ASPECTS OF CLAUSE POLITENESS IN JAPANESE: 
AN EXTENDED INQUIRY SEMANTICS TREATMENT 
John A. Bateman* 
USC/Information Sciences Institute 
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 
Marina del Rey, CA 90292 U.S.A. (e-mail: bateman@va=a.isi.edu) 
Abstract 
The inquiry semantics approach of the Nigel compu- 
tational systemic grammar of English has proved capa- 
ble of revealing distinctions within propositional con- 
tent that the text planning process needs to control in 
order for adequate text to be generated. An extension 
to the chooser and inquiry framework motiwLted 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 
inquL'y framework wu incapable of the klnd of se- 
mantic control Japanese politeness requires and how 
the implemented extenslon 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. 
1 Introduction - inquiry se- 
mantics 
• A crucial task in text generation is to be able to con- 
trol linguktic resources so as to make what is gen- 
erated conform to what is to be expre~ed. In the 
computational systemic-functional grammar (SFG) 
'l~gel' (Mann, 1985; Mztthleseen, 1985; Mann and 
~/~atthlessen, 1985), this task is the responslbility of 
the grammar's inquirv memardice. Nlgel follows gen- 
eral systemic-functlonni linguistics (SFL) practice in 
presenting grammar as a resource for expressing mean- 
ings; meanings are realized by a network of interlock- 
ing options and ps_,-ticular grammatical forms are ar- 
rived at by making choices In this network. Gener- 
ating appropriate text is then a problem of making 
the chokes in such a way that the distinct needs of 
individual texts to be expressed are satisfied. This is 
*Thk research was supported by a post-doctoral re- 
search fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion 
of Science (Tokyo) and the Royal Society (London), and 
was principally carried out at the Nagao Laboratory of the 
Department of Electrical Engineering, Kyoto University. 
achieved by means of choice experts, or ©hooserl, that 
collectively ensure that the choices made will be those 
appropriate for any particular text need. Each choice 
point in the grammar network has associated with it a 
chooserwhose responslbiHty is to interrogate the text 
need in respect of just those aspects of meaning nec- 
essary for determining the appropriate option to take. 
These choosers are formalized as decision trees whose 
nodes consist of basic knowledge base interrogation 
primitives called inqu/r/es. 
Each aspect of meaning to be expressed that the 
~ar needs to know about is made a~cesslble to 
the choosers by means of a single inquiry whose func- 
tion le to determ;Y,e where any particular meaning to 
be expressed stands on that aspect. For example, 
should the gr=mm~r need to know whether the text 
need was for the expression of a unitary object (say, a 
llon) rather than a set object (lions), then at the appro- 
priate choke points in the grammar choosers would ap- 
peal to the inquiry named i~,fultlplleltyQ to determine 
the text need. When fully specified, inquiries have two 
forms, an informal English gloss representing the func- 
tion of the inquh'y in terms of the theory of meaning 
adopted, and an implementation, currently in Lisp, of 
an actual interrogatlon of a knowledge base. Typically, 
constructing an inquiry proceeds first by means of suc- 
cees|ve approximations in informal terms, glossed in 
English, followed by an encoding of the understanding 
achieved of the semantic distinction at issue. 
This inquiry semantics approach has been very suc- 
cessful in the l~gel grammar of English; the grammar 
now has a very wide coverage all under inquiry con- 
trol. The type of coverage has, however, been limited 
primarily to what in SFL terms is called the ideational 
component of meaning (Hall\]day, 1985). This is the 
component concerned with expressing our represen- 
tation of the world in terms of propositional content 
and logical organization. It is natural, therefore, that 
the inquiry approach should be successful in this do- 
main since this is typically the kind of information 
that is stored in the knowledge base and so is read- 
ily retrievable. Another SFL component of meaning, 
however, is the interpersonal. This aspect concerns 
147 
the expression of social relationships, an area that will 
become increasingly important as more natural inter- 
actions between people and machines are attempted. 
