Blurb:

Yansheng Mao and Kun Yang explore the use of back-channels in Chinese consultant-caller communication as a form of politeness. They find that the consultants use backchannels for the primary purpose of following, followed by those performing the functions of agreeing, responding, rephrasing, adding, interrupting, repeating and commenting. These functions, discussed within Leech’s GSP (2014), are found to have the implications of politeness.