Politeness Strategies In John Grisham’s Novel “The Client”

ABSTRACT

People tend to choose the strategies for polite conversation in the purpose of achieving their final goal by maintaining other’s face. Politeness is the power- distance relationship of the interactants and the extent to which a speaker imposes on or requires something from their addressee. However, politeness phenomena can also be appeared in literary text such as dialogues in a novel which provides the language of people interacting each other within the novel through the portrayed characters, so the story is easy to be understood. Therefore, the researcher chooses politeness strategies to investigate politeness phenomena in John Grisham’s novel “The Client”.

In this study, the researcher analyzes the portrayed of utterances of the politeness strategies toward four politeness strategies, namely bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record strategies.

The descriptive qualitative is used to conduct this research. The reason is to describe and to explain the politeness phenomena in the novel of “The Client” writen by John Grisham. In addition, this study presents the data in the forms of words or utterances rather than numbers which rely very much on the rich narrative description.

The result of the study shows that four strategies are applied by the portrayed characters in their dialogues. First, Bald on record strategy which is used in the situation in which S wants to achieve the maximum efficiency of his utterance. Second, Positive Politeness Strategy which is used in the condition in which S tries to minimize the distance between expressing friendliness and solid interest. Third, Negative Politeness Strategy which is used in the situation in which S has the main focus on assuming that he may be imposing and intruding on H’s space. Fourth, off Record Strategy which is used in the condition to take some pressures off the hearer.

This study can lead other researchers to conduct research on politeness strategies in the other form of literary works such as poetry and drama in the purpose of enriching the discourse studies. It is also hoped that the study on politeness involves language other than English; so, it can broaden the knowledge in applying linguistic aspects in various languages.