

 The study of politeness from a pragmatic view reveals a strong relation to the concepts of activity types and role-relation. My paper includes first, the proposed different perspectives of politeness, namely: (1) the social norm perspective, (2) the utterance perspective, and (3) the pragmatic perspective.  As for the latter, the pragmatic perspective can be categorised into four headings, namely: (1) the conversational maxim view, (2) the face management view, (3) the pragmatic scale view, and (4) the conversational contract view.
 Second, the concept of activity types plays a crucial role in the study of pragmatics - more specifically -  politeness.  Knowing the nature of an activity type determines the degree of politeness of our course of verbal communication. My discussion in this part is based on Thomas's (1995:194-6) suggestions concerning a number of categories in which an activity type description could be included. These are : (1) the goals of the participants, (2) allowable contributions, (3) cultural differences ( which includes the topics of (a) the degree to which Gricean Maxims are adhered to or are suspended and (b) the degree to which interpersonal maxims are adhered to or are suspended,) (4) turn-taking and topic control, and (5) pragmatic parameters.
 Third, my research on the topic of 'role-relation' reveals a connection of this concept with the study of politeness and activity types. First, I will divide the topic of role-relation into two perspectives: (1) the social view and (2) the linguistic view. Concerning the linguistic view, I would like to propose a model showing that an interactant's social role is based on an activity role. In addition, an interactant's activity role depends largely on the nature of the activity type and the choice of the interactant in placing one's activity role at a spot along a scale between the social role (formal) and personal relationship role (informal.)
 I  base my assumptions on the notion that unless an activity type or a role-relation is assigned, one cannot say that an utterance is more polite than others nor can one assume that a sub-maxim (of conversational maxims) or a super - strategy (of face management ) or a need (of pragmatic scales) is valued higher than others. Thus, the study of the theories should take the key concepts of activity types and role-relation into consideration.

 One way of being polite in Japanese and Thai is to use a HIGH level of language as pointed out by Matsumoto (1989) and Diller (1985). This paper distinguishes degrees of politeness by reference to sets of typical situations that speakers would tend to agree. These could be distinguished in terms of politeness variables by classifying the language level of self-reference pronouns. These level of refinement, in turn, are closely linked to normal selection patterns involving self-reference pronouns as well as certain particles and other linguistic markers. Interestingly, this approach leads to a slight difference in the details of scaling in Japanese and Thai, requiring the recognition of some extra subcategorizations for Thai. In both Japanese and Thai there are three levels: "HIGH", "MIDDLE" and "LOW". The basis for the classification is determined by speakers' judgements. Functionally, notions like politeness and refinement need more study and cross-language theoretical analysis than has been possible in this study, which has focused on empirical description in only two specific languages. A crucial problem is the extent to politeness and refinement need to be defined locally for each culture or whether more general or universal definitions are possible. This study has attempted to show that at least for Japanese and Thai it is possible to make empirical comparisons using a fairly consistent framework, but the approach could be tested with more languages.
 

 Greetings in Chinese are a critical pragmatic issue to American learners. Several greeting expressions and the degree of politeness are problematic to the learners and cause them misunderstanding. This study deals with the politeness strategies in Chinese greetings by Chinese natives and American learners of Chinese. The data are drawn from interviews, questionnaire responses, and observations. Generally, the Chinese and the Americans share the following considerations in determining a greeting form. the time and the location of the setting, the addressee's social status and the closeness/distance between the informants and the addressee, and politeness. Furthermore, the two groups of informants combine strategies when greeting, for example, use of honorific address forms and in-group identity markers. Nonetheless, a significant distinction between the Chinese and the Americans is: The Chinese include questions in their addresses. They feel that the questions help demonstrate politeness since the questions show their concern for the addressee. To be polite when greeting an unfamiliar addressee in Chinese, the Americans exclude questions. Also due to cultural peculiarities in the use of greetings and the Americans' level of Chinese, they misuse or choose not to use various forms. On the basis of observations in natural settings, the researcher suggests ways to master these forms.

 This paper investigates into the switching of first-person pronouns commonly practiced by Thai females as a means to express politeness.
 In this paper, 'politeness' is regarded as a person's recognition of public self-image of others in relation to oneself. Politeness, in this sense, is defined not only by Social distance/closeness, but also by the person's relative position in the hierarchical Social relations. In an attempt to appropriately display ouch recognition, a Thai native speaker employs a wide array of first-person pronouns ranging from nicknames to highly hierarchical and court-styled pronouns. Knowing how to choose appropriate reference for oneself and others marks one's tactfulness and skills in human relations.
 However, being a Thai female complicates this complex matter even further. Under some circumstances a fifty-year-old woman may change her 'adult' self --reference to a childlike pronoun /nuu/ literally means 'mice,' which a five-year-old normally uses When speaking to the elders, At the same age level, and in the same circumstances, a Thai male can successfully pass every politeness 'test' by using just one pronoun /phom/.
 The analysis of this phenomenon reveals at least two gender implications. First, it shows how flexible and inconstant the public self of a Thai female is in the social context. Second, it depicts the asymmetry of social requirements, particularly ones concerning politeness, for males and females in Thai society. Put another way, it is more, difficult for a Thai female to assert herself politely in communicative action for Thai society expects women to adjust their social position more often than it does
 By studying conversational texts and interviewing Thai female speakers, the researcher will identify key factors involved in the making of this politeness strategy. Questions will be asked as to under what circumstances Thai females switch their self-references and how they do it to implement their politeness strategy successfully. Definition of politeness will also be asked on the part of the women. A combination of linguistic and gender perspectives will be employed in the analysis of social and gender implications of :this communicative phenomenon.

 Different models for politeness have been suggested as possible frameworks of understanding for investigations of cross-cultural communication (Grice 1989, Fraser 1990, Lakoff 1977, Leech 1983, Turner 1996). Most would agree that the teaching of politeness should be based on systematic pragmatic principles derived from empirical research (Meier 1997) rather than on haphazard lists of prescribed words and phrases which are thought to be polite in an abstract sense. In one politeness framework, Brown and Levinson (1987) propose that power, distance, and rank of imposition work together with face wants and needs to determine the appropriateness of specific utterances in interpersonal communication. Other key variables in this study are the specific actor roles (e.g. teacher, student) relevant to the EFL classroom.
 This presentation will explore the relationship between face wants and actor roles, focusing on power and distance. American teachers in Thai EFL classrooms could benefit greatly in maintaining an active awareness of these relationships. As manifestations of face are also interconnected with complex systems of worldview and behavior, a general cultural background will be developed in relation to Komin's (1991) heuristic of clusters of Thai culture and Richards and Sukwiwat's (1985) discussion of elements of communicative competence. It should also be noted that Thai politeness might be similar to Chinese patterns (Gu 1990, Mao 1994) although further research in this area is still needed.
 This study expands on research of Thai face in specific and culture in general. Study results will be compared with hypotheses developed from the literature base and data pools of cross-cultural interference.  Data are elicited from multiple sources: semi-structured interviews with Thai teachers, American teachers and Thai students in conjunction with a twenty item multiple-choice survey of 73 Thai students.
 Some aspects of Thai student/teacher roles and instances of American teacher behaviors in the Thai classroom will be described in an attempt to identify areas of potential difficulty in American/Thai classroom interaction.

 This paper describes the findings of a corpus-based study of the modals ,'can', 'could', 'may', 'might', 'will', 'would', 'shall', 'should', 'must', 'ought', 'need', and 'dare' in spoken and written Australian English. In the study systematic comparisons were drawn with comparable work on British English and Australian English.
 The use of the modals to realise various degrees of politeness by, for example, avoiding potential brusqueness and minimising the effects of straightforward factual assertion, are explored in detail. In their epistemic uses the modals are often used to serve a polite hedging function by attenuating the likelihood or heightening the 'unreality' of the proposition. In their deontic uses they offer the speaker a variety of means for the polite expression of conditions imposed on the addressee or upon other participants. The subject-oriented uses of some modals (ability 'can', volitional 'will', etc) are less relevant to politeness considerations. Differing practices in Australian, American and British English are explored.

Contemporary theories of linguistic politeness tend to be grounded in the pivotal concept of face threatening acts as formulated by Brown and Levinson.  As a result, relatively scant attention has been paid to the ways in which politeness can also be a function of shared understandings concerning the appropriateness of discourse-staging strategies.  This paper seeks to develop a perspective on linguistic politeness as it relates specifically to discourse organisation.  To this end, the concept of face threatening acts (FTAs) has been augmented to introduce the notion of primary face threatening acts (PFTAs).  Primary face threatening acts are seen to be speech acts by means  of which pragmatic goals are ultimately attempted but which depend for their success upon being adequately framed by focussed discourse-specific and context-specific FTAs.  The paper focuses on Australian English and suggests that politeness dysfunctions which occur between native speakers of Australian English and speakers of English from non-Western backgrounds could well be the result of different discourse-staging strategies.  Preliminary data from research involving Thai and Japanese speakers of English and native speakers of Australian English are cited to examine this hypothesis.

Seamus Cooney
Department of English
Western Michigan University

 Certain English poems use explicit or implicit conversational exchanges, carefully controlled in tone, which exploit the complexities of politeness behavior for their authors' own communicative purposes. Whether explicitly through dialog or implicitly through the implied presence and reactions of a hearer to a single speaker, such poems create a controlled interplay of the social roles and status of the interlocutors and dramatize, to satirical or emotional ends, a personal relationship in all its human complexity and ambiguity. An analysis of several examples from the 17th to the 20th century, from Donne to William Carlos Williams, in terms derived from Brown and Levinson will demonstrate my points. An epigram by Pope provides a good example.
 I am his Highness' dog at Kew.
 Pray tell me, Sir, whose Dog are you?
 The Pope couplet doesn't wholly depend on--though it gains its full meaning from—its explanatory title, "Engraved on the Collar of a Dog which I gave to his Royal Highness," since it would still work if we imagined it as speech attributed to the animal (in the tradition of Aesop's talking animals, say). But it gains from the information, since thinking of it as on a dog's collar entails thinking of a passer-by bending down to read the tag-only to be skewered by the polite aggression of the epigram--an FTA if ever there was one.
 But we readers of the printed poem are not bending down to read a dog's collar tag! Thus we are not the hearer whose "face" is threatened by the ostensible speaker (the dog) or by the hidden real originator (and who is that? The author Pope? The Prince, who authorized, if not authored, the couplet's presence on his dog's collar?).  No, we are onlookers, safe from threat and able to enjoy the imagined discomfort of the collar reader and the intuited polite impoliteness of the aggressor (dog/ Pope/Prince) as well as his canny elusiveness.
 Much here depends on rank. It is a Prince's dog who is being politely aggressive.  Thus it behooves the imagined reader of the tag not to take offence. The poet (Pope was often accused of snobbery) gains status from the association with the Prince at the same time as he hides behind his protection.  Another thing the Pope depends on is the currency of the word "dog" as applied to men (a subject explored by William Empson in The Structure of Complex Words). "You dog," from one man to another, at least in post-Restoration England, carries a tone of admiration mingled with awareness of official disapproval (rather like "You rascal!" or, in American, "You son of a gun!"). Thus it need not be read or heard as an insult. However, to ask you to whom you as a dog belong is to imply that you are subservient; such a query is perhaps aimed particularly at other frequenters of court circles. It's not merely one gay dog recognizing another of his kind, but one domesticated and tamed literal pet implying that there's a good chance his interlocutor is similarly domesticated and tamed and thus on the same low social level as he.
 Yet this potentially deadly insult is masked by the epigrammatic concision of the couplet, so that the only response felt to be possible by a reader of intelligence is a laugh, though with perhaps an inward pang! (Imagine how absurd it would be for a reader of the dog tag to take offence! At whom would he be offended? The dog? The dog's owner, the Prince?)
 This miniature poem, thus, engages with great subtlety and complexity, many of the strategies of politeness that occur spontaneously in conversational exchanges. We have several interlocutors, complex implications about the social distance between them, negative politeness ("Pray tell me"), "bald on record" utterance ("Whose dog are you?"), a grant of positive face to the imagined reader of the dog tag, with a further grant of face to the reader of the poem who must have enough wit to get the joke and enough social awareness to relish the play of roles.
 