Although the N\]gel grammar does contain a few in- 
quiries that are termed interpersonal, there has not 
been enough work here really to determine whether 
the inquiry framework is going to provide the took 
necessary for capturing the kind of meaning this in- 
volves. 
If the inquiry framework can be used in thk area 
also, then we can use it to investigate the knowledge 
base distinctions that will need to be represented in 
order to control interpersonal grammatical resources. 
This is a methodology that has already been applied 
with great success to ideational meaning in the Nlgel 
project. There, projecting through the inquiry inter- 
face from the grammar on to context has allowed for 
the construction of a domain independent knowledge 
organization hierarchy called the upper structure (e.g. 
Moore and Arens, 1985). Since inquiries rely upon 
specific semantic distinctions to control the grammat- 
ical choices for which they are responsible, the for- 
mulation of a chooser's inquiries amounts to a con- 
straiut on the organization and content of the knowl- 
edge base and text planning that needs to be done 
of the following form: if the ling~stic distinction for 
which the present chooser is responsible is to be avail- 
able as a resource for the text planner to exploit, then 
that text planner and the knowledge base have at least 
to support the semantic distinctions identified by the 
inquiries that constitute that chooser. 
Thus, the semantic distinctions revealed to be nec- 
essary for the implementation of the inquiries that con- 
trol ideational choices have guided the construction of 
the upper structure. To extend the kind of organiza- 
tional resource the upper structure provides into the 
interpersonal arena would therefore be very beneficial 
for our understanding of what needs to be included in 
the interpersonal area of the knowledge base and the 
text planning process and so would promise to improve 
the range and quality of the texts we can generate. 
2 A new domain: The ex- 
pression of politeness in 
Japanese clauses 
As part of a proposed text generation project in 
Japanese at Kyoto University, some fragments of a 
systemlc-functlonal grammar of Japanese have been 
constructed (Bateman, 1985; Bateman et aL, 1987). 
In Japanese discourse the grammatical expression of 
various interpersonal relationships is quite common. 
Gaining control of these resources was therefore an 
ideal way to test further the applicability of the inquiry 
semantics approach in a domain which was clearly not 
ideational 
The particular area of interpersonal meaning exam- 
ined here ls that concerned with the expression of ap- 
propriate degrees of humility and respect in references 
to one's own actions, to those of one's audience, and 
to those of third parties. Although the general rule of 
being humble about one's own actions and respectful 
about those of others is complicated by a number of 
factors, even thk simplest case presents problems as 
far as controlling the grammar is concerned. In this 
section, I will briefly describe some of the forms in- 
voived and, in the next, how these create problems for 
the inquiry and chooser framework as used in l~geL 
A variety of clause forms are regularly employed in 
Japanese for the expression of interpersonal meanings 
related to 'politeness'. For example, the 'demotion' 
of the process information to a nominal-like form pre- 
ceded by a normal nominal honorific prefix (e.g. o, as 
in o-e\]~: 'honorable' tea) supported by an auxiliary 
verb such as Juru, 'to do', or naru, 'to become', of- 
ten explicitly expresses the relative social statuses of 
the participants involved and the fact of those partici- 
pants' acknowledgment of those statuses. This we can 
see in, 
o-VERB suru humble referral to 
do seif's action 
o-VERB- n/ naru respectful referral 
becomes to action of other 
o-VERB dssu more distant respect 
• be for action of other 
Another type of form involves combinations of mor- 
phemes that conventionall~, represent distinctive ways 
of being polite. Here, there are a number of different 
interpersonal speech act types that may be performed. 
For example, both the expression of gratitude for fa~ 
yore received and the expression of the ~v/nO of favors 
virtually obligatory in normal discourse; this is 
achieved by appending one of the many verbs express- 
ing 'to give/receive' to the process performed. These 
verbs are highly sensitive to relative social positions 
and the perspective taken on the action performed 
(e.g. Kuno and Kaburaki, 1977; Inoue, 1979) and this 
aspect of their meaning is carried over for the expres- 
sion of favors done or perceived. 1 Typical combina~ 
tions also express po\]ite ways of seeking permission for 
actions; one here modifies the action to be performed 
by means of the morphemes for causation/allowing, 
receiving a favor, wizhlng for, and thinking: a rough 
literal gloss of this form would be along the lines of 'I 
think I want to humbly receive from you your allowing 
me to do X'. 
