Tag Questions And Politeness Strategies

The tag question is a very common linguistic phenomenon in oral English. It is a simple structure with complex pragmatic functions. Tag questions usually do not merely raise questions but convey various intentions of the speakers. As a result, English learners encounter much difficulty in understanding them in oral interaction. Therefore, a holistic analysis of tag questions in terms of their functions under different contexts is necessary. After an overview of the existing syntactic, semantic and pragmatic studies on tag questions, it is concluded that there requires a more feasible approach to analyze this special linguistic phenomenon. The major concern of the present study is to consider tag questions as positive or negative politeness strategies and analyze their pragmatic functions related to the negative face wants and positive face wants of the interlocutors.This study relies on the Politeness Principle proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) to examine the relationship between tag questions and politeness strategies. In specific contexts, tag questions act as the realization of politeness strategies to mitigate face-threatening acts and attend the hearers' positive face or negative face. From the secondary data analysis, we conclude that if consider the usage of tag questions as an intention to be polite, this intention may convey various pragmatic forces under different contexts. All these pragmatic functions conveyed by tag questions could be explained as either negative or positive politeness strategies.