 Linguistically, the Lisu express politeness by using the morpho-phoneme /-w/ placing at the end of the words, for example: [?aba] 'father' > [?abaw] 'father' (polite).  Intonation, stress and loudness can also show politeness or impoliteness.  Equally, taboos and slangs have important roles.
 Culturally, politeness and impoliteness concerns social status, that is, seniority, social rank (shaman village leader(s), villagers), age (elders-youngers), gender (men-women) and
roles of each person in the society.  Social values also play interesting roles.
 Manners and gestures are usually used to show politeness and impoliteness.  High and low position also have important roles.
 

 The present study focuses on children's comprehension and production of speech acts of politeness. The goal of the study is firstly to determine what the children's system of politeness is, and secondly to determine if there are any cross cultural differences in the children's system.
 Two models, Brown & Levison (1978, 1987' ) and Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1992), describe the politeness strategies used by an adult to facilitate communication with the person being addressed, that is to say to avoid using face threatening acts (FTAs). The children are thought to use their own strategies and system.
 The experiment to be carried out on French and English speaking children involves the recording of natural conversation and three tests.  The recording of natural conversation aims to show the children's production of politeness formula in an ordinary situation. The three tests aim to determine the children's comprehension of politeness phenomena. Children between the ages of 8 and 12 are asked to take part in a play game, to colour and comment on humoristic drawings, and to judge four saynetes for their acceptability or innacceptability in terms of linguistic politeness.
 The discussion centres on whether or not the children have a separate politeness system and if there are any differences between French and English speaking childrens' systems.

 A language is not only a set of cover terms for entities and grammatical structures which put these terms together to form meaningful utterances.  It also conveys a set of attitudes, a certain world-view.  That is not to say that language shapes thoughts and determines the way we think, but to state the fact, obvious to any bilingual person, that we "do things with words" differently in different languages.  Wierzbicka (1991, 1992, 1997), Gass and Neu (1996), Holland and Quinn (1987), Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), among others, argue quite convincingly that both the nuances of meaning of lexical items and related to underlying cultural models.  The question this paper is concerned with is what happens when the cultural assumptions underlying the mother tongue begin to erode in people live in a culture where a language other than their mother tongue is dominant.
 The cultural model in question is the Polish view of hospitality, or host-guest interaction (related to the more general model of politeness).  In brief, the Polish model of host-guest behavior assumes the host trying her or his hardest to persuade the guest to eat and drink as much as possible and to prevent their living.  The guest's role includes refusing second helpings of food and drink and only accepting after repeated urging from the host.  This is quite different from the North American (NA) English "non-imposition" model: the host making sure the guests have what they need but taking refusals at face value, the guest feeling free to accept/refuse food when offered (and helping themselves without and offer from the host).  Needless to say, Polish guests encountering the NA model often perceive their hosts as rude (they take their "polite" refusals as real, do not offer again, and do not try to prevent their leaving).  But, with time, many Polish immigrants accept the NA model of host-guest behavior/politeness and may adopt it as a standard.
 The question I was interested in was whether there was a relationship between abandoning the Polish model of hospitality and linguistic behavior.  In my sample of 13 Polish couples living in the US and Canada for 5 years or more, I found that it was indeed the case.  Two extralinguistic considerations proved to be salient: i) whether the couple had children, and ii) whether the wife worked outside the home (there was no cases of the husband staying at home and the wife working).  The length of time the couples have lived abroad (5-15 years) and the age (27-42) did not prove to be as significant as i)-ii).
 Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the cases where there were children and the wife did not work outside the home (type A couples), the Polish hospitality model remained strongest and the language of the parents showed least interference from English (4% of English expressions in a 2 hour dinner conversation with a Polish guest).  In the cases where both worked and had no children (type B), the Polish hospitality model was most eroded and the amount of English used in their interactions was significantly greater (up to 30% including code switching entire discourse units and use of English vocabulary items in Polish).
 Type B couples were the most interesting from the point of view of the relationship between cultural models and language.  A key question relating to type B couples is which came first: the erosion of the mother tongue or the erosion or the cultural models associated with it?  I am not sure that it is possible to answer it, but what this part of the study demonstrates is that language and cultural attitudes including politeness norms are very closed connected.
 From the sociolinguistic point of view the most interesting was the contrast between the two remaining groups.  Type C couples where the wife worked and there were children exhibited the hospitality model to a greater extent and had less interference from English (10%) than type D couples with no children and the wife not working outside the home (15%).  Though one might expect that the exposure to English in the outside work environment of mothers in type C couples would contribute to greater transfer, the wish to transmit the Polish language and culture to children proved to be more significant.
 I believe that a future follow-up study of the politeness norms of the children from the various settings would prove very interesting, though I suspect that they might not vary greatly.  While it is quite possible for a person to be bilingual it is much more difficult to be truly bicultural.

 Terms of address are an important part of face for professors in university communities.  In relatively homogenous communities, where members share common assumptions about the needs of others within the community, problems rarely arise in the use of terms of address.  However, in situations where members come from different language and cultural backgrounds the assumptions about the needs of others may differ from individual to individual, and the potential for misunderstanding increases greatly.  Assumption University in Bangkok is an example of such a multi-language, multi-cultural community.  At Assumption University, English is the official language while Thai is the language of the surrounding community, as well as the primary language for most of the student body.  In addition, while most of the students speak both English and Thai, the professors may or may not speak Thai.  The existence of two dominant languages at the university means that there are a number of terms of address available for students to choose from when addressing their professors, including the English choices of “doctor”, “professor”, “teacher”, “sir”, “madam”, “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, “Ms.” and “Miss”, as well as the Thai choices of ajarn (professor) and kru (teacher).  In a context like this, misunderstandings may arise for two reasons.  One is that while the Thai students are bilingual they may not be bicultural.  The potential exists for them to use English terms of address without knowing the politeness implications of those terms.  A second source of misunderstanding can be found in the fact that professors in this environment may be operating from either Thai or English cultural assumptions.  However, since such assumptions are not externally visible, students may use terms that do not match with the assumptions of the professor.  Specifically, this study seeks to identify (1) which of the possible terms of address are being used to address professors, (2) the assumptions of the students regarding the appropriateness of using the various terms of address available, and (3) the assumptions of the professors regarding the appropriateness of the terms of address available.

 Much research on computer-mediated communication (CMC) has focused on impoliteness amid the anonymity of cyberspace.  Though flaming and other types of abrupt language and behavior occur often, relatively little research has been done on politeness in CMC.  Of interest is the question of how the computer-mediated environment affects definitions of politeness and   whether these definitions differ from those in face-to-face and traditional genres of written communication.
 To explore these questions, we have chosen to use Korean because it has morphologically and lexically marked honorific forms that indicate politeness (or, in rare cases impoliteness) and, by the lack thereof, informality and impoliteness.  The rapid spread of the Internet and commercial providers (ISP) has turned the computer into an important tool for mediating communication in Korea.  The combination of clearly marked honorific system and the rapid spread of CMC makes Korean an important test case in discerning the effects of CMC on established patterns of politeness, many of which have deep roots in Korean cultural traditions.
 We plan to gather data from two types of CMC: synchronous chat-room discourse for commercial online providers and asynchronous postings on Korean newsgroups (han.*) and provider and Web page BBS.  Because the number of honorifics is large, we will limit ourselves to honorifics that occur in greetings and closings.  These include formulaic expressions such as "annyonghaseyo" ("hello," "How are you?") and "osooseyo" ("welcome"), the use of the honorific suffix "shi" with verbs, and nominative suffixes used in terms of address, such the polite "-nim," the bureaucratic "-ssi," and the informal "-i."  We will look at how these forms are used and represented orthographically in referring to other persons in the chat-room or thread. This format of analysis will allow us to investigate how honorific usage varies between persons who are familiar with each other and those who are not in the two most common forms of CMC.  We will compare the results of this analysis with secondary research on honorifics in face-to-face communication and various written genres.  In our analysis, we will also refer to the literature, both scholarly and popular, on CMC in Korea. Through this analysis, we expect our research to elucidate a number of differences in honorific usage between CMC and other types of communication that will become increasingly salient social phenomena as CMC continues to spread in Korean society.

 This paper is a critical examination of Brown and Levinson's (1978; 1.987) concept of face vis-a-vis the Thai concept of face, and the repercussions of the discrepancy between the two concepts for politeness theory. Brown and Levinson propose a theory of politeness which has at its core a definition of face formulated by noted American sociologist Erving Goffman. Goffman states: "The term face may be defined as the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact" (1967: 5). However, an examination of 71hai face shows that it is at odds with this explanation.
 According to Goffman's definition, face is determined on a per interaction basis. Ho states that Goffman "...seems to treat face as situationally defined, meant to refer only to the immediate respect a person expects others to show in each specific instance of social encounter" (1976: 868). Goffman's face is derived from a self-image defined in discrete encounters, and it implies that an individual's face can be reformulated in subsequent encounters. Furthermore, in Brown and Levinson's treatment of the phenomena, catering to "face wants" is a strategic move in interactions.
 While there is not much written specifically on Thai face, there are many anthropological studies of Thai people and culture (e.g., Hanks 1962; Phillips 1970). These studies give profiles of Thai personality, culture, and social interaction, which help to build a picture of what this concept represents for the Thai. In addition, works on Chinese and Japanese face (e.g., Hu 1944; Ho 1976; Matsumoto 1988) are plentiful. Because Thai culture shares traits with these Asian cultures, it is possible to learn about Thai face by looking at face in other Asian societies.
 A common trait is, for example, hierarchical social structure in the aforementioned Asian societies. In Thailand, as in China and Japan, it is more important for an individual to realize her place in the social structure and behave accordingly. In Thai society, a polite individual shows that she knows her place in the hierarchy by numerous means, and examples front Thai are given to establish this point. This is a crucial factor in the preservation of an individual's good face and that of her family. On the other hand, in western society an individual can be more concerned with promoting her own positive self-image, and her face and deeds have no impact on her family and their face.
 In this paper, I discuss Thai face and establish its crucial role in Thai social interaction and politeness. I also critically examine western face, particularly the definition used by Brown and Levinson. Using examples from Thai, I will show that Thais' face considerations are collectively based and that polite linguistic behavior in Thai has different underlying motivations than the ones discussed by Brown and Levinson.

