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Introduction
As Mills(2003) claims, politeness is to respect the speech of the person you are talking to and avoid to hurt his/her feeling or upset him/her. Politeness is also ’an behaviour which actively expresses positive concern for others, as well as non-imposing distancing behaviour’(Holmes, 1995:5). In this paper, several terms will be explained and exemplified by means of politeness from the field of sociolinguistics.
Turn-taking
In conversation, the role of speaker and hearer are changing constantly and the person who speaks first becomes a listener as soon as the person addressed takes his or her turn in the conversation by beginning to speak(Richards et al.,1992: 390). It is essential for people to know when and how it is appropriate and acceptable to take a turn to develop a conversation in a cooperative and progressive way. Therefore, skills and rules for turn-taking are needed and employed here, both for speaker and hearer. Here are some examples for turn-taking:
A: The movie we watched tonight is awful, isn’t it?
B: Yes, definitely yes.
R: How’s the weather in Liverpool? Is it still raining every now and then?
V: Oh, yeah, it’s usually windy and rainy at this time of year.
Backchannels
Backchannels are minimal responses that are usually made to show one is paying attention or to encourage the speaker to continue(Hawes, 2011).There are several signals of backchannels, sounds such as m-hm, yeah; gestures like nods of head; expressions such as ’oh, really?’, ’you’ve got to be kidding’; request clarification; complete speaker’s sentence and restate what speaker just said(Dunken
As Mills(2003) claims, politeness is to respect the speech of the person you are talking to and avoid to hurt his/her feeling or upset him/her. Politeness is also ’an behaviour which actively expresses positive concern for others, as well as non-imposing distancing behaviour’(Holmes, 1995:5). In this paper, several terms will be explained and exemplified by means of politeness from the field of sociolinguistics.
Turn-taking
In conversation, the role of speaker and hearer are changing constantly and the person who speaks first becomes a listener as soon as the person addressed takes his or her turn in the conversation by beginning to speak(Richards et al.,1992: 390). It is essential for people to know when and how it is appropriate and acceptable to take a turn to develop a conversation in a cooperative and progressive way. Therefore, skills and rules for turn-taking are needed and employed here, both for speaker and hearer. Here are some examples for turn-taking:
A: The movie we watched tonight is awful, isn’t it?
B: Yes, definitely yes.
R: How’s the weather in Liverpool? Is it still raining every now and then?
V: Oh, yeah, it’s usually windy and rainy at this time of year.
Backchannels
Backchannels are minimal responses that are usually made to show one is paying attention or to encourage the speaker to continue(Hawes, 2011).There are several signals of backchannels, sounds such as m-hm, yeah; gestures like nods of head; expressions such as ’oh, really?’, ’you’ve got to be kidding’; request clarification; complete speaker’s sentence and restate what speaker just said(Dunken