A Cross-Cultural Study of Modality in the Speech Act of Asking for Permission
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is concerned with a cross-cultural study of modality expressions in asking for permission by Vietnamese and English speakers. The study involved 209 Canadian and Vietnamese informants with the use of a Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. A total of 3000 utterances were chosen for analysis to gain insights into the frequency and types of lexico-modal markers manifested in the two languages. It is found that hearer-oriented verbal style tends to be dominant in Vietnamese while the speaker-oriented strategy is more favored in English. Vietnamese speakers tend to employ direct strategies with a dominant use of appealers which sounds intimate to the hearer. English speakers, by contrast, incline to conventionally-indirect strategies such as Can I, Could I, etc. It is also evident that Vietnamese speakers frequently use politeness markers when they communicate with the older, but they hardly use them for their peers. English speakers, however, use politeness markers for all partners with a slight variation. Another noteworthy similarity is that both Canadian and Vietnamese women modalize their language than men.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".