Thus, the following clause forms are also commonly 
required in normal discourse: 
lThus, for verbs corresponding to the English 'give' and 
'receive', there are seven Japanese verbs in common usage 
and these differ in most part according to the relative social 
positions of the participants in the giving. 
148 
VERB-giving doing a 'favor': 
respectfully or humbly 
VERB-recelving receiving a 'favor': 
respectfully or humbly 
\[VERB-cause-receive-wish\]-t hink 
deferential seeking 
of permission 
This by no means exhausts the range of formo that 
are relevant to discussions of politeness, respect, and 
humility in present-day Japanese, but it will be suf- 
ficient as an indication of the kinds of structures and 
meanings addressed within the present grammar, s It 
should also be noted that there are different 'dimen- 
sions' of politeness involved in the use of these forms; 
for example the clause 
yoku kite- kureta- ne 
well come favor to speaker tag 
which means 'thanks for coming' is in the familiar level 
of speech form, i.e. it could only be used between 
people who are on familiar terms. It is nevertheless 
8Jill necessary for the favor being done to be explic- 
itly acknowledged; not expressing it would result in a 
clause that would often be inappropriate. The present 
grammar also treats the range of distinctions that arise 
along this 'famlliar'/'polite' levels of speech dimension 
but this will not be of immediate concern here. 
The differences in meaning that these alternative 
politeness-related forms represent need to be made 
available to a text generation system. Thls may be 
done by offering a set of grammatical resources that 
serves to express interpersonal knowledge about the 
interactive situation. As has been the case in the sys- 
temic grammar approach employed in Nigel generally, 
it is desirable to factor the knowledge and meanings 
to be expressed in terms of a structured set of alter- 
natives that may be selected from straightforwardly; 
for ideational meanings this is provided by the upper 
structure. The internal organization of the systemic 
grammar then takes care of the construction of lin- 
guistic structures appropriate to those meanings. Now 
we want to be able to do the same with the linguistic 
structures described here. Information which will need 
to be held in appropriately constructed speaker and 
hearer models should be factored according to the in- 
quirles that are necessary for driving the grammatical 
distinctions concerned. A problem arises here, how- 
ever, in that it is not possible to state within N\]gel's 
grammar and chooser framework that the alternative 
grammatical forms available for the expression of po- 
2A very good introduction and summary of the range 
of meanings and forms devoted to aspects of politeness in 
Japanese is given in Migutani and Misutani (1987). 
liteness are alternatives at all. The next section ex- 
plains why this is so. 
3 Problems with the existing 
formalization of chooser- 
grammar interaction 
The principle problem encountered with controlling 
the deployment of structures such as those introduced 
in the previous section by means of a chooser mecha- 
nism k that, formerly, all chooser decisions have been 
local. Each chooser determines which grammatical 
feature is to be selected as appropriate for the con- 
text of use from a single point of minimal grammat- 
ical alternation. For example, the grammatical aVa- 
tern that presents the minimal grammatical alterna- 
tion in Japanese between having a constituent express 
a circumstance of location, and not having such a con- 
stituent, has a chooser associated with it which inter- 
rogates the knowledge base and text plan by means of 
its inquiries in order to see which of the two alterna- 
tives is applicable in the case at hand. If a location 
is to be expressed a grammatical ?eature is selected 
that entails the insertion of a constituent character- 
ized functionally as a location; if there is no location 
to be expressed than a feature which does not have 
such an entailment is selected. This selection between 
the alternative grammatical choices, or features, that 
are offered by a sinOle grammatical system is the only 
influence that the chooser of that system is permitted 
to have on the generation process. Thus, in the lo- 
cation case, the effects of the chooser responsible for 
insertion or not of a location constituent are entirely 
local to the portion of the generation process delimited 
by the location system of the grammar. 