 The phenomenon of linguistic indirectness is studied in Searle (1979b), with an emphasis on what are called directives in the taxonomy of speech acts that is proposed in Searle (1979a).  On Searle's view, the chief motivation for indirectness in directives is politeness. An alternative approach to `indirect speech acts' is offered in  Levinson (1983), which builds on the work of numerous researchers within the framework of Conversation  Analysis. Under this alternative approach, the chief motivation for indirectness is, again, politeness---this time in the sense of Brown and Levinson (1987). As in Searle (1979b), conclusions  regarding politeness are derived as Gricean implicatures from the Cooperative Principle, now, however, supplemented with the assumption of the mutual awareness of `face', i.e., speakers' and hearers' self-esteem: `politeness is a major source of deviation from rational efficiency' (1987: 95). `Face', a concept which is argued to be universal by Brown and Levinson, consists of two components: roughly, the desire to  be unimpeded in one's actions (negative face) and the desire to be approved of (positive face). It is face that is responsible for the existence of preference organization: the central idea is that acts such as requests and offers are intrinsically threatening to face and require `softening'. Thus the relative preferences concerning the possible reactions to pre-requests are all derived from (mainly negative) face considerations.
 In their introduction, which is a critical examination of their 1978 work, Brown and Levinson conclude that since their analysis of politeness treats the two aspects of politeness as basic wants (the `zweckrational' rather than the `wertrational' model of social interaction), it suffers from an `overdose' of `cognitivism' (1987: 48). As a consequence, it is not able to account for the fact that social interaction has its own emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it. Thus, Brown and Levinson note that politeness has a sociological significance `altogether beyond the level of table manners and etiquette books': it presupposes a potential for aggression as it seeks to disarm it, and makes possible communication between potentially aggressive parties. Hence the non-communication of the polite attitude will be read not merely as the absence of that attitude, but as the inverse, the holding of an aggressive attitude.  In addition to this, Brown and Levinson note that on the one hand, the core concept of face is subject to cultural specifications of many sorts, but that on the other hand `notions of face naturally link up to some of the most  fundamental cultural ideas about the nature of the social persona: honour and virtue, shame and redemption, and thus to religious concepts. [...] This emergent character is not something for which our current theoretical models are well equipped' (1987: 62).
 In this paper it will be argued that the emergent character of social interaction can be accounted for if the study of its internal systematics is supplemented with the theory of the development of social structure that has been proposed in the historical sociology of Elias (1993). Central to Elias' approach is the concept of a `figuration': a structured and changing pattern of human beings, bound together in a process of competition and interdependency. Elias focuses on the `civilizing process' in European society since the late Middle Ages, which he describes in terms of an extension and intensification of the chains of human interdependency in the course of time. This `generalisation of interdependency' is used to explain changing standards of behaviour and modes of experience in terms of major, long-term social transformations, in that it is argued to lead to extended and intensified `external effects' of one person's deficiencies and adversities upon others. `The higly differentiated social apparatus becomes so complex, and in some respects so vulnerable, that disturbances at one point of the interdependency chains which pass through all social positions inevitably affect many others, thus threatening the whole social tissue' (1993: 244). When confronted with such external effects, the competing social groups within these increasingly dense and complex networks of interdependency compel their members to adopt stricter standards of affect control. Importantly, Elias shows that the monopolization of violence in the process of state formation involved such restraints. The monopolization of violence by the state entailed the forceful imposition of domestic pacification, and thus facilitated more self-restrained forms of behaviour among people who no longer had to be constantly prepared for violent attacks. Interestingly, moreover, these constraints upon affective and impulsive behaviour were not just imposed from the outside, but also adopted through insight into one's more long-term and more remote connections, through an orientation toward the future, in which economic competition increasingly comes to take the place of physical violence. That is: the external `constraints toward self-constraint' turned gradually into self-imposed constraints, into a `second nature',  a `superego', or `conscience', experienced as part and  parcel of one's person. It is this general shift in the direction  of greater self-constraint and a stronger orientation toward the future that has made people more `civilized' in Elias' sense.
 Now, the civilizing process is in itself perfectly capable of accommodating the notions of both negative and positive face, for note that the process, being essentially a mechanism of undoing external effects---the negative consequences that one person's deficiencies and adversities have for others---through social  constraints toward self-constraint that result in civilized, `polite' behaviour, is driven by the pursuit of negative face---that is: the desire to be unimpeded in one's actions---and aims at an increase of positive face---the fulfilment of the desire to be approved of. Besides, it can be observed that the civilizing process can account for the aforementioned emergent properties of social interaction which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it:
 (1) Politeness and aggression.
 It was noted above that politeness has a sociological significance `altogether beyond the level of table manners and etiquette books', since it presupposes a potential for aggression as it seeks to disarm it and makes possible communication between potentially aggressive parties, so that the non-communication of the polite attitude will be read not merely as the absence of that attitude, but as the inverse, the holding of an aggressive attitude.  This property of social interaction is readily explained in Elias' terms. The ascription of an aggressive attitude to impolite individuals follows from the fact that polite, `civilized' behaviour is seen as the result of self-imposed constraints toward self-constraint that have their origin in the intention to undo the external effects of domestic aggression. Hence, impolite persons will be interpreted as people who put themselves outside the pacified order of a civilized figuration. (By the way, Elias does provide a detailed analysis which shows that the origin of table manners can also be traced back to the process of domestic pacification.)
 (2) Politeness and embarassment.
 According to Elias, `rationalisation' is no less characteristic of a civilizing process than the peculiar molding of the drive economy that we call `shame' and `repugnance' or `embarassment'. This aspect can of course be attributed to the fact that the decrease of the `threshold of embarassment' is one of the central effects of the development toward self-constraint that characterizes the civilizing process and eventually results in our `second nature'. As we saw above, also notions of face link up to such very fundamental cultural ideas about the nature of the social persona: honour, virtue, shame, redemption, etcetera. Correspondingly, it can be observed that the  non-communication of the polite attitude normally is accompanied by  feelings of shame, repugnance and embarassment.
 For that matter, Elias' theory of the civilizing process may in last analysis even yield a perspective from which politeness is not seen as `a major source of deviation from rational efficiency' (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 95) but, instead, as the rational way to behave {\em par excellence}, given the---self-imposed---limits of civilized and pacified figurations.

 Among the research strategies employed in the cross-cultural study of linguistic politeness is the identification and comparison of "similar speech acts". There are some notable problems in the cross-cultural study of speech acts, many of them methodological and involving the lack of naturalistic data upon which comparison is based, or variation in the way data was collected or analyzed. This paper is based upon several corpora of a single speech act, the compliment, drawn from five settings: American English (New York), South African English (Johannesburg), Polish (Warsaw), Zulu and Sotho (Johannesburg and Maseru). All five corpora were collected by this researcher, assisted by mother tongue speakers. The data on compliment + compliment response are naturalistic (ethnographic) data and provide a unique opportunity for comparison.
 The speech act of complimenting offers several advantages: (a) compliments are usually easily recognizable items of discourse, (b) they are, typically two-part sequences in which the compliment response (CR) immediately follows the compliment (C), (c) there is a widespread notion that compliments are offered "to make the hearer feel good", what Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1987) termed "un cadeau verbal" (" a verbal gift").
 Previous analysis of the two English corpora has revealed broad similarity in the form of the compliment, but significantly different profiles in their frequency and in the response (CR). American Cs are more common, and the dominant CR among status equals is other than Acceptance (e.g. "Thank you"). South African compliments occur less frequently, and the dominant response type is Acceptance. It has been suggested that the same act serves different functions in the two speech communities, with South African Cs being most often proffered as genuine expressions of admiration and American Cs as tokens to negotiate solidarity in conversation. The Polish CR data suggest that the dominant response type is Acceptance, but the positioning and higher frequency of the Cs within discourse suggests non-identity in function between the South African English and Polish compliments. Form, frequency and function require separate analysis here.
 The two African language corpora are interesting in several regards. First, there are prominent differences in urban and rural varieties of speech. Perhaps not surprisingly, urban varieties are more like English patterns in those same cities. This is a point of conflict for rural speakers who occasionally report that they do not understand what urban speakers are saying, i.e. what they are doing with words. Differences between urban and rural varieties include not only appropriate topics for compliments, but also the direction of compliments between status non-equals, appropriate response patterns, and the functions served by the same speech formulae.
 Closer analyses of the individual corpora reveal gender-based differences in all cases, although the extent of those differences also varies. The differences are strongest in the case of American English and Polish.
 The richness of these data allows for an in-depth discussion of the ways in which one particular speech act relates to linguistic and cultural settings. The paper will also discuss instances of intercultural miscommunication arising from pragmatic transfer.

 This paper aims to show that politeness strategies in Thai computer-mediated communication (CMC) discourse indicate that Thai culture is changing profoundly. However, this change is not entirely passive. Thais strategically use language as a measure to counteract and maintain their identity. This resiliency of Thai culture reflects the appropriation of Walzer's "thick" and "thin" conception in making sense of the tension between the global and the local in CMC discourse. A culture is "thick" in that it has deep roots in history, myth and shared beliefs and ideals dating back in time; on the other hand, a "thin" culture lack these myths and histories and instead relies on general and abstracted concepts which can be shared across a wide range of cultures.
 Prevailing wisdom regarding CMC and culture seems to be that it tends to make all the world's cultures the same. Thus one hears of such praises of the role of the global data network in promoting such good ideas and practices as democracy, human rights and so on. This paper, however, will take a critical look at this issue and tries to contribute to this growing interdisciplinary discussion by focusing on politeness strategies in Thai language CMC in order to find out about the following questions: How do politeness strategies tell us about this problem? How is Thai culture affected by the rising use of CMC and how this affection can be seen in the linguistic strategies for politeness? And how does this affection tell us about some of the theories of CMC and culture?
 Politeness is one of the ways for members of a group maintain relationships; it is thus instrumental in keeping the group together. This seems to ring true also in the virtual communities of online CMC. But CMC differs fundamentally from face to face communication in that the former affords a chance for anonymity while maintaining close conversations, making it easier for impoliteness to occur. Thai users of CMC discourse are aware of this. They become conciously polite, manipulating a wide range of deference marking devices available in the language. The ideology of politeness is evidenced not only by overt forms such as terms of address, pronouns and final particles, but also by the various strategies they perform which characterize Thai culture. In particular, the study pays close attention to cases where local conventions confront with CMC global norms.
 The data used in this study are gathered from such places as real time web chat communications as well as web-based and e-mail discussion groups. Various politeness strategies in Thai CMC discourse will be closely examined, and the ideology associated will be discussed. Apart from answering the questions above, the study will add to the ongoing debate of thick and thin cultures by focusing on how Thai culture maintains its resiliency and identity through language amidst the ongoing globalizing trends which are coming through CMC and the Internet.

 Effective cross-cultural communication takes place not only when one has mastered another language and can converse with speakers of that language, but also when one has mastered the nuances of common linguistic courtesy that exist in that language. What may be an acceptable expression of linguistic politeness in one language may be an expression of impoliteness in another language.
 A lecture by a Filipino friend on do’s and don’ts of linguistic etiquette led me to do informal research on how these rules in my friend’s language, Cebuano, compared with verbal behavior among the Kagayanen people, an indigenous cultural community on the island of Cagayancillo in the southern Philippines. The findings are presented in this paper. One similarity involved indirect confrontation or correcting by use of an example. It was found too that inconsistencies and non-equivalencies in meaning when comparing a Western use of English and a Non-Western use of English resulted in gross misunderstandings and impressions of impoliteness. Other Symposium issues that will be discussed in this paper are:
 --Politeness strategies used by native and non-native speakers
 --Differences between definitions and expressions of linguistic politeness
 --Politeness and indirectness
 --Impoliteness
 This paper will also include discussions on asking questions, familiarity and direct address, avoiding retaliation through the practice of nicknaming, why it is impolite to pay a verbal complement or say, ‘thank you,’ indirectness in letter writing, the use of honorifics, entertaining visitors, and saying no.

 In many Asian languages, systems of honorifics mark social relationships among speaker, hearer and topic. Because they define, identify, and reinforce these relationships, they are important aspects of socialization.
 In expatriate or immigrant communities, systems of honorifics become a source of cross-generational variation and potential misunderstanding. For example, Tamura found that when second generation Japanese-Americans failed to use honorifics, their parents called them "rude and disrespectful." (1994: 149) Indeed, honorifics can become a catalyst for language maintenance. Among Cambodian parents in Massachusetts, the ability to speak politely and to use honorifics appropriately is seen as an important reason for sending their children to Khmer language programs (Smith Hefner 1990: 257). On the other hand, avoidance of the use of honorifics may be a cause for code switching and even language shift. A study of Vietnamese-American young adults reported that while the 1.5 generation had no problem using honorifics in Vietnamese to their parents, using them with their own generation was more problematic. Instead, with Vietnamese younger than themselves, they report using English (Yost 1985).
 The current study investigates language use patterns in a Thai community living in the U.S., with particular attention to the use of referential terms to mark social relations. It focuses on the children of Thai immigrants studying in a summer Thai language course at a Buddhist temple in Northern California. The study explores the motivation of parents to send their children to Thai language school, the motivations of the students for studying Thai, attitudes toward Thai and English, and the students' proficiency in the use of referential terms in Thai. It draws on data from language attitude and language use questionnaires, language proficiency measures, participant observation, and recorded conversations among students, their peers, and their elders.

 The use of conventional forms for the realization of face threatening acts is an essential part of a speaker's communicative competence.  When communicating in a second language, a speaker often tends to use strategies that have become conventionalized in her mother tongue but are not so in the given language. In this case misunderstandings arise in intercultural encounters. What is misunderstood is neither the propositional content, nor (most of the times) the force of the utterance but its politeness degree. The source of such misunderstandings lies in the different degree of (in)directness that is considered to be appropriate for the performance of   speech acts in a given situation in different cultures.   Requests have been a very popular object of  cross-linguistic research. It has been found out that in some languages  (e.g. English) polite requests are conventionally realized through questions (conventionally indirect speech acts) whereas in others (Greek, Russian) directly through imperatives. Suggestions, on the other hand, have not been studied extensively. Similar to requests, suggestions threaten the hearer's negative face although the future act is not in the speaker's  but in the hearer's interest. Moreover, the speaker endangers her own positive face by implying that she knows better than the hearer. Nevertheless, since the act is not in the speaker's interest the threat is not as big as in the case of requests. Aim of the paper is to compare the conventional strategies used for the realization of suggestions to those used for requests in languages like English, German Russian, Italian and Greek and to find out  whether speakers tend  to be more indirect when suggesting (since suggestions are not as threatening as requests) and whether there are common forms used for the realization of both requests and suggestions in all these languages. Moreover, it is of interest to see whether the use of a conventional form in one language (imperative, question with modal auxiliary, negative question) transferred in another can cause misunderstandings as far as the politeness degree of the utterance is concerned, so that foreign speakers are misjudged as impolite or hyper-polite.

