Blurb:

Xiyun Zhong and Cynthia Allen, by combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, and integrating interviews with observations, examine the backchannel practice on the Chinese Internet forums. They discover that backchannels, represented in an Internet style, occur more frequently on the Internet forums than in daily conversations, and perform a variety of politeness functions, each function corresponding to a certain sub-maxim of Leech’s General Strategy of Politeness.