Variation in the contextuality of language: an empirical measure (original) (raw)
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Linguistic Etiquette In Communication
2021
T here are three factors influence children in their daily communications. First is social distance, this factor shows the discrepancy of delivering their aims to older people and it affects impoliteness in communication, for instance, using Javanese word kowe to their parents. Then, in social interaction, the children assert their statement by adding some animal and impolite words to their friends, and they think it as trend in nowadays communication. The second factor is social power consists of four aspects; interlocutors’ position, age, gender, and language impairment. This factor is much influenced by education background and understanding of religion. The third is degree of imposition which explains children’s way of uttering their will. It shows that when children speak to friends or parents, they do not care their words and intonation.
Informality Judgment at Sentence Level and Experiments with Formality Score
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
Formality and its converse, informality, are important dimensions of authorial style that serve to determine the social background a particular document is coming from, and the potential audience it is targeted to. In this paper we explored the concept of formality at the sentence level from two different perspectives. One was the Formality Score (F-score) and its distribution across different datasets, how they compared with each other and how F-score could be linked to human-annotated sentences. The other was to measure the inherent agreement between two independent judges on a sentence annotation task. It gave us an idea how subjective the concept of formality was at the sentence level. Finally, we looked into the related issue of document readability and measured its correlation with document formality.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2024
Introduction: Understanding how category width of cognitive style and power distance impact language use in cultures is crucial for improving cross-cultural communication. We attempt to reveal how English foreign language students, affected by high-context culture, communicate in English as a foreign language. What models of foreign communicative competence do they create? Methods: We applied association rule analysis to find out how the category width of cognitive style affects the foreign communication competence in relation to culture and language. Results: The requester tends to be more formal and transfers conventional norms of the culture of the mother tongue into English, which mainly affects the use of alerters and external modifications of the head act of request. Discussion: A broad categorizer, regardless of social distance, prefers to formulate the request in a conditional over the present tense form, contrary to narrow categorizers who, in a situation of social proximity, prefer the request form in the present tense. A similar finding was shown in the case of external modifications of the head act, where we observed the inversion between broad and narrow categorizers, mainly in the use of minimizers and mitigating devices.
Formality and informality in communicative events
American Anthropologist, 1979
This paper examines the analytical utility of the concept of "formality" in social-cultural anthropology, particularly the ethnography of communication. A survey of literature indicates that '~ormuZity" actually incorporates several distinct descn'ptive dimensions that do not necessarily correlate. Separating these dimensions facilitates the comparison of social occasions, viewed in t e r m of their communicational structure. The occasions compared here are political meetings among Wolof (Senegal), Mursi (Ethiopia), and Ilongots (Philippines). It is suggested that formality in. communicative events can serve not only the force of tradition or the coercive power of a political establishment, but also creativity and change. [formality, political meetings, ethnography of communication, sociolinguistics, situational analysis]
INTERPRETATION OF LANGUAGE IN CONTEXT: A KA:RMATIC ANALYSIS OF CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION 1
Context is understood in different ways by different linguists. First, as text, it was the " the wording that came before and after whatever was under attention " (Halliday 1991: 3); later on, in the 19c, it was extended to concrete and abstract things: the context of the building; the moral context of the day; and then further, in modern linguistics, to the non-verbal environment in which language was used. Consequently, the word 'co-text' has been coined to refer explicitly to the verbal environment. At that time, Malinowski (1923, 35) introduced two distinguishing terms context of situation and context of culture. " What this means is that language considered as a system – its lexical items and grammatical categories – is to be related to its context of culture; while instances of language in use – specific texts and their component parts – are to be related to their context of situation. Both these contexts are of course outside of language itself " (Halliday 1991: 3). In discourse analysis, it is understood as knowledge, situation, and text in different approaches. According to Ka:rmik Linguistic Theory (KLT) of which ka:rmatics is a branch, language is not only used as a resource for the construction of ka:rmik (via dispositional) reality but it is also created from it in a five-fold reality construction process of dispositional-socioculturalspiritual-cognitive-contextual actional-actional realities. Form-function-meaning are dispositionalized like blueness qualifying lotus. As such, disposition qualifies all these five realities and meaning is generated-chosen-specified-directed-materialized (GCSDMed) by disposition. Here, disposition rules supreme by accepting, modifying, neutralizing or negating the prevailing cultural norms according to the individual's variable choice; again, even a new variable may be invented that may not become a cultural norm but used only for some time. Furthermore, culture is not a homogeneous structure and hence norms cannot be the same across a culture as a whole. Consequently, cultural derivation of meaning is problematic at the individual level and indeterminate at the collective level. Therefore, it is proposed here that meaning should be derived at all the levels of cultural praxis including cross-cultural communication ka:rmatically in a ka:rmik context but not in a cultural context.
The influence of social distance on speech behavior: Formality variation in casual speech
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2017
An important dimension of linguistic variation is formality. This study investigates the role of social distance between interlocutors. Twenty-five native Dutch speakers retold eight short films to confederates, who acted either formally or informally. Speakers were familiarized with the informal confederates, whereas the formal confederates remained strangers. Results show that the two types of interlocutors elicited different versions of the same stories. Formal interlocutors (i. e. large social distance) elicited lower articulation rates, and more nouns and prepositions, both indicators of explicit information. Speakers addressing the informal interlocutors, to whom social distance was small, however, provided more explicit information with an involved character (i. e. adjectives with subjective meanings). They also used the word
Universals of linguistic politeness
Journal of Pragmatics, 1986
A cross-cultural study of requests for a pen in Japanese and in American English provides empirical evidence for a common factor, Discernment, which we hypothesize operates in all sociolinguistic systems of politeness. We also propose a complementary factor, Volition, hypothesizing that differences in the weighting of the two factors afford one way to characterize sociolinguistic systems of politeness in different languages. The results of the study further offer empirical support for the theories of Brown and Levinson and Leech.
Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2013
Nowadays, spontaneity, success and coherence of intercultural communication (especially politeness communication) are studied from the point of view of different linguistic theories. However, not enough attention is always paid to cognitive characteristics of the interlocutor. These characteristics as well as context and social specifics of communication influence communication behaviour in foreign language utterance. The aim of our paper is to examine the relationship between cognitive style 'category width' and social and expressive factors in politeness speech acts formulated in requests in mother tongue (Slovak) and foreign language (English, Spanish and German). Selection and peer review under the responsibility of Prof.