 This paper is an attempt to trace the origin and development of linguistic politeness in Thai. It proposes that traditional communities in rural areas are dominated by kinship relations. "Age" is a vital factor in classifying people to different levels on the kinship scales. The older one is, the more authority one has. In such communities, kinship terms have been an important way to show politeness.
 In traditional 'city' communities, however, social relations are status-based. The higher one's status, the more elaborate term of reference or title one gets. In such communities the speaker's self-effacement and hearer's elevation have been the main strategies in showing politeness. Commoners when speaking to the King use pronouns referring to the highest part of their body. Head and hair are used as symbols of self -effacement. The pronoun used in addressing the King refers to the lowest part of his body - the sole of his foot. In traditional 'city' communities, politeness goes one way from inferiors to superiors.
 In modern 'city' communities where education and egalitarian are propogated, polite words or polite particles have been developed and taught in school. Aristocratic speech have been redefined as politeness indicators for people in general. Unlike politeness intraditional communities, in modern 'city' communities politeness goes both ways - from inferiors to superiors and from superiors to inferiors.

 1.     In the vein of Matsumoto (1988 and elsewhere), partially Ide (1989), and Ide et al. (1992), I present in this paper certain situations in Japanese honorifics, where Brown & Levinson's (1987) theory of negative politeness yields unsatisfactory results. To remedy this, I introduce a specific set of principles that seems to be operative in determining the choice of proper honorific forms in Japanese. For instance, (1) below is not only perfectly grammatical but also it exhausts almost all of negative politeness strategies discussed in Brown & Levinson 1987 such as (i) being conventionally indirect, (ii) use of plurals, (iii) giving deference, (iv) nominalizing, (v) apologizing, (vi) questions/hedges, (vii) being pessimistic, etc. In fact, (1) has a sufficient sophistication in manifesting the speaker's cordiality toward the addressee.
 (1) Makoto-ni kyoosyuku de gozaimasu-ga, o-taku-no hoo-kara  kisya-no saisyuu'an-o watakusi domo-no-hoo-ni o-sirase nasaru-koto-ga dekiru-desyoo-ka?
 'If it is not terribly inconvenient, would it be possible for you to inform us of your final decision?'
 2.    Despite its grammaticality and extensive application of various politeness strategies, as an honorific sentence, sentence (1) is inadequate on two crucial accounts. It fails to observe conditions of what I call <De-agentivization Principle> and <Benevolence Principle>. First, the verb o-kaki-nasaru 'writing (a letter') needs to be converted to o-kaki-ni naru (literally, 'it occurs  for someone to be in a state of writing a letter').This rhetorical conversion, namely defocusing of agentivity on the part of the honorific subject, has an effect of creating an illusory state of affairs in which the exalted person is relieved from 'menial' labor or service. Second, as shown in the improved (2) below, sentence (1) also needs to be rephrased in such a way that the speaker's request is to be expressed as a form of petition so that the exalted subject can bestow his 'writing a recommendation' in the form of gift on his subordinate as a beneficiary of benevolence.
 (2) Makoto-ni kyoosyuku de gozaimasu-ga, kisya-no saisyuu'an-o ukagaw-ase-te itadak-eru- desyoo-ka?
 'If it is not terribly inconvenient, would it be possible for us to hear about your company's final decision (on the matter)?'
 3.     A Japanese speaker may feel awkward or even uncomfortable when he is greeted with a store manager's conventionalized expression 'What can I do for you?' To him, such an offer, welcoming and friendly though it might be in the American cultural context, is an instance of blunt violation of the principle of benevolence which says that the superior is always a benefactor and cannot be indebted.  The paper includes discussions on three other major principles with reference to the exalted party's space and actions.

 The aim of this research is to observe to what extend the same politeness strategies are used by native speakers that belong to the same sex in  different cultures, with special reference to English and Greek.
 A questionnaire is distributed to the same number of male and female native speakers of English and Greek, all university students. The questionnaire gives the students a number of situations and asks them how they would form requests for these situations.
 First of all, differences in politeness strategies within the same culture are  taken under consideration, and then follows a comparison of politeness requests made by male and female native speakers cross-culturally, where the main points of focus are the following:
 1) firstly, to what extend male speakers of English and Greek use the same strategies in the same situations, and
 2) secondly, to what extend female speakers of English and Greek use the same strategies in the same situations.
 A discussion follows where the main issue is the universality of politeness strategies, with special interest in the expression of requests by male and female speakers of different cultures. Throughout the discussion current views about the universality of politeness requests (with references to languages other than English and Greek), and also views about how men and women express politeness requests are taken under consideration.

 Privacy is one of the main problems in intercultural communication. In some cultures, privacy is clearly marked in intercultural communication.  There are rules governing human interaction regarding maintenance of personal privacy. Violation of personal privacy leads to communication breakdown and social disharmony. In some cultures, the boundary between personal privacy and public property is not clear. This is revealed in various speech situations and discourses such as gossip, personal inquiry, and correspondence. This paper will present examples from Asian and Western cultures.

 Most theories of linguistic politeness primarily address interactions between mother-tongue speakers of the same language.  Discourses in which at least one participant is a 'nonnative' are less adequately accounted for by current models, although it may be in just such discourses  -- with no simple consensus of cultural norms, and foregrounding of in- and out-group social roles -- that the politeness dimension of interaction proves most salient. Yet while politeness may be a high practical priority for the learner, didactic and pedagogical designs for second- and foreign-language instruction generally offer only fragmentary ad hoc help with its acquisition.  This paper reviews the main theoretical thrusts of the study of linguistic politeness in relation to the nonnative-language curriculum, surveying core problems in modelling the politeness of nonnatives and addressing the extent to which -- and how -- politeness may be more clearly brought within the scope of instruction.

 This paper reports on an investigation into the use of address terms by English/Cantonese-speaking bilingual children in Hong Kong. We would focus on the use of terms of address, especially kinship terms versus the use of personal pronouns in relation to politeness in different languages. Data was collected from two bilingual projects in which conversations between subjects and investigators were tape-recorded and transcribed during the period during the age between 2-3 years.  Monolingual data from CANCORP (Lee at. al 1992-94) will also be drawn to make comparisons between the English-Cantonese bilingual and monolingual Cantonese children’s usage of terms of address and pronouns.  Cantonese, one of the main dialects of the Chinese, provides a good source for studying kin terminologies. Like other Asian languages such as Thai and Japanese, it emphasizes explicit polite speaking.
 Results show that bilingual children prefer to use personal pronouns while monolingual children use more of the address terms:
(2;04.07)
*CHI: < You sit here , you sit here > [/] you sit here .
(2;05.23) (CANCORP: CCC20523)
*CHI: ze4ze1 co5 &aa3 .
%gls: sister-voc  sit PRT
 The above examples show the difference between our bilingual subject and the monolingual child in their choices when making the same request: the former prefers to use the second person pronoun while the latter opts for an address term.   This may be due to the influence of English, which, like most of European languages, does not have a complex hierarchy of the kinship terms like that of the Chinese.  Bilingual children tend to make the relationship more simple though it may be regarded as impolite in the eyes of the Chinese people. For examples, our bilingual subjects address their maternal grandmother with kinship term while they call their paternal grandparents by their first names.
 The second person pronoun also serves the function which is similar to the terms of address but it appears to be much intrusive and comparatively less polite:
(2;06.08)  (CANCORP: CCC20608)
*CHI: lei5 zip3 zyu6 wo3 .
%gls: you hold ASP PRT
 The impolite effect in the use of “lei5” in Cantonese is not as explicit as its English counterpart “you” as in this example taken from our bilingual subject:
(2;02.03) You get, I eat [to Daddy, Taking chocolates off shelf]
 Difference in markedness between Cantonese and English may be the main reason to explain the resulting speech production.  Such direct transfer from Cantonese to English may lead to different pragmatic meanings.  However, degree of emphasis also affects the outcome:
(2;07.01)  You go there , you go there okay ?
 The weak tone of “you” together with questioning tone and tag at the end shown in the above example serve to alleviate the level of impoliteness by increasing its tentativeness.  Also, the importance of the final particles should not be neglected in the development of children’s polite behaviour.

 In the spring semester, 1999, 12 students in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Chung Hsing University (NCHU) in Taichung Taiwan swapped email with the USA key pals for 14 weeks and with the 15 key pals from Germany for 6 weeks. The nationalities of the students and the key pals are Chinese, Malaysian, Myamrian, Cyprian, German and American.
 NCHU students are required to write sometimes on the weekly topic and sometimes freely. The USA key pals are all volunteers. The common characteristics of these volunteers are that they are interested in intercultural study. The 15 German key pals were required to contact NCHU students and to write a 20-page term paper talking about the sociolinguistic phenomena or email discourse analysis.
 NCHU students were reminded frequently that a good and polite key pal should do three things in each email message: talk about what was discussed in the international key pal's last email, answer all the questions asked by the key pal, and talk something on new topics to facilitate the key pal's next reply. My intuition of the three jobs should be ideal.  For the study, the students' and the key pals' email messages are the linguistic data for discourse analysis. The analysis will be viewed mainly from the viewpoint of pragmatics.
 The practice of my ideal email politeness might be very difficult. The difficulty results from the habitual conversational styles patterned by the society where one is from, the age difference, the gender, the ethnicity, the purpose of the communication, and the individual differences. The questions usually catch the most attention and are well taken care of. When one does not ask questions, American key pals are most likely to talk about the counter topics; the Chinese and Germans are less likely to.

 Wuming Zhuang has a large number of sentence final particles, many having more than one function. Several of these words form a striking contrast between polite and impolite speech when they occur on otherwise identical sentences in identical circumstances. For example, when a host offers food to a guest, the very polite way to respond is *Gw leuz, gw leuz." (eat PTCL, eat PTCL). When the particle 'leuz' is used, the sentence is gentle, and could be translated "in a while perhaps I will have some, thank you." The speaker is not asserting that they will eat the food, but is simply acknowledging the offer of the food. If, however, the guest were to say "Gw bwq." (eat PTCL), he would come across as downright presumptuous. He would have appropriated for himself the place of the host. This sentence means "Of course I will eat it, I have the right to this food." Similarly when the host offers food, if he uses the particle 'veiq', he is politely encouraging the interlocutor to eat food, but using the particle 'bwq' would be very pushy and rude. In this paper the authors analyze the meaning and usage of four different sentence final particles, paying particular attention to the factors which determine the politeness or impoliteness these particles convey in particular situations.

 In a connectionist model, a set of Thai words related to the concept of politeness was derived from the study of the definitions of the word "politeness" in terms of a network of words, or wordnet. Three main concepts can be abstracted from this wordnet: (1) the physical properties of politeness, e.g., soft, smooth, light, sweet etc., (2) the affective and evaluative aspect of politeness, e.g., good, comfortable, right, kind etc., and (3) the physical action or manner of politeness, e.g. sit, bow, slow, quiet. etc.. Ten words from each concept, totaling 30 words, were selected from the basis that they were not language specific only to Thai. These words were then used for the study of lexical concepts. The opposites of these 30 words, i.e., soft-hard, good-bad, sit-stand, were drawn to make a set of 30 pairs of opposites These pairs of opposites are used in an experiment to measure the degree of relatedness of the opposites to the concept of politeness. Using politeness as a prime concept, subjects were asked to rate how much the opposites are related to the prime by using Osgood Semantic Differential Rating Scale. Two hundred university Thai students half male and another half female were the subjects doing the experiment. They used a computer program to mark the rating scale for these 30 pairs of opposites which were prompted individually on the screen in a random order. The reaction time of the rating was measured, from the time when a single pair of opposites was displayed on the screen to the time when the subject marked the rating scale. The profile of the rating scales of the Thai subjects towards the set of these 30 opposites, consisting of the three main concepts aforementioned, as well as the reaction time of the subjects in doing the rating of each concept help to hypothesize the cognition of politeness in Thai. The research methodology is recommended for further cross-language study.
 

