Beyond the politeness tightrope: Message design for multiple social goals

Abstract

In linguistic pragmatics and social anthropology, several influential researchers believe that politeness is essential for maintaining social order by way of disarming potential aggressiveness [Goffman 1967; Brown & Levinson 1987; Gumpers 1987]. In one of the most detailed of these theories, Brown and Levinson's, speakers pursue a single goal (e.g. getting the hearer to stop doing something) by using a mental model of the hearer to select a position on a one-dimensional spectrum of strategies that identifies the best balance between achieving the speaker's practical goal while avoiding offense to the hearer (as might occur from a purely brusque request). But are speakers actually limited to this one-dimensional spectrum of strategies? And given that people often pursue more than one goal at once, how might they do so in such a simplistic model of polite communication? I describe and evaluate a computational model that generates strategies for multiple simultaneous goals.


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