Compliments and compliment responses in Philippine English

Compliment is a speech act that frequently occurs in everyday conversations. It is often used to start a conversation or to ‘lubricate’ the conversational interaction by reinforcing the rapport between the interlocutors. One line of academic research on compliments is to investigate similarities and differences across varieties of English (Jucker, 2009). So far, many varieties of English, such as American English, New Zealand English, and African English have been explored and it was found that compliments are formulaic in terms of both the meaning and the syntactic forms (e.g. Manes & Wolfson, 1981; Holmes, 1986; Herbert & Straight, 1989). However, only few studies have been done on Philippine English. This paper aims to fill the gap. A Discourse Completion Test (Henceforth DCT) was used to elicit data of giving and receiving compliments from 30 college students in a Philippine University. An analysis is provided of the compliment strategies, the syntactic and lexical patterns characterizing compliments, and the compliment response strategies. It was found that Philippine English speakers tend to use explicit compliments plus a bound semantic formula most frequently. The compliments in Philippine English are as formulaic at syntactic and lexical levels as other varieties of English. Filipinos are more likely to accept the compliment, rather than reject it, when they receive one

Some notes on the paper "The mean value of a new arithmetical function"

In reference [2], we used the elementary method to study the mean value prop- erties of a new arithmetical function, and obtained two mean value formulae for it, but there exist some errors in that paper. The main purpose of this paper is to correct the errors in reference [2], and give two correct conclusions

Relativistic Astronomy. III. Test of Special Relativity via Doppler Effect

The Breakthrough Starshot program is planning to send transrelativistic probes to travel to nearby stellar systems within decades. Because the probe velocity is designed to be a good fraction of the light speed, Zhang & Li recently proposed that these transrelativistic probes can be used to study astronomical objects and to test special relativity. In this work, we propose some methods to test special relativity and constrain photon mass using the Doppler effect with the images and spectral features of astronomical objects as observed in the transrelativistic probes. We introduce more general theories to set up the framework of testing special relativity, including the parametric general Doppler effect and the Doppler effect with massive photons. We find that by comparing the spectra of a certain astronomical object, one can test Lorentz invariance and constrain photon mass. Additionally, using the imaging and spectrograph capabilities of transrelativistic probes, one can test time dilation and constrain photon mass. For a transrelativistic probe with velocity v ~ 0.2c, aperture D ~ 3.5 cm, and spectral resolution R ~ 100 (or 1000), we find that the probe velocity uncertainty can be constrained to σ v ~ 0.01c (or 0.001c), and the time dilation factor uncertainty can be constrained to (or 0.001), where is the time dilation factor and γ is the Lorentz factor. Meanwhile, the photon mass limit is set to m γ 10−33 g, which is slightly lower than the energy of the optical photon