 This study is a critical review of Brown & Levinson (1987), based on about 30 hour-long--naturally-occurring conversations between Japanese people of different social ranking. Brown and Levinson attempted to establish a universal politeness theory based on the notion face Presented by Goffman (1967). This Politeness theory has been criticized especially by linguists who study languages which include systematic honorific systems. (See Ide (1989) and Matsumoto -(1988, 1989).) These criticisms are intuitionally understandable, but data-based supports are necessary so that the criticisms can be more Persuasive. For that reason, this study analyses about 30-hour- long-transcribed-conversations between people of different social levels, and attempts to show that Politeness for Japanese people premises a social hierarchy which is incompatible with the Politeness theory postulated by Brown and Levinson.
 We have selected two different sources for the data relevant to this study. One is conversations between Ms.Tetsuko Kuroyanagi and several guests of different ages, sex, and social ranking on the TV interview program called Tetsuko no Heya. The other source includes fifteen-minute segments of conversations performed by university professors, university clerks, a doctor and a elementary school teacher. Each interlocutor is asked to perform and record conversations with People who are higher and lower in rank, so that we can detect their different strategies depending on their social rankings in conversation. These conversations are analysed, based on use and non-use of polite and plain style, use of honorifics, different uses of sentence final particles, use of slang, colloquial expressions, and jokes, etc.
 The results of these analyses show that Japanese speakers are quite sensitive to their positions in the social hierarchy among conversation members. They first set their proper positions and Politeness level based on the social hierarchical relationships and then try to make a successful conversation with other interlocutors, utilizing Politeness strategies permissible within that level.
 The observed Politeness is complex, such as showing closeness (positive Politeness In Brown & Levinson's term) within the deference Politeness level (negative Politeness). This Politeness strategy Is quite different from Brown & Levinson's simple scheme In which people choose one of the Politeness strategies, which are, in order, the least face-redressive "positive strategy", "negative strategy", and the most face-redressive "off record", depending on the weightiness of an face threatening act. Japanese Politeness, on the other hand, can be complex, because people use politeness strategies permissible within the first-set politeness register.
 In the Japanese culture, people are considered polite or well-bred when they know how to use different registers depending on their positions in conversation. Based on the transcriptions of natural conversations, this study shows that Japanese Politeness is based on a social hierarchy which needs a politeness theory different from Brown A Levinson's theory which is based on an egalitarian society.

 People may apologize for being rude or impolite, but they rarely apologize or even "thank themselves" for being polite. This implies that, among other things, rudeness or impoliteness is more "marked" than etiquitte and politeness. Contrary to the logical research consequences of this implication, the literature on linguistic impoliteness/rudeness is remarkably thin. Sociolinguitics textbooks usually include a tiny s6ction on taboo and swear words, with the least attention to their pragmalinguistic variation intra- and interculturally. One discourse' genre in which such words are used extensively is that of insulting ( jeers, taunts, sounding, etc, are members in the insulting generic family). Insults may be expresions of anger , instances of what Leech(1983)calls banter, or ritual utterances. The present paper explores insulting in a rural community to the south of Egypt. Ten native informants participate in the study by filling in an observation sheet. The analytical focus of the study is on the linguistic patterns,perceived degree of rudeness, and sociolinguistic implications of the collected insults.The results thereof are interpreted in terms of the ideological and sociopolitical makeup of the community.

 The crucial role played by politeness in linguistic expression and in human social interaction in general cannot be overstated.  It is also the case that speakers of different languages have different means of encoding politeness considerations.  Therefore, it is of great importance to investigate the particular politeness strategies speakers resort to in specific languages as a means to further our understanding of the social functions of language.  The present work analyzes the relationship between politeness and diminutive suffixes in Spanish.  In Spanish, diminutives can serve politeness strategies, as in the sentences:
  ?Gusta un cafecito?  ?Would you like some
 coffee?? and ?Alguna otra cosita?  ?Anything else for
 you?? (said, for example, in a store).
 Spanish diminutives have undergone a grammaticalization process which has made them available not only for the expression of small size but also of a variety of other more abstract concepts, among them intensification, approximation, and pejoration.  In the case of the diminutive of politeness, a meaning shift involving pragmatic strengthening appears to have taken place.  The diminutive in its inception has a meaning related to the physical, propositional realm:  the meaning 'small'.  Moving away from it, the polite diminutive, brings forward considerations of social relations and social interaction where the speaker's intentions and attitudes are the most important meaning that gets across.  In this sense, the diminutive serves as a pragmatic hedge, which can be used to soften or weaken the illocutionary force of an utterance, and, therefore, as a politeness marker.  In certain dialects of Spanish, like Mexican Spanish, diminutives have undergone a further extension and can be employed as honorifics or deferentials.
 To conclude, this paper presents a study of politeness strategies involving Spanish diminutive suffixes.  More specifically, using the theory of metaphor and R. Lakoff's (1976, 1980) and Brown and Levinson's work (1987) on linguistic politeness, I analyze the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms through which diminutives are recruited to perform such function.  All in all, the use of the diminutive to express politeness is just another way in which social considerations impinge upon language.
 

Background:
 It has long been observed that lexicalized politeness marking exists in Japanese, and functions to distinguish overtly marked polite forms, from their plain forms (ie. non-overtly marked forms). This is seen in, for example, the verb inflections  -(r)u  vs. -masu, and the copular da  vs. desu, as well as on adjective and nominal prefixes -(g)o  vs. their non-marked variants. Similarly, it has been noted that variation in politeness marking also serves to semantically  differentiate the many personal referentials that are in use in modern Standard Japanese (see Harada 1975, Niyekawa 1991, Shibatani 1990, etc.).
 Although some scholars prefer to view this variation as a graded system of politeness, (for example Miller 1986, Harre and Muehlhaeusler 1990 etc.), it is claimed here that the binary opposition seen in the data listed above reflects more faithfully the nature of the wider lexicalized politeness marking system, and that it works together with other features to form the distinctions existent in the pronominal system, and those of the honorifics system as well. Although such an approach has not been taken thus far, similar feature-based analyses of honorifics have been previously published (eg. Harada 1975, Hinds 1976).
Analysis:
 Initially, the domain of analysis as a semantically discrete class of words will be confirmed. The existence of politeness marking (+/- OPM (overt politeness marking)) will then be posited, and backed by lexical evidence from other grammatical categories.
 Upon these premises, a paradigmatic description of the personal reference system of Standard Japanese will be offered, and the following lexical items will be analyzed.
 1st Person: watakusi, watasi, atasi, boku, uti, ore
 2nd Person: sotira, otaku, anata, anta, kimi, sotti, omae, temee, kisama
 3rd Person: kare, kanozyo
 The major distinctions between the systems of first, second and third person will be discussed, and their implications noted.
 Politeness is also marked on plural suffixes in Japanese, and so the values of the following will be given and co-occurence restrictions will be considered.
      1st Person     2nd Person     3rd Person
     1.     -              - gata                  -
     2.  - tati           - tati                  - tati
     3.  - ra             - ra                    - ra
     4.  - domo          -                       -

Conclusions:
 Although this paper will concern itself primarily with politeness, it will become clear that other features are equally needed to fully describe the pronominal system; for example, speaker-gender marking, and proximity marking.
 In this way, this analysis will be demonstrated useful for understanding the dynamics of the wider honorifics system. Furthermore, it is believed that in languages such as Japanese, a distinction between pragmatic politeness and lexically marked politeness must be made to enable meaningful language description.

        Maintenance of friendly relations is one of the typical characteristics of Thai people.  According to Komin (1998), being polite, kind and helpful, and caring and considerate receive a high value in both urban and rural Thai society.  This suggests that Thai people would be hesitant to refuse when they are asked for help.  The present study aims at examining what Thai speakers would do when they would rather reject a request.  What strategies do they apply when refusing requesters in different status situations?  And how can they make their refusals less face-threatening?
        The data collection method is a discourse completion task adapted from Liao and Bresnahan(1996).  The questionnaire consists of short descriptions of five situations--refusing a higher status, a lower status, an acquaintance, a close friend, and a stranger.  110 respondants were asked what they would say when they prefer to reject a request.  They were also told that they may choose to say nothing.  It is hypothesized that Thai speakers adopt different refusal and politeness strategies according to the variable of power and distance of the requesters.  It is likely that they are more reluctant to refuse a higher status and a close friend due to the status and the brotherhood spirit values.

 Observing Gricean maxims of conversation, especially the maxim of quantity in this present study, may violate consideration of politeness. In breaking "news' about patients' conditions, either to the patients themselves or to the patients' relatives, Thai doctors have often been criticized for being too reserved, i.e., not being informative enough. This study will investigate how considerations of "face" have effected the communicative strategies (bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness or opting out) chosen by doctors. For example, some of the topics to be investigated are whether or not being very informative on a doctor's part could lead to difficult commitments to some undesirable or awkward future actions. Another example is whether or not doctors fear their positive face would be threatened once they have provided the sought-after information to the patients' relatives. In this study, we propose to conduct an investigation into these politeness issues with 25 doctors and 120 medical seniors at Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University.

 In their discussion of politeness in child language, Brown and Levinson (1987) suggest the necessity of more research on the role specific cultural beliefs about "face" play in children's socialization (38). A number of publications on child language support the view that directives (e.g., requests) and indirect hints (e.g., questions) are communicative strategies that preschoolers (age 2.5-5.5) use in satisfying their needs. These strategies, however, are not necessarily manifestations of politeness (B&L, 37) but rather tactics to get adults to attend to their needs. My fieldwork on Thai preschoolers' politeness shows that we do indeed find in verbal interactions of these children with adults both directives and indirect hints. However, while doing FTAs to their adult interlocutors, these young Thai children are also displaying their deference or positive politeness strategy.
 In Thai culture, most parents teach young children to be respectful and polite both to family members (parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc) as well as to newly acquainted elders (the parents' friends, older cousins, etc). This taught politeness even precedes language fluency: as soon as Thai children acquire enough muscular control (as early as 8 months) and well before they have acquired polite forms of address, they are encouraged to form a "waj," a gesture indicating respect formed by joining the palms of the hands together while bowing the head. Soon after the children can verbalize, they are told to use the polite marker "krab" or "kha" when speaking to their elders. Thus, it can be hypothesized that positive politeness strategies should be highly detectable in a Thai child's language even when that child is engaging in FTAs such as making a request or complaints to adults. In these transactions even the preschool child shows awareness of "face."
 Although the notion of cultural "face" is not always relevant for a child speaker -- as for example when the child's power relative to their adult interlocutor is strengthened by the presence of its primary caretaker, at which times the child reverts to direct expression of its wants -- my fieldwork conducted with 20 Thai preschoolers of varied socio-economic backgrounds shows that their directives and indirect hints as used in FTAs rarely lower the addressee's positive face. In fact, the potential offense to the addressee's positive face is often mitigated.

 This paper investigates the use of the /KH/ polite particles in Thai, realized as /kha/~/kha/ and /khrap/-/khrap-phom/ marking politeness in male and female speech, respectively. They are classified by most linguists as a type of final particles in Thai. Some label them as discourse markers. Syntactically, these words are apparently simple words, but their occurrence car. be complicated because they are not always found in the sentence-final position, as has been maintained in most grammar books. Pragmatically, these words are important in social interaction, but there has not been a study that specifically focuses on their communicative function. Based on a corpus of approximately 70,000 words in the form of dialogues taken from J.S. 100 radio program, this study, therefore, attempts to answer some remaining questions concerning the syntax and pragmatics of the /KH/ polite particles in Thai, for example, When should one use or not use these particles? What are their syntactic constraints? For what purpose are they used? It is hoped that the result will give insight into the particle word class in Thai and be useful to those who study Thai as a foreign language.
 The result of the study shows that syntactically, the /KH/ particles occur mostly at the end of a sentence, but also in some other positions, e.g. following the topic of a sentence. Pragmatically, these polite particles perform interpersonal ,function, represented by consultative style in Thai. They are used, for example, when one asks questions, responds to a question, expresses agreement, greets and addresses a person, etc.

