Judgments of Politeness in L2 Acquisition

Abstract

This paper examines Japanese ESL learners' perception and production of to whom and how politely one should speak and what expressions are appropriate to whom in American English. Speakers are expected to change the level of politeness, in both American English and Japanese, depending who the addressee is, but the two languages are different in how the speaker weighs factors such as age and status of the addressee and the speaker's familiarity to the in relation to others. Some of the differences between the learners and native speakers seem to he due to negative transfer, especially in terms of the age of the addressee, however others could be attributed to various possible sources as developmental and so on.