Towards a model of formal and informal address in English
Manaal Faruqui, Sebastian Padó · 2012
Informal and formal (“T/V”) address in dialogue is not distinguished overtly in modern English, e.g. by pronoun choice like in many other languages such as French (“tu”/“vous”). Our study investigates the status of the T/V distinction in English literary texts. Our main findings are: (a) human raters can label monolingual English utterances as T or V fairly well, given sufficient context; (b), a bilingual corpus can be exploited to induce a supervised classifier for T/V without human annotation. It assigns T/V at sentence level with up to 68 % accuracy, relying mainly on lexical features; (c), there is a marked asymmetry between lexical features for formal speech (which are conventionalized and therefore general) and informal speech (which are text-specific). 1