 This paper investigates the politeness in Khmu culture through the use of address terms.  The address term is normally used as an in-group identity marker.  The address terms for kin in Khmu are based mainly on kinship terms, whereas the address terms for non-kin are based on titles or occupations, names and kinship terms.  The complicated kinship system in Khmu is therefore firstly investigated and then the address system used for kin, non-kin and outsiders is investigated.  Married kin with children and unmarried kin are normally addressed by different terms.  The Khmu way to teach children the complicated address system is to address married kin with children by terms that would be used by the speaker's children.  The address term based on the eldest child's name is also very popular and appropriate to address a married person.  The use of formular for greeting and leave taking and the soft intonation are also important to express politeness and respect.
 

 1. This paper, dealing with recent developments in Japanese, tries to account for changes in the use of linguistic forms usually considered as falling under the domain of politeness. Their recent uses, including exaggeration in/ and facework, can, however, usually not be covered by traditional politeness approaches, and the theory of communicative virtues is applied (Marui et al. 1996) to explain the phenomena.
 2. Very little remains in terms of politeness phrases in casual talk in Japanese. Apart from institutionalized situations, which are thus characterized, the overall use of linguistic expressions traditionally indicating politeness has decreased considerably (Reinelt 1988) and many have taken on an "institution-indicating" character. Probably at the same rate, an increase in other uses of such means can be observed, and will be dealt with in this paper.
 3. Exaggeration, often including polite and impolite forms (Panday 1999), sometimes even rudeness, has become necessary to build up friendship, to stand out, and generally to be recognized as a person at least in a variety of situations in Japan. This means that exaggeration has become an important part of facework.
 4. To cover such facework in social interactions, a theory that surmounts the confines of the prevailing politeness theories by encompassing other elements is required.  The theory of communicative virtues (Marui et al. 1996) can comprise various kinds of "facework" and uncommon uses of "politeness expressions".
 5. Ironically, the concept "face" has been shown to be inappropriate in the context of Eastern languages (Matsumoto 1989, Mao 1994). The new contents of "face"work in Japan is based on many "Western" elements, but they appear characteristically changed.  As such a face is becoming necessary now in Japan, although it is used differently from the traditional face notions of MEN or MENTSUU, the theoretical term face has come back home to its country of origin (de Kadt 1999).

 A number of studies have reported that Japanese language has various kinds of honorifics.  One of the most salient use of honorifics is the choice of plain predicate forms, da, or formal predicate forms, desu/masu.  Previous studies have claimed that the speakers of Japanese choose plain or formal predicate forms in order to express their assessment of the contextual situation.  (Matsumoto, 1987; Ide, 1989; Maynard 1993).  The common explanation among these studies is that the speakers’ choice between plain and formal predicate forms depends on three factors: (1) difference in age, status or power (2) degree of intimacy (3) degree of formality of situation.  According to their explanation, a speaker constantly uses the same speech level form, either plain or formal form, to the same addressee unless the degree of the formality of the situation changes.  One of the typical use of plain predicate forms can be observed in conversations between family members or close friends, while formal predicate forms can be observed in a student’s speech when talking to her or his professor.
 It is often observed, however, that the speakers switch plain forms to formal forms even when they talk to family members or close friends in informal situations.  This observation has been remained to be unexplained by the previous claim that the formal forms express the speakers’ formal attitude toward the addressees who are in higher position in status or role-relationship, for example.  By analyzing such situations observed in Japanese conversational data, this present study tries to find the another aspect which can explain this switch from plain to formal forms.  The ultimate purpose of this study is to propose that speakers use formal forms in order to express their identity that has been conventionalized in Japanese culture and society.  This study further suggests that the Japanese honorifics expresses two different aspects simultaneously, one is formality and the other is sociocultural identity of the speaker.
 As our data, we have observed 10 sets of Japanese family conversations at dinner table settings.  One typical example of the speaker’s use of formal forms with the addressee observed in our data is a wife talking to her husband, “Gohan desu yo.” (meal COP ADD HON FP “ Dinner is ready.”) The use of formal form desu in this example, instead of the plain form da as in Gohan da yo, cannot be explained by the previous explanation that the speakers use honorifics to express formality for the addressees.  The wife and husband in this example usually talk with the plain forms each other, but she switches plain to formal forms in this observation.  Why?  The careful observation of the data led to the another aspect which affects the wife’s choice of formal form.  In Japanese society, women, especially wives are considered to use the higher level honorifics and act more politely than men as socially expected behavior.  Moreover, doing the housework such as making dinner has traditionally been considered to be wives’ job.  Therefore, by finishing cooking and talking to her husband, with the formal form instead of the plain one which is her basic speech level to her husband, unintentionally she express her conventionalized social and cultural identity as a wife in Japanese society.
 This study concludes that Japanese formal predicate forms expresses not only formality but also sociocultural identity of the speaker.  Previous studies from western perspectives have a tendency to see that speakers intentionally use honorifics to express formality to the addressees.  This study, from non-western perspectives, shows that speakers unintentionally use honorifics to express their conventionalized sociocultural identity.  Thus, we claim the possibility that two different aspects of honorifics, as a marker of formality and as a marker of sociocultural identity, interplay when speakers use honorifics.

 Like some other peoples in the world. the Vietnamese people pay much attention to the politeness in their linguistic communication.
 1.  This research paper will survey some of its manifestation as follows:
 1.1  Using personal pronouns with the motto "humble when referring to oneself. honorific  when addressing to others"
 1.2  Using relative nouns as provisional pronouns to communicate in society.
 1.3  Using verbs, combinations of modal verbs of' honorific and deference or of mitigation and modesty in communication.
 1.4  Using modal particles at the end of  utterances such as  'a', 'ohi', 'nhi', 'nhe', 'he', etc.
 1.5  Using hedges with tact and indirectness
 1.6  Using fillers to express hesitation, appealers or cajolers before the main message.
 1.7  Using utterances in question form instead of request or command form
 1.8  Using forms of re-sequence such as re-request, re-invitation before stating the main message.
 2.  From the above surveys, it can be said that beside the universal linguistics mentioned by pragmatists in the theory of politeness, linguistic politeness in the Vietnamese language also has its own characteristics, which need studying more profoundly.

     This paper addresses the question of how role and status relationships impact on choice of lexical item as well as choice of register in the lexical set of verbs meaning 'visit' in Japanese. The set of verbs includes: 'hoomon suru', 'ukagau', 'ojama suru', 'tazuneru', 'otozureru', 'yoru', 'asobi ni iku'.   Semantic aspects of the Japanese verbs of visit are described from a contrastive point of view with a set of English verbs (Australian usage) for 'visit'.  The English verbs considered in this study are: 'visit', 'go/come see', 'call in/by', 'drop in/by/over', 'go/come round', 'pop in/by/over', 'stop in/by'.
 The analysis revealed that the relationship of the addresser to the addressee and the purpose and duration of the visit are encoded in the verbs.  In both languages, the verbs range from the idea of a formal, prior arranged going (or coming) to see a person or place to a very informal event.  The degree of formality that is semantically contained in the chosen verb for 'visit' is determined by how well the interlocutors know each other or the people to whom they are referring.
 The findings support Matsumoto's (1988) notion that social context is amplified in Japanese speech events but that the honorific system in Japanese is more than a strategy of negative politeness to achieve coercion of the addressee (1988:419).  The paper also discusses Silverstein's (1985) notion of how the verbs of visit in Japanese as metapragmatic formulae represent communication as pragmatic social action and form a culturally-specific representation of communication (1985:143).  The paper also includes a brief discussion of how usage of honorific language can serve to express social boundaries within a society.

 Translators face an enormous task in translating texts from languages which are both culturally and typologically distinct from the target language. Highly complex socio-cultural values are, in many cases, encoded rather discretely in the linguistic structures used for narration. The manifestation of cultural values is to some extent also dependent on the linguistic structures available in the language. The translation of  expressions denoting request and command in Kinnauri (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the north-western region of India) is one such case. In this paper we will examine the request and command strategies in Kinnauri and contrast that with strategies in English in order to discuss its implications for translation purposes.
 Kinnauri predominantly uses the imperative construction to encode requests and commands. The difference between a request and a non-honorific direct command is made here by means of the choice of the imperative markers on the verb. The distribution of the verb inflectional morphology reflects a complex interplay of a range of semantic and pragmatic factors. The variables such as honorificity, social hierarchy, cultural norms about displaying respect, the age factor, and, whether the utterance should be viewed as a concise instruction, a suggestion, an advice or an urging are some determinant factors concerning the choice of the imperative markers. English, on the other hand, uses the imperative construction or the ‘direct’ command strategy only in extremely restricted contexts, preferring to use the indirect means for this purpose. For example, using the WH-question construction for requests/ commands.
 Another significant observation that needs to be made in this connection is that Kinnauri, unlike English, has a morpho-syntactic mechanism to encode phenomena such as politeness and respect even in declaratives. This is morphologically encoded on the verb by means of the subject agreement suffix and also by means of the choice of pronominals. The availability of linguistic means to encode politeness in the grammar of a language (Kinnauri, in this case) makes it redundant to choose yet another, an indirect means of structurally encoding this distinction in request/command constructions. Distinct from this, in languages such as English where neither the verb agreement system nor the pronominals marks such distinctions, there seems to be a need to use some other linguistic mechanism to distinguish explicitly different points on the request-command continuum. (Languages may, however, differ concerning which points of the scale they choose to distinguish). In English this distinction is encoded by using two distinct structures, using the imperative construction for direct instructions in very restricted contexts and WH-imperatives in more polite contexts. This, in short, suggests that different cultural values may be encoded differently in languages, partially depending also on the linguistic devices available in that language.

 In the study of politeness there are two fundamental questions: what is politeness and how do individuals acquire the ability to perform in ways which are considered polite by the society they live in.
 Expressing gratitude is important in balancing politeness relations between individuals, and an inappropriate expression of gratitude or the absence of gratitude, where gratitude is expected, can have a detrimental effect on an interaction which, in turn, can have negative long-term consequences on the relationship  between the individuals itself.
 In English, thanking is the most common form of expressing gratitude and, in the main, children are taught this routine by their parents and caretakers.  However, in this study currently being conducted on responses to thanks, it is clear that thanking and giving responses to thanks is an intricate process with an identifiable structure which is highly context dependent.  The objective of this study is to examine  to what extent the thanker and the thankee are engaging in a structured ritual, and to examine how rigid the components of the ritual are.  Being able to identify the components would lead us to an understanding of what a given society's values are with regard to what individuals may expect of each other in terms of the other's resources (time, effort, possessions).  There is some evidence to show that whenever the thanker and thankee engage "appropriately" in acknowledging gratitude and in accepting that acknowledgement then  there is a kind of harmony which is in line with the harmony that exists when two individuals show mutual support for each others' face.  Is this politeness?
 Not knowing how, or not being able, to express thanks and responses to thanks in a manner deemed appropriate in alignment with the norms of gratitude rituals can leave either the thanker or the thankee feeling that they, or their interlocutor, is not adequately polite.  This is particularly problematic for individuals who move between speech communities and cultures  and who are not familiar with all the intricacies of the rituals of the new community or culture at a metapragmatic level.  An understanding of the societal values underlying the forms of the gratitude ritual would give us better insight into what is perceived as being violated when the gratitude ritual is perceived as inappropriate by one of the interlocutors.  In this paper, I aim to present components of the gratitude ritual and the values to which they relate and to show how not knowing those values can have negative consequences for one, or both, interlocutors.

 A computational model for the degree of changes in politeness by adding word endings to expressions in Japanese is proposed.  In the proposed model, two stochastic features are assumed:
  (1) For each expression, a situation where the expression would be to used can be     represented by a probability distribution of the politeness value in a psychological space, and
  (2) For each word ending, a situation corresponding to the most suitable expression to which the word ending would be added  can be represented by a  probability distribution of the politeness value in a psychological space.
 The change in politeness resulting from the addition of word endings is calculated by the difference between these probability distributions. The information theory is applied to the calculation.
 It is expected that there is a linear relationship between the degree of politeness of original expressions and the degree of changes in politeness by adding word endings to the expressions.
 Psychological experiments  were performed to verify the  proposed model.  The degree of politeness of expressions was evaluated by the paired comparison method and  Thurstone's method.   The experimental results  show the expected linearity,  so the proposed model has been  verified qualitatively. The results were also discussed by the linguistic intuition.
 The proposed model gives theoretical bases for the generation of complicated  polite expressions by the combining simple polite expressions.