With the politeness forms we seem to be faced again 
wlth a set of alternative meanings concerning level and 
type of politeness to be expressed. However, the prob- 
lem as far as the previously implemented view of the 
possible effects of choosers is concerned is that these 
alternatives correspond to no single points of grammat- 
ical alternation. For example, if the process of reading 
(yomu) is to be expressed but we want to make a se- 
lection of politeness-related meaning between a simple 
respectful reference to another's actions and a more 
distanced, indirect and reserved respectful reference, 
then the choice of appropriate forrn~ for that process 
is between 
o- vomi nl naru 
HONORIFIC reading CASE becoming 
and 
o- Voyr6 desu 
HONORIFIC reading COPULA-be 
149 
Now, while the distinction in meaning may be cap- 
tured by a simple scale of the 'directness' of the sen- 
tence that is appropriate for the particular interactive 
situation in which it is to be used, there is no gram- 
matical system in the grammar of Japanese that offers 
a direct choice between these two clause structures. 
The former structure is similar to the typical use of 
the verb 'become' as in Z-hi naru, 'to become X'; the 
latter is similar to clauses such as X deau, 'it is X'. 
They are not normally, e.g. in contexts not involving 
this particular contrast of politeness, in grammatical 
contrast. 
The distinction is, thenl in the use. and meaning of 
the structures rather than in their grammatical con- 
struction. Indeed, such distinctions may often cross- 
cut the distinctions that are made in the grammar; 
this is simply to accept that the semantic and prag- 
matic distinctions that a language draws need not be 
matched one-for-one by corresponding minimal points 
of grammatical alternation. The levels of coding are 
distinct and incorporate distinct aspects of the mean- 
ing and construction of the linguistic units involved. 
It is not then possible to associate a 'politeness' 
chooser with a grammatical system as is done with 
the choosers for ideational meanings because there is 
no grammatical system of 'politeness' to which it may 
be attached. A simple choice between minimal alter- 
natives of politeness can result in radically different 
grammatlcal structures that differ by virtue of many 
features. This means that politeness of this kind can- 
not be made available as a controllable expressive re- 
source for a text planner within the chooser framework 
as it is implemented within the Nigel project. 
4 An implemented solution 
In order to meet this problem and to allow full control 
of politeness phenomena, the following extension was 
implemented within the context of the computational 
systemic grammar framework supported at Kyoto. 
The chooser framework is maintained as a deci- 
sion tree that selects between minimal points of se- 
mantic alternation. However, it is no longer the case 
that this needs to be held in a one-to-one correspon- 
dence with the minimal alternations that the gram- 
mar network represents. The possibility of distinct 
patterns of organization at the two levels, as would 
be claimed by systemic linguistics proper, is therefore 
captured. Accordingly, any chooser is permitted to 
make any number of selections of grammatical features 
from anywhere in the grammatical network. Choosers 
are thereby permitted to take on more of the organi- 
zational work required during text planning. 
This extension made it possible to construct a 
chooser decision tree that interrogates the text need 
concerning precisely those distinctions in meaning re- 
quired to ascertain which level and form of politeness 
to employ. The inquiries of this decision tree are free 
to ask all the questions related to the aspects of the 
social relationships of the participants in the speech 
situation that are necessary without being concerned 
about where in the grammatical network the conse- 
quences of those questions will be felt. This makes 
that reasoning available in a modular and easily com- 
prehensible form. The result of any particular path 
through the decision tree is a set of grammatical fea- 
tures that the grammatical product being generated 
as a whole must bear. This can therefore call for very 
different structural results to be selected which differ 
by many grammatical features drawn from many dis- 
tinct grammatical points of alternation° The present 
politeness 'chooser', or decision tree, has around 15 
decision points where a distinct inquiry needs to be 
put to the knowledge base. These \]nqulrles are still at 
the stage of informal approximation. 
