Aspects of Clause Politeness in Japanese: An Extended Inquiry Semantics Treatment

John A. Bateman

Abstract: The inquiry semantics approach of the Nigel computational systemic grammar of English has proved capable of revealing distinctions within propositional content that the text planning process needs to control in order for adequate text to be generated. An extension to the chooser and inquiry framework motivated by a Japanese clause generator capable of expressing levels of politeness makes this facility available for revealing the distinctions necessary among interpersonal, social meanings also. This paper shows why the previous inquiry framework was incapable of the kind of semantic control Japanese politeness requires and how the implemented extension achieves that control. An example is given of the generation of a sentence that is appropriately polite for its context of use and some implications for future work are suggested.