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CHAPTER ONEINTRODUCTION

1.1 Overview
As we all know, politeness phenomena exist in almost every society and every culture,and different cultures construct different norms for what is polite or impolite, hence, itwill be meaningful to explore the politeness in various cultural backgrounds. Over thepast few years, politeness phenomena have been extensively examined from differentsociocultural settings, but most of the studies are confined to the cultural backgroundssuch as the eastern or western culture. Therefore, the study of the pattern of linguisticpoliteness under a sub-culture or within a particular community deserves moreattention.
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1.2 The background of the research
Released in 2008, the movie Cape No. 7 achieved the longest and broadest theatricalrelease compared with the Taiwanese film ever made. Besides, its language as well asthe beautiful love story also made it appealing to the people all over the world. Themovie Cape No. 7 describes the harmonious lives of a group of people from differentbackgrounds in the town of Hengchun in the southern Taiwan. Taiwanese andJapanese are used in film, in addition to Mandarin Chinese. According to Eckert andMc Connell-Ginet (1998), a community of practice is:An aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagementin some common endeavour. Ways of doing, ways of talking, beliefs,values, power relations--in short, practices-- emerge in the course of theirjoint activity around that endeavour.( Mc Connell-Ginet 1998: 579)In this sense, the people in the town of Hengchun constitute a homogeneousgroup in terms of their obvious attitude in being members of the town, with the aim tolive a better life and build a lively hometown with local flavor. The whole populationof the town is likely to develop linguistic resources (here, politeness language) whichwill distinguish them from people from other places such as people living in themainland China, Hongkong and Macao.As a part of China, Taiwan has been separated from China for almost 100 years,so the history of Taiwan, especially the southern Taiwan has been characterized bydiversity due to the result of waves of immigration and years of colonialism underdifferent rulers. It is believed that the integration of traditional Chinese culture and theoutside culture produces the current Taiwanese culture. In 2009, Ma Yingjiu, the“president” of Taiwan, talked in an interview that Cape No. 7 is the true reflection ofTaiwanese daily lives which can offer us a glimpse of the real Taiwanese life. Hence,in this paper, Brown and Levinson’s face theory will be applied as the framework toanalyze the politeness phenomena in Cape No. 7 which reflects the local flavor of thevillage life in Southern Taiwan, in order to explore the politeness features as well asbehind traditional Chinese culture in the community.
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CHAPTER TWOLITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Introduction
Politeness expression reflects people’s effort to preserve harmonious relationship aswell as encodes the ethical and moral concept of daily conduct, and the studying of itcan inform us a lot about the social and cultural values of a society as well as theknowledge about how to behave appropriately in the community. Therefore, over thepast thirty years, politeness has been researched from multiple levels and variousaspects. In this chapter, the author will review the most relevant and influentialre