For example, after traversal of the decision tree has 
already established a number of important facts con- 
cerning the text need, including that the actor is the 
hearer, that the situation is not one classifiable as for- 
many 'o/~clal', that there is considerable social 'dis- 
tance' between the speaker and hearer, among others, 
the simple semantic distinction glossable in English as 
Is the subject-matter o/ the procssa ~uch 
that additional reserve should be ahownf 
is drawn. If the text need is classifiable as requir- 
ing a yes-response to this inquiry then the gram- 
matlcal features: identi/ying, intensive, and speeial- 
frammalical-pla¢ing are constrained to appear. If 
a no-classification is possible, then the grammatical 
features: becomlng-attribute, intensive, and special- 
grammatical-placing appear. The former set results in 
clauses with a functional structure of the form: 
e- VERB dssu 
HONORIFIC X COPULA-be 
which, as we have seen, expresses additional distance 
between the action and its performance as required. 
The latter set is sufficient to constrain the structure 
produced to be of the form: 
o- VERB ni naru 
HONORIFIC X CASE becoming 
which is the less indirect expression of respect. 
By way of contrast, the portion of the 'politeness' 
chooser that is concerned with the expression of hu- 
mility, rather than respect, is shown in figure 1. 
Formerly, any such decision tree would only have 
been able to call for the appearance of a single gram- 
matlcal feature; here any number of features may be 
selected (as indicated by the '++' operator in figure 
1) during the decision tree's traversaL Modelling the 
kind of non-local organization inherent in the expres- 
sion of politeness would therefore have required nu- 
merous decision trees split according to the grammat- 
150 
IS the action independent Of otJlerS, the audience In particular? 
Is the process of the kind that • 
s¢~e¢t•l lextcat verb exists that 
em~'esses huld 11 ty? 
*+ post LI ~-SOCl al -pl 1¢t ng 
favm,trs 
** see¢~i al- | exl cai -pl act n 9 
post tt v~ sot1 •1 -pi a.:t ng 
Vould the performance of the fwocess 
obligate the hearer In any va)~ 
IS the process of the kind that • sp¢~t•1 
lextcal verb exists that e~resses hmM14t~ 
t~ spect•l-lex4caI-placln9 ~ poslt|ve-soc~•l-pl•ctng 
pOSl ti ve- soot al °pl •Cl ng 
** v~ shfulness 
favours 
modl fled- ~.-~ss 
cause modt fl ed-W~cess 
81-9rmtt ca1 -pi act~g 
IS there • reas(m for e)q)llcltly laktng 
clear COnsideration Of the others wishes 
• regarding the process, such as tn seeking 
perldsslon for an act4on ~hlch way benefit 
the actor as ma=h its more than tt does the hearer'? \- 
** {the features for:. 
~IE~8 1"~) 
Fig-ure 1: The humility portion of the politeness chooser 
ical org-~nization. This subordinates the semantic or- 
ganizatlon to the grammatical organization and nec- 
essar;\]y obscures the unity of the politeness reasoning 
process. By allowing the two levels of gray,mar and 
semantics their own, not necessarily isomorphic, di- 
mensions of organization it \]s possible to express the 
unity and coherence of patterns at either level and to 
capture the relationship between those levels. 
5 Example of the genera- 
tion of appropriately polite 
clauses 
In this section, the generation of an actual utter- 
ance exhibiting complex attributes of politeness is il- 
lustrated. The utterance is drawn from a corpus of 
telephone conversations concerning hotel reservations. 
The traces given are those actually produced by the 
currently implemented Japanese systemic grammar 
program that is written In Symbolic• Common Lisp 
and runs upon a Symbolics 3600 Y.~p Machine. 
The context for the utterance is as follows. After a 
negotiation of precisely where, when, and how long the 
customer is to stay, the person responsible for hotel 
booking states that he will send the confirmation of 
the reservation to the customer 'today'. It is worth 
noting that the 'direct' translation of thle statement 
in terms of its ideational content (perhaps glossable 
as a very neutral I wall! send it today), such as might 
be handled by current machine translation systems, 
would be quite inappropriate in a genuine interactive 
situation such as the one described. What was actually 
said was of the following form: 
kVou A~sou saaete, itadaki, tai to omoim~u 
today send do-canes receive wish think 
forward humbly 
might I be permitted to send it today? 