 This paper presents the Vietnamese politeness in two aspects: Linguistic and cultural. As for Linguistics, pronouns including kinship terms are prominent features that are related to the age, social status, and intimacy of the speaker and the listener. Some nouns can be used as pronouns expressing politeness.  Cac ban "friends"   refers to a group of listeners. Dong chi "comrade" can be used both as a second pronoun and the third pronoun preceding the name, and refers to the party's members. Ngai "Mr., gentlemen" can be also used as a pronoun for the high ranking people. Moreover, in each type of dialogue, such as greeting, leave-taking, requests and apologies, there are some certain verbs precede the sentence, such as Xin , Lam on "please", which express politeness. Particles can also express the attitude or mood of the speakers relating to the degree of politeness. The intonation can also express politeness. As for cultural aspects, some manners, such as walking in front of a senior person without bending the body, or holding something above another person's head without saying anything, are not considered impolite. Before eating each meal, especially in the family, the youngest ones should invite all the seniors like the grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, brother (s), sister(s), to eat first. Anyone who finishes eating and wants to leave before, has to ask for permission to leave. Greeting by shaking hands shows politeness. Touching cheeks between a Vietnamese and a foreigner shows the intimacy and politeness too.

 This study aims to determine the indirect use of language by Thai speakers. The data was collected from two sources, one from the conversations drawn from five contemporary novels awarded as best novels of the year; the other was collected from a questionnaire investigating 475 subjects of the study about their choice of direct or indirect ways of speaking in certain situations. The subjects were selected by the multi-stage sampling method and grouped according to occupation, gender, level of education, and age. The findings from the conversation analysis indicate that the use of the indirect speech act was mostly found in interrogative constructions, followed by the declaratives, and imperatives respectively. The major function of indirect speech used was found to convey irony. By contrast, the investigation into the subjects' choice of direct or indirect use of language shows that the subjects preferred an indirect way of speaking predominantly to emphasize politeness. It is obvious from this point that Thai speakers use indirectness as a communicative politeness strategy. In addition, there is a proportional relationship between the subjects' use of indirectness and their educational level. In other words, the higher the group's level of education is, the more likely they are to use an indirect way of communication.

 The Tsouic tribes, the oldest of the Austronesians,  inhabit the highest areas of the central mountain range in Taiwan. They include the Tsou, Kanakanavu and Sa'arua tribes, comprising a population of over five thousand people together. They have been strongly sinicized over the past  fifty years, but their culture has a good chance of survival, if the recent  efforts of cultural and language revitalization can continue even after the  recent weeks of earthquakes hitting these areas.   In the proposed paper I intend to describe the phenomena of politeness and their native evaluation as I was able to observe  them over the past decade. Besides the universal politeness strategies we can  observe a lack of words, expressions for social occasions like leaving, starting  on a trip or beginning certain activities, expressing sorrow or condolences.  There may be some taboos behind this: By hiding the immediate plans, the bad  spirits had no chance to stop them. There are also other taboos about not being  polite to one's elders and own relatives.   In these languages the word for politeness is directly derived from the word for fear, shyness. Politeness towards outsiders from other villages among the  elderly was expressed by singing greeting forms and words of welcome,  alternating. I plan to introduce some of these spontaneous  songs.    In the southern Tsouic language of Sa'arua we can observe that  the appellation of elder people depends on how many children they have. If a man  has several children, his respectful name will be changed, so the family status  and number of offspring (also for grandparents) is evident from how they are  called. The same change of name applies for women, too. Details of this follow  in the paper.   Another interesting case of "impoliteness" I wish to introduce is the ritual of proposal in the northern Tsou tribe. When relatives  of the young man go to the potential bride's house, the father of the bride must  demonstrate anger and should scold the guests, be rude to them, if he agrees to  the marriage. The guests are supposed to tolerate the worst scolding, are  forbidden to talk back, since this is why they came. On the other hand, if they  are treated politely, this is a sign of refusal.    The ritual language and stories of elderly are rich in polite  metaphors. I plan to introduce and explain some of these.   Since the aboriginal people live in a Han-Chinese society, I  plan to conclude with cases where Chinese and Aboriginal politeness differ: attitudes of space and intrusion, body language, explicitness of communication.  The Chinese concept of "face" is difficult to accept for the  aboriginal people for whom it all smells of dishonesty.    Since these endangered minority languages are inadequately  studied, I hope that this paper can contribute some questions for further  research.

   In a model of linguistic politeness, Brown and Levinson (1987) introduce two basic conceptual tools of human interaction: face and rationality.  In Japanese, however, social context plays a more vital role than the speaker's strategic language use (Ide 1989: Matsumoto 1988).  By examining a Japanese formulaic expression onegaishimasu (translated as "I ask you to..." or "I request ..." in English), this paper argues that conventions, not rationality, are primary in linguistic politeness of Japanese.  I argue that the use of the conventionalized formula elevates interpersonal relationships and constructs metapragmatic meanings of politeness in groups and in society.
 The analysis of this study is based on data collected from spoken and written discourse in Japanese.  This paper first presents multiple meanings of onegaishimasu.  Then, the paper demonstrates that using onegaishimasu as a formula reflects the importance of presupposing
aspect in linguistic politeness of Japanese.
 Let us first look at the example (1) in which the student submits a term paper to the professor and uses onegaishimasu.
(1) go-shidou-no         hodo   yoroshiku onegaiitashi-masu.
    HON-guidance-POSS about  treat well onegaishimasu HUM-HON
    "Onegaishimasu (I would like to ask you for your guidance)."
 Here, the use of onegaishimasu conveys the speaker's simple request to the interlocutor for guidance.  At the same time, the speaker uses the expression because the use is socially required in this context.
 Onegaishimasu carries other meanings in different contexts.  Onegaishimasu is a routine behavior of relation-acknowledging in (2), and of greeting in (3).
(2)  A junior student (J) makes an international call to a senior student
(S) and uses  onegaishimasu after having asked some questions.
  1  S: jaa, mata ne, hachigatsu-ni o-aisuru no tanoshiminishi-te-masu.
         well again SFP August       HON-see   look forward-exist-HON
         "Well, I am looking forward to seeing you again in August."
  2  J: kochirakoso ano mata yoroshiku onegaishimasu.
         me too    well again treat well onegaishimasu
         Doumo shitsurei-itashi-masu.
         very   excuse-HUM-HON
         "Me, too.  Onegaishimasu again.  Good-bye."
(3)  MC: Onajiku shikai-no Sugiura-desu.   Onegaishimasu.
            similarly MC-    Sugiura-COP   Onegaishimasu.
         "I am also an MC, Ms. Sugiura.  Onegaishimasu (Nice to meet you)."
 The examples indicate that onegaishimasu has multiple and overlapping functions.  They also suggest that onegaishimasu has become such a highly ritualized speech formula that omitting it is impermissible in interaction.  Without this formula, the speaker could construct these statements only awkwardly, and the listener would perceive that something was missing, making the whole interaction seem impolite.  This point is illustrated by the fact that Japanese language has no other equivalent expressions to onegaishimasu.  Thus, the use is strictly constrained by social conventions that tend to overweigh the speaker's strategic language use based on rationality.
 This study suggests that using the formula itself enacts metapragmatic meanings of politeness in social context, such as indicating communicative competence and elevating social bonds among the interlocutors.  Within discursive patterns of Japanese interaction, conventionalized formulae, in general, play far more crucial role than individual interests in politeness strategies.  To conclude, this study illustrates the significance of social conventions in Japanese language use.

 In Brown & Levinson (1987) it is claimed that the selection of a linguistic strategy from the authors’ suggested hierarchy of politeness strategies follows an assessment of the Weightiness of a Face Threatening Act, which is compounded based on conversationalists’ assumptions about sociological variables such as Distance, Power, and Ranking of the Imposition. However, each politeness strategy may be realised by several linguistic strategies, while no further indication is provided as to how to select between them. In an attempt to investigate regularities of usage in the distribution of politeness markers across contexts, the realisation of selected speech acts in Cypriot Greek was researched into, on the basis of a corpus of spontaneous conversational data recorded during autumn 1998 in the four major towns of the Republic of Cyprus. In the proposed paper, the analysis focuses on specific politeness markers, such as the mood and number of speech act-realising verb forms, as well as the interaction of these with illocutionary force modifying devices such as address terms, endearing expressions and diminutives used occasionally. The aim of the paper is to examine the situational distribution of these politeness markers in relation to such extra-linguistic variables as the sex, age and social class of the speaker and the addressee, the relationship between them, the setting of the conversation, the sequential placement of the speech act in the flow of the conversation, as well as the type of speech act performed.
 Discussion of examples from the data shows that (i) particular extra-linguistic variables appear to warrant the use of specific politeness markers, and (ii), as a result of (i) above, only a collective reference to all the extra-linguistic variables studied can adequately account for the situational distribution of any particular politeness marker. In other terms, considerations of qualitative, rather than simply quantitative, appropriateness seem to drive the selection of politeness marker(s) in the data collected. Consequently, it is proposed that a more fine-grained analysis of these findings can be afforded with reference to the notion of a frame, in which immediately observable, indispensable extra-linguistic information about a situation is summarised together with information about the appropriate linguistic politeness marker(s).
 Finally, it is argued that, in making no a priori theoretical claims about the politeness potential of such markers (by classifying them, for example,  under specific over-arching strategies, as do Brown and Levinson), frames can provide a basis for a truly universalising approach, which will do justice to the cultural diversity empirically attested in the area of politeness phenomena.

    This study focuses on cultural differences of the use of 'polite' expressions in various situations.
 It is well known when the requested act is considered as a burden on the addressee (i.e., asking someone to check a paper), the question forms are more polite than the imperative forms. This phenomenon is verified cross-linguistically. It is explained that the question forms imply the addressee has an option to refuse the request (Brown & Levinson 1987).  However, according to Leech (1983), when the requested act is regarded as a benefit to the addressee (i.e., asking someone to have some more cookies), the imperative is more polite than the question as it gives no option to the addressee and maximizes his or her benefit. Tsuzuki et al.(1999) examined Leech's contention empirically. Native language (English, Chinese, Japanese) speakers were asked to rate the politeness degree of both forms . The supposed addressee in the study was a close friend to the speaker. They found that the imperative is more `appropriate (not too polite)' than the question in Chinese, the imperative is less `appropriate' than the question in English, and that the imperative is as `appropriate' as the question in Japanese. This study showed Leech's contention does not hold true in some cultures.
     We will expand upon the study mentioned above. We focus on English and Chinese, because of the clear contrastive results found in the study above and because English and Chinese are generally free from honorific expressions. We examine not only the case where the addressee is a close friend but also cases where the addressee is not close to the addresser in order to explore how far the superiority of the imperative over the question can be extended.
     Our approach features the following:
(1) Employment of `appropriateness': We base our research on a `impolite' - `appropriate' - `too polite' scale. Theoretically, `appropriateness' is a crucial concept for the use of linguistic forms in a given context.  Methodologically, this makes it possible for us to examine the use of the linguistic forms empirically.
(2) "Positive/negative politeness affects selection of linguistic forms" hypothesis: Our general working hypothesis is the use of imperative and question forms reflects `positive politeness' and `negative politeness' (Brown & Levinson 1987). In terms of positive politeness, the imperative becomes more polite than the question in that the speaker treats the addressee as a member of an in-group just like himself or herself. On the other hand, in terms of negative politeness, the imperative becomes less polite in that the speaker would impede the addressee's freedom of action.
(3) "Situation/culture affects priority to positive/negative politeness" hypothesis: We hypothesize social and cultural priority in a use of positive/negative politeness plays a crucial role to designate the use of linguistic forms in a given situation.
(4) Cognitive approach to explain use of linguistic forms in context: The above approach is, in sum, aiming to explain the use of linguistic forms with respect to cognitive factors reflecting social/cultural context. To explore these factors, we are employing the standard experiment-oriented methodology controlling various contextual factors.  Our pilot study shows that in the case where the addressee is not the addresser's close boss, the imperative becomes less appropriate than the question. This tentative result is parallel to our hypothesis that even in Chinese society, positive politeness is given priority only when the addressee is a close friend.

