Politeness Strategies Used by Mia and her grandma in “Princess Diaries” film

ABSTRACT

People who are trying to maintain social relation in the society need certain communication strategies. One of the most important ways to achieve this objective is politeness strategy. This social phenomenon can appear in visual form such as film since it provides a lot of utterances used by the characters. Film reflects the real of social life, when it is made by the director, it is influenced by the social and cultural values where the film is being created. Considering the important of politeness strategies in a conversation, here, the researcher wanted to find out the politeness strategies used by Mia and Her grandma, two main characters in film entitled “Princess Diaries”.

This research was designed by using sociolinguistic approach because the researcher tried to study a language phenomenon used by the speaker and the hearer. The data were the utterances of Mia and grandma, the main characters of “Princess Diaries” film, which contain the politeness strategies. They were analyzed inductively through the observation done by the researcher himself. The approach for analyzing the politeness strategies is based on the Scollon and Scollon’s Theory of Politeness.

As the result, the researcher found out that both Mia and her grandma used two kinds of strategies based on Scollon and Scollon’s Concept of Politeness, they are involvement and independent strategies. There were twenty politeness strategies used by Mia: four involvement strategies (notice and attend to hearer, exaggerate when says to the hearer, and giving voluble) and sixteen independent strategies (showing apology, being pessimistic, using the hearer’s nicknames, and minimizing threat to the interlocutor, etc). Meanwhile, there are fifteen politeness strategies used by her grandma: twelve involvement strategies (showing attend or notice to the hearer, giving voluble, showing sympathy, using the hearer’s language and claim common point of view, opinions, and empathy, etc) and three independent strategies (state general rules, giving apology, and calling the hearer by using his/her nicknames).

This study can lead the further researchers to conduct research on politeness strategies in other kind of films, theories, and no limited on the two characters. It is also hoped that the study on politeness strategies involving other languages, not just in English, therefore it can broaden the knowledge in applying linguistic aspects in various languages.