The publication addresses politeness strategies used by Czech University students when they contact faculties. Politeness in Czech society is also introduced: diglossia (contexts in which both, Standard and Common Czech tend to be used), nominal and pronominal addressing in the Czech society and in the Czech academic sphere, prototypical requests in Czech and their comparison to English and other languages. The book consists of two studies focusing on students’ communication with faculties; the data include e-mail requests for information sent to the lecturer by students and requests for information posted on the students’ information forum. The focus was on expressing politeness in the form of an address, opening and closing formulas, degrees of directness and amounts of syntactic, lexical/phrasal and external modification used in requests for information.

This book explores the extent to which self-praise is acceptable in both offline and online contexts, across different genres, platforms, and cultural backgrounds. The data analyzed encompass both naturally occurring (daily conversation as well as institutional talk) and elicited (experiments and interviews) types, and are explored at both quantitative and qualitative levels to offer a relatively systematic and comprehensive inquiry into self-praise as social (inter)action. Contributors to this book not only draw on traditional politeness theories but are also informed by social psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, CMC, and (multimodal) discourse analysis. They are inspired by pragmatics but also go beyond to ground their studies within locally situated cultural contexts, most of which are under-presented in the current academic world. Their efforts substantiate the fact that self-praise is most worthy of intensive analytic attention. This book appeals to students and researchers in the field and contributes to the way communication is facilitated through different ways of deploying linguistic and interactional resources.

Language is an essential feature of societies, and there are five distinctive language styles which are commonly used in conversations. It is only natural that people switch between these styles, and, as a result, they speak in different styles in different situations. Furthermore, based on distinctive factors influencing people’s speech, we tend to employ different degrees of politeness and directness in different situations. This work identifies, analyses, and compares the language styles and degrees of directness and politeness used in the English and Slovak languages by presenters of a number of live television shows. The chosen shows for this book are broadcast live, which means the presenters do not follow a script, and their language is more natural. Moreover, these live shows are broadcast on non-commercial national television networks, which are known for their objectivity and use of standard language. The results of this analysis contribute to sociolinguistic and pragmalinguistic research, not only in Slovakia, but also worldwide.

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in cross-linguistic research on forms of address from increasingly diverse and complementary perspectives. The present edited collection is the inaugural volume of Topics in Address Research, a series that aims to reflect that growing interest. The volume includes an overview, followed by seventeen chapters organized in five sections covering new methodological and theoretical approaches, variation and change, address in digital and audiovisual media, nominal address, and self- and third-person reference. This collection includes work on Cameroonian French, Czech, Dutch, English (from the US, UK, Australia, and Canada), Finnish, Italian, Mongolian, Palenquero Creole, Portuguese, Slovak, and Spanish (in its Peninsular and American varieties). By presenting the work in English, the book offers a bridge among researchers in different language families. It will be of interest to pragmatists, sociolinguists, typologists, and anyone focused on the emergence and evolution of this central aspect of verbal communication.

The ability to effectively communicate with individuals from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds is an invaluable asset. Learning a second language proves useful as students navigate the culturally diverse world; however, studying a second language can be difficult for learners who are not immersed in the real and natural environment of the foreign language. Also, changes in education and advancements in information and communication technologies pose a number of challenges for implementing and maintaining sound practices within technology-enhanced language learning (TELL). Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Technology-Enhanced Language Learning provides information on educational technologies that enable language learners to have access to authentic and useful language resources. Readers will explore themes such as language pedagogy, how specific and universal cultural contexts influence audio-visual media used in technology-enhanced language learning (TELL), and the use of English video games to promote foreign language learning. This book is a valuable resource for academicians, education practitioners, advanced-level students, and school administrators seeking to improve language learning through technology-based resources.

International Academic Conference on Teaching, Learning and E-learning and International Academic Conference on Management, Economics and Marketing, Budapest, Hungary 2017 (IAC-MEM 2017 + IAC-TLEl 2017), Wednesday - Thursday, July 5 - 6, 2017