During generation the grammar causes the politeness 
reasoning chooser network to be entered; this performs 
the classifications shown in figure 2, the humility sec- 
tion of thk reasoning may be followed through in figure 
1 also. 
The ~-a~nmatical features constrained to appear in 
this case, i.e. ~sh/uinesa, \[avoura, cause, etc., then 
result in particular predetermined paths being taken 
through the grammar network. For example, figure 
3 shows when the grammatlcal system responsible 
for the construction of the functional structure con- 
cerned wlth the expression of causallty is entered, s 
S a number of experimental extensJo~ over the corn- 
151 
ENTERED SO CI AL-P LACING-REQU I REM ENTS;SY STEM 
CHOOSER: Inquiring Is tt possible f.or the -~peaker to Identify ~dth the 
actor of. the process SENDING (PROCESS)? 
ENVIRONHENT RESPONSE: YES 
CHOOSER: t nqut rtng Does the re1 art onsht p (e. g. one o£ great sot1 al 
distance) bergen the current speaker and the hearer 
requt re the expresst on oP spectal soctal post tl ont ng 
tnf.ormaMon during the statement of" SENDING (PROCESS)? 
ENVZRONHENT RESPONSE= YES 
CHOOSER: presel ectt ng f.eature HUHBI~NG 
CHOOSER: HUMILITY-REASONIN~ 
CHOOSER: I nqut rd ng Is the actl on SENDING (PROCESS) tndependent of others, 
ENVI RONHENT RESPON~ 
CHOOSER: t nqut H ng 
ENVIRONHENT RESPON~ 
CHOOSER: t nqut H ng 
ENVIRONHENT RESPONSE: 
CHOOSER: choostng 
CHOOSER: - I nqut rd ng 
ENVZRONHENT RESPON~ 
CHOOSEP- preselecttng feature 
• CHOOSER: preselectt ng feature 
CHOOSER: preselecM ng f.eature 
the audtence t n part| cular? 
NO 
Would the performance of. the process SENDING (PROCESS) 
obll gate the hearer, tn any way? (e. g. to carry for 
so¢~fteo .°°) 
NO 
Is the process SENDING (PROCESS) oF the ktnd that a 
spectal lextcal verb extsts that expresses huadltty? 
NO 
POSZI~VE-SOCIN.-PLACZ NG 
Is there a reason /'or explicitly maktng clear 
consideration of the other's wishes regarding the 
process SENDING (PROCESS). such as I n seekt ng petrol sst on 
for an action ~ht ch may beneftt the actor as much as 
more than tt does the hearer? 
YES 
VI StFIJLRESS 
FAVOURS 
HOOIFIED-PROCESS 
CHOOSER: preselectt ng feature CAUSE 
CHOOSER: presele~tt ng feature HOOTFIED-PRO(TcSS 
CHOOSER: preselec%t ng Feature SPECIN.-GRNqHAT~CAL-PLACING 
SELECTED FEATURE is POSITIVE-SOCIAL-PLACING 
Figure 2: Trace of the 8rammar's poHteneu reasoning 
ENTERED MOOIFIED-PROCESS-TYPE-SY-S~ P.M RECURSIVELY 
PRESELECTIONS OVERRIDING: =;electing feature CAUSE, . 
SELECTED FEATURE is CAUSE 
~J;LZZEI~ tnserttng 
REALIZER: conflaM ng 
REN~ZER: pre.sel ectt ng 
REALZZER: preselectl fig 
REN.ZZER: or'dent ng 
~ENTERED MODIFIED-EXPERIENCE-SYS/EM RECURSIVELY 
CHOOSER: t nqut H ng I= tht = use of the process SENDING (PROCESS) rood1 fted 
further t n some way? 