 This paper examines the formula that provides the Brown and Levinson Theory of Politeness (BLTP) with its notion of context. The paper examines the following four issues:
 1. The exhaustivity of D, P, and R. In particular, I examine the evidence for the addition of other contextual parameters such as 'affect'. I show that the formula may need to choose a subset of parameters from an overall set of possible parameters and that this choice will itself be a function of discourse type.
 2. The scalarity of D, P, and R. Brown and Levinson hypothesize that D, P and R have associated with them scales of seven values and that positions on these scales determine facework. I examine the evidence for the hypothesis that speakers from different languages have differently calibrated scales and that these different calibrations play a role in cross-cultural miscommunication.
 3. The delicacy of S and H. Brown and Levinson acknowledge that their framework rests upon a simplification. Goffman (1981) and Levinson (1988), as well as others (e.g. McCawley (1984), Zheng (1993)), have gone some way to decomposing the notions of S and H and in particular to assessing the influence of third parties on utterance design. I examine the evidence for more empirically adequate participation frameworks and attempt to assess the consequences of these for BLTP.
 4. The adequacy of the addition function. This is a more difficult topic to examine. At present I endorse the speculation that 'when any of the three interpersonal variables reaches a particularly high level, the effects of the remaining variables lessen or drop out completely' (Holtgraves and Yang, 1992: 252). I examine what little evidence there is to corroborate this speculation.
 The upshot of the discussion of 1. - 4. is the emergence of a Theory of Politeness, which I shall sketch, that is empirically more robust and conceptually more elegant than the BLTP.

 Foreigners living in Thailand are often told, “You must not be too direct when dealing with the Thai. At all costs, don’t make them ‘lose face’.” To ‘lose face’, si?a na?a as they say in Thai, is one of the numerous ‘face’ idioms which abound in the Thai language. This study examines the concept of ‘face’ and its relationship to politeness in the Thai culture as revealed through the analysis of Thai ‘face’ idioms.
 The face na?a is part of the head and the head is sacred for the Thai (while the feet are inferior). Therefore, it is not surprising that na?a is metaphorically related to one’s ego, self-identity and dignity. Consequently, ‘gaining face’ da?y na?a helps one to feel socially accepted. Conversely, losing face and experiencing shame are particularly to be avoided.
 In this paper, I will use the definition of politeness as “socially appropriate behavior” (see Meier 1996). Propriety (kala?thesa?) is one of the key themes in Thai social interaction. For the Thai, to be polite is to ensure that one maintains one another’s ‘face’, i.e., to ra?ksa?a   na?a, literally ‘preserve face’. This is a root value underlying Thai social interaction. Therefore, Thai people make great effort not to offend anyone. Politeness strategies involve saying and doing the right thing in the right way and at the right time so as to maintain one’s dignity. Hence, the perception of politeness depends on the social context as well.
 Some politeness strategies for maintaining one’s face include indirectness, avoidance of confrontation and the suppression of negative emotions. Such strategies are delicately and keenly observed by all parties involved in a social interaction in order to ensure that no one loses face. An important concept related to this is the concept of kre?t??aj which can be roughly translated as “to be considerate or to be reluctant to impose upon another person.” I will show how kre?t??aj is closely related to face and politeness.
 What happens when these social rules are violated? The consequence is the loss of ‘face’ which leads to the experience of negative feelings such as shame or anger. It is interesting to note that a large number of Thai ‘face’ idioms describe shame or anger. Shame is therefore closely interconnected to the Thai concept of face. Shame is also used in the Thai society as a social sanction to make people conform to the acceptable norms of society.
 This study reveals that there is a coherent conceptual organization underlying the Thai concepts of ‘face’ and politeness. The relationship between face and politeness in Thai culture once again illustrates the interdependence of thought, language and culture.

 The present study analyzes 72 dyadic conversations between strangers in order to examine the twelve base subjects' discourse-politeness strategies, depending on the interlocutors' age and gender.  To clarify the influence of a partner's power on a given base subject, each base subject was asked to interact with six different partners: 1) older-same sex, 2) older-opposite sex, 3) the same age-same sex, 4) the same age-opposite sex, 5) younger-same sex, and 6) younger-opposite sex.
 The results showed that there was little influence of power asymmetry on the speakers' choice of honorifics at the sentence level, but there were much influence on the discourse-level features such as frequency of topic initiations and speech-level shifts. The older person initiated topics more frequently and used more downshifts (shifts from polite forms to non-polite forms) than the younger person in age-asymmetric conversations.  That is, the base subjects managed the discourse-politeness strategies depending on the interlocutor's perceived power, whereas the politeness level of linguistic forms at the sentence level was kept constant regardless of the interlocutor's perceived power.
 These results indicate that in the case of Japanese, Brown and Levinson's politeness theory does not explain the choice of appropriate linguistic forms at the sentence-level, but explains better the discourse-level phenomena such as frequency of topic initiations and speech-level shifts examined in this study.
 Based on the present study, I emphasize the following: 1) The necessity of extending the scope of politeness research from a speech-act level to discourse-level phenomena. 2) In languages with honorifics, which constrain the choice of linguistic forms such as Japanese, it is all the more important to take discourse-level phenomena into account, when examining politeness in verbal behavior. This is because many options for voluntary politeness strategies, which are free from the constraints of the honorific use, are left in the discourse-level phenomena.
 In the presentation, I will argue that in order to compare linguistic politeness behavior in languages with honorifics and without honorifics, and to construct an unbiased universal theory of politeness, the notion of discourse politeness is necessary.

 This is an investigation of the overlap phenomenon, or simultaneous speaking,  in conversations by Thai speakers.  The data include four types of conversation distinguished by two features: the communicative intent and the formality of the situation as dictated by social hierarchy.  Three significant types of overlap are found: an accident, an echo, and an interruption.  Overlap is by definition a face threatening act (FTA) for it is an attempt, intended or unintended, to impede a conversation partner's  flow of speech.  Of all three types of overlap, interruptions seem to be the most damaging FTA, a gesture of severe impoliteness.  Yet, observant newcomers into Thai speaking communities cannot help but noticing the prevalence of overlaps in Thai conversations.  John Hinds (1993) describes the phenomenon as an instance of what Cooper and Ross (1975) call the "ME-first Principle".  Without intending to pass judgement, Hinds claims that this behaviour is also evident in the Thais' traffic and queue behaviour and proposes that this should be considered a cultural idiosyncrasy for which allowances must be made  by members of other cultures.  The following findings from discourse data lead to a different  description of this phenomenon.  First of all, most overlaps, even those of the interruption type, are not retaliated by a signal of resentment or animosity, i.e. the discontinuation of a conversation.  Secondly, overlaps, when they are prevalent in a conversation, are not restricted to any conversation partners. Thirdly, they are found in abundance in conversations among peers.  Fourthly, they seem to be a characteristic of "fun" conversations, where the communicative intent is just that, to have fun.  The fact that the conversations are being witnessed by others, such as those in live T.V. programs, do not seem to have an effect on the number of overlaps.  However, the difference in social status of conversation partners seem to be a good deterrent of overlaps both in private and public conversations.  With these findings, it is possible to describe this overlap phenomenon, differently from Hinds (1993).  Rather than being an excusable but inevitable act of "ME-first" immaturity, this phenomenon is explicit evidence of what Vongvipanond (1998) calls "attitudinal alignment" in discourse.  Even a most impolite form of FTA is acceptable, or even interpreted as a friendly gesture, if participants can align their attitude towards the way in which they co-construct their conversations.  Similarly, the same "attitudinal alignment" principle can explain other violations of politeness rules, such as the exchange of impolite and bad words among close friends.

 For what reasons did many linguists of the endof the 19th century and of the first half of the 20th century, such as Chamberlain B. H., Aston W. G., Polivanov, Ya-mada Y., Kieda M. and more recently Kuno S. (1978), Kikuchi Y. (1994) among others try to explain the Japanese polite expressions in terms of persons, and in some cases to study the honorific language in contrast to the Indo-European systems of persons (Wlodarczyk Andre: 1986, 1987, 1996)  Some linguists went as far as to propose a hybrid category named “honorific Person”. In our opinion, to answer why honorifics and persons are comparable comes down to finding out the components of a general theory of pragmatic IDENTITY.
 From a psycho-sociological perspective, it has been said that IDENTITY should be defined as a continuum with individual and social characteristics at its ends (Abrams D. and Hogg M. A. 1990, p. 3-4), therefore that it cannot be partitioned into - let us say - individual and social parts (Mantovani G. - 1995). But linguists are well aware that, for their purposes (i.e.: linguistic categorisation), purely psycho-sociological motivations are often misleading, unsuitable for theorising about linguistic data. In other words, linguistic expressions do not always correspond to psycho-sociological categories, even in pragmatics.
 In order to analyse linguistic honorific expressions, we must therefore distinguish RESPECT from POLITENESS as we do distinguish PERSON from PERSONALITY. Indeed, Respect should be defined as a linguistic category (Martin Haase- 1994), whereas Politeness is broadly known as a social phenomenon, thus concerning psychological attitudes of members of social groups.
 Let us call the identity of the participants of the speech acts “locutive identity”. In our view, both linguistic categories Person and Respect indicate a simple locutive identity (ostensive IDx = (x = x)) and a composite locutive identity (estimative IDx:x’ = v(x, x’) o d(x’, x)) respectively. The estimative identity is very close to the notion of status. In our theory, we utilise two concepts elaborated in [Hill B. etalli - 1986]: “volition” and “discernment” as functions of the composition whose role is to “estimate” the degree of respect of linguistic expressions. The composite identity maybe the result of application of more than one composition; i.e. it mayconcern more than two participants.
 We argue that the (deictic) identity of speech actors (defined in a different way from the one proposed by Jakobson R. - 1956) is more basic (primitive) as a concept than “face” (in the FTA analyses by Brown P. & Levinson S. C. - 1978) without replacing the latter, and consequently can serve as the common denominator when building a logical Theory of Person and Respect (i.e. a theory of deictic identification of speech actors).
 Let us add that general principles of this theory were first conceived with the aim of implementing personal and honorific expressions on a computer using new planning techniques (plan schemata) found on sequential logic (Hoare C.A.R., 1969) in Artificial Intelligence (Cohen, P.R. & C. R. Perrault - 1979 and Allen, J. F. & Perrault , C. R. - 1978).

 Defining Politeness is very difficult because of its broad meanings in social contexts and sciences. In socio-linguistic studies, politeness describes the proper way of speaking in the communication with other people in both verbal and non-verbal forms. The aim of this intercultural communication studies is to find out how people with different cultural backgrounds can communicate better with each other by using politeness as a communicating weapon. We try to analyse the role of politeness in, business negotiations between Chinese, English/American and German business people.
 Linguistic Theory: In linguistic studies, Brown and Levinson's studies on politeness has been treated as the classic studies on politeness in communication since its first publication in 1978. Interest in this socio-cultural phenomenon and the ways in which it is realised in language usage has been greatly aroused since then. The claim of the universality of their politeness theory and their model person have been challenged by many Asian linguists, such as Kenneth C. C. Kong (1998)_ Western people think in an inductive way, and the individual is emphasised in the Western society, so Brown and Levinson analyse the politeness phenomenon from the point of view of personal face, personal self image; whereas Eastern people think in a deductive way, the harmony of the society is emphasised, every individual plays a role in the society to keep the harmony, the individual is not emphasised. The politeness phenomenon is analysed from the point of view of keeping the harmony of the society, and every individual uses politeness to play their role better in the society. Therefore, the universality of Brown, and Levinson's politeness theory should be put in doubt when referring to Eastern cultures in intercultural communication, even though people with different thinking structures want to co-operate with each other, misunderstandings and conflicts are inevitable.
 Study Methods: The state of today's polite speech and behaviour, both in verbal and non-verbal will be analysed from historical point of view. The historical development of politeness in China, Arnerica and Germany will be individually illustrated.
 The misunderstandings and conflicts due to different politeness strategies in today's intercultural business negotiations are then further analysed- In intercultural studies, Hofstedt's intercultural theory of the difference between individualistic, low-context cultures and collectivistic, high-context cult also be applied.
 To realise and know the different politeness of the foreign negotiating partner which belongs to intercultural sensibility is important, but to know how to use it is even more challenging and significant. This is known as intercultural competence. The different role of politeness in the process of intercultural business negotiations are studied based on the linguistic and intercultural theories mentioned above.
 Different politeness strategies are used by Chinese business people along with the time of modernisation in China. The practical examples are based on various books about intercultural communication published in recent years, and personal communication with business people, and last but not the least personal experiences as an interpreter in business negotiations for international companies and on international fairs during the last nine years in Germany.