Production Of Tag Questions On The Basis Of Politeness Principles

English tag question is composed of a declarative and a tag attached to it. The declarative in a tag questions expresses a statement and tags a question. As simple the construction seems to be, the semantic and pragmatic meanings tag questions convey are rather complicated. Tag questions usually convey various intentions of the speaker. Tag questions are a distinctive feature of spoken English and are heavily employed in daily conversations by native speakers of English in an attempt to attend to the feelings of the addressee under certain contexts.With a view to saving the positive and negative face of the hearer, the speaker uses the tag to offer the hearer more options. In the cases of posing potential threat to the hearers, tag questions are a good facilitator in maintaining the integrity and independence of the addressee. Tag questions carry various concrete functions such as seeking agreement, eliciting topics, echoing the statement, seeking confirmation, intensifying humor, and softening confrontation in the actual performance of Larry King. The paper intends to correlate the tag questions with the politeness based on the theoretical framework of Brown and Levinson's Politeness Principles. And in an attempt to enhance the verbal communication of Chinese English learners, the author takes TV hosts of home and abroad as the target of the study to note how our English is like and to help get closer to the target language. The data derives from the spontaneous utterances from the TV talk show program, Larry King Live, Joe Behar Show and Dialogue with the former two programs representing native TV hosts and the latter one representing the Chinese TV hosts. Concrete and specific examples are illustrated to portray a clear picture of the pragmatic functions of tag questions and qualitative analysis has been drawn on the quantitive data collection.From the research, it is noted that even the Chinese English TV program hosts who speak excellent English use few tag questions in their interviews in comparison with the frequency of the tag questions used by the native speakers of English in their talking programs. High level of English proficiency doesn't necessarily guarantee equal level of the pragmatic competence. So to speak, English classroom teaching in China should give equal focus on both the learners'language proficiency and on the learners'pragmatic competence. Textbooks and English teachers are the key sources where students gain their knowledge. In order to better develop the pragmatic awareness of the English learners, more pragmatic-related information should be introduced apart from the semantic and syntactic knowledge and also teachers are supposed to be sufficiently and culturally socialized in terms of the language pragmatic competence, in which case, Chinese English learners can better master various linguistic devices to achieve different communicative goals.