ENVZRONHENT RESPONS~ NO 
CHOOSER: selec¢tng feature CORE-PROCESS 
SELECTED FEATURE is CORE-PROCESS 
REN.IZ'F.~ preselecttng PROCE~ for SIMPLE-PROCESS 
INITJ\[ATOR 
INI~ATOR and AGENT. 2 
PROCESS For COPPL~-PROCESS 
PROCESS for CAUSATIVE 
AGENT. 2 before AGENT. 1 
FiKure 3: ~raversal of the causaCivity region of the grammar 
152 
This grammatical system offer two alternative selec- 
tlous of feature: one which constrains the structure 
generated to be an expression of causation and one 
which does not. Here, since the grammatical feature 
cause has been constrained to appear by the polite- 
ness chooser, no further reasoning needs to be done 
at this point and the construction of the appropriate 
structure may proceed directly (via excution of the re- 
alization etatemerds associated wlth the cause feature, 
which call for a variety of operations to be performed 
on functionally-labelled constituents such as AGENT, 
PROCESS, etc.). 
Similarly prsssiscted grammatical decisions are 
made for each of the other regions of the grammar 
responsible for creating the structure required to ex- 
press the politeness need as determined during polite- 
ness reasoning. Thls serves to build the structure of 
the example sentence as an appropriate realization of 
the distinctions in politeness that were ascertained to 
be necessary by the politeness chooser inquiries. 
6 Implications for further 
work 
It has been shown how a straightforward extension of 
the chooser and inquiry framework employed within 
the Nigel grammar permits its application to the 
control of the resources for expre~ing politeness in 
Japanese. In addition to the choice of humble and 
respectful forms of expression illustrated here, thk 
mechanism has been used in one current version of 
the grammar to support the selection of appropriate 
verbs of 'giving' and their combinations with other 
processes for the expression of favors done and con- 
slderation for other's actions, the selection of the par- 
ticipants or circumstances in the clause that are to 
be made 'thematic', and the selection of appropriate 
levels of speech (familiar, polite, deferential) across a 
variety of grammatical forms. 
The flexibility that this approach offers for cap- 
turing the semantic distinctions involved in interper- 
sonal meanings is allowing us to apply to interper- 
sonal knowledge the technique that was adopted for 
ideational meanings of determining the knowledge that 
needs to be maintained for satisfactory control of the 
resources of the grammar. An examination of how the 
inquiries informally glossed here may be implemented 
with respect to an actual knowledge base significantly 
constrains the types of constructs and their interre- 
laticnships that that knowledge base will be required 
to support. Thus notions of relative social position, 
obligatlons owed, favors done, social situation types, 
putational systemic framework implemented in Nigel ap- 
pear in this trace, e.g. the entering of granunatical s/stems 
'recursively' and the insertion of multiple functions of the 
same type, as in AGENT.1 and AGENT.2. These are be- 
yond the scope of this paper however; their detail may be 
found in Bateman et a/. (1987). 
consequences of actions upon other people, and oth- 
ers that adequate inquiries have been found to rely 
upon are isolated in a linguistically-motivated and con- 
strained manner for incorporation in the interpersonal 
component of any knowledge base that is intended to 
support Japanese text generation. It is to be expected 
that similar results may be found with respect to En- 
gllsh also and so the identification of the interpersonal 
constructs necessary for knowledge bases for English 
text generation is now a clear priority. 
A more general application of the extension to the 
inquiry semantics approach illustrated here is that it 
opens up the possibility of using the chooser and in- 
quiry framework to capture the selection of grammat- 
ical forms according to the uses that are to be made of 
those forms, without imposing the grammar's organi- 
zation upon the decision trees that control that selec- 
tion. Since this non-isomorphism between distinctions 
that are to be drawn between uses and the distinctions 
that axe maintained in the grammar is as widespread 
across English as it is across Japanese, it is to be ex- 
pected that the mechanism proposed here could find 
wlde application. However, further experimentation 
into the mechanism's utility and appropriateness as a 
representation of what is involved in areas of language 
use where this occurs needs to be undertaken. 
Acknowledgments 
Many thanks are due to Professors Makoto Nagao 
and Jun-ichl Tsujii, all the members of the Nag~o lab- 
oratory, and to the staff and students of the Kyoto 
Japanese School for attempting to improve my under- 
standing of the Japanese language and its situated use. 
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