Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

While the literature has mostly focused on the goal of information transfer, many linguistic phenomena only make sense in the light of further goals pursued by the agent. One such phenomenon is polite language use. In this paper, we propose a new model of polite language production. We suggest that patterns characteristic of polite language, e.g., indirectness, emerge from a tension between two goals: on the one hand, being sufficiently truthful and informative, and on the other hand, being kind to the listener. To capture these pressures, we introduce a novel model of probabilistic language production which combines a strategic choice of content selection with the usual pragmatic choice of content expression. We fit our model to empirical data from a previous experiment using a bespoke Bayesian model. We quantitatively compare our model to a previous model of politeness and discuss some ways in which our account is simpler, more general and better accounts for empirical data and theoretical considerations.