The Relationship Between Prosody and Politeness: A Review Study

The present review article investigated the relationship between prosody and politeness and summarizes the results of some previous studies in this area. It presents Brown and Levinson’s ‘politeness’ theory which is especially pertinent for understanding politeness in real frameworks. In the following sections, the researcher clarified the need of learning politeness with its prosodic expression, pitch, and its impact on politeness. This article also presents two ways of collecting speech samples. In conclusion, it argues about some research in this area pays special attention to prosodic values such as the F0 (pitch/fundamental frequency), pitch forms, length, and speech level and it also concludes that utterances with a rising intonation are politer than ones with a falling intonation. It also stated that a rising tone is usually favoured because it is prosodically “open”. It means that it gives the listeners a fortune to respond.