Michael Hall’s blog

How are you today?

2008-03-28T14:21:02Z

So I am curious to know what you all think about where this saying (how are you today?) would fit within the Politeness Principle. The reason I ask is that this is something that everyone says sometime to someone during their daily activities. But...

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The modesty maxim in Japanese

2008-03-28T14:16:03Z

Reading about this maxim made me think of a funny experience I had when studying abroad in Japan. In Japanese society it is somewhat mandated, through social constructs, that modesty reign supreme when one receives any type of compliment. If someo...

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Classifying speech acts

2008-03-21T16:57:24Z

So when doing the homework for chapter 17 I found something I disagree with concerning classifying speech acts. On the fourth exercise we are asked to classify some lexical items into as many categories to which we seem them belonging. So for "com...

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What is the "weekend"?

2008-03-21T16:43:42Z

So I had an instance yesterday during a conversation where what is understood to be the "weekend" was not the same between me and the person to which I was talking. I was talking to my neighbor and we were discussing the nice weather yesterday and...

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