Earticle

This study analyzes chats conversation to understand how politeness is achieved in English conversation. Within Brown and Levinson’s model (1987), politeness is introduced as the concept based on the social notion of face and interpreted as the effort to avoid Politeness is interpreted as the effort to avoid a threatening act or to mitigate the threat if it is inevitable. This research is motivated by the author’s experiences with working through a native speaker of English and being aware of politeness. Academic interaction with her co-worker, an American speaker of English provides an opportunity to enhance the author’s awareness of communication as social interaction and face-involved. This study focuses on the native use of English and identifies features and strategies in order to see how politeness is achieved when face-threat has to be committed. Records of chats have been documented and analyzed to investigate the use of English in order to see what kinds of strategies are used and enhance the author’s awareness of politeness. The data selected for the current study come from chats conversation occurring for three months in 2007. Analysis of the data show that it is difficult to avoid threatening acts in verbal interaction. A set of face-threatening acts (FTAs) are identified such as disagreement, interruption, requests, and correction of English. The use of linguistic means shows how politeness can be achieved from a native speaker’s perspective.

Previous studies reported that children made errors by identifying constituents outside of the c-command domain of only as focus. (Crain et al. 1992, 1994; Notley et al. 2009; Gualmini et al. 2003). In order to provide a more detailed picture of the developmental knowledge about the syntactic constraint, this study investigates how children and adults assign focus in sentences with post-verbal only preceding the two noun phrases connected by prepositions either about or to (i.e., NP1 about NP2 and NP1 to NP2). Only is associated with both NP1 and NP2 in sentences involving 'about' whereas it is associated with NP2 alone in sentences involving 'to'. Using a Truth-Value Judgment task (Crain & Thornton 1998), I demonstrate that unlike adults, children have a strong tendency to treat two different constructions in the same way and prefer to associate only with the NP2 in general. The result indicates that children have a qualitatively different syntactic representation in terms of the c-command constraint.

The purpose of the study is to investigate how the judgment of raters is biased toward certain rating criteria or task types in assessing Korean university students’ L2 writing. In addition, the study aims to examine whether or not non-native rater group and native rater group share the same judgment of students’ written products. Six raters scored 258 compositions written by Korean university students on two topics. The written products were rated using an analytic scoring scale with content, organization, language in use, grammar, and mechanics. For the first part, the FACETS analysis revealed that all six raters showed self-consistent scoring patterns across the rating categories in the two tasks. However, each rater was biased towards certain type of tasks and rating categories. For the second part of the study, the results of ANOVA and MANOVA tests revealed that there were significant mean differences between the two groups across the rating categories in both tasks except content in Task 2. It is also shown that the non-native rater group is harsher in their rating than the native rater group regardless of the rating category.