Politeness strategies used by a child in “Jersey Girl” movie

ABSTRACT

In our daily communication, people need to use the strategy of politeness to build harmony when they interact with others in order to achieve their wants and goals by maintaining other’s face. Whether we realize it or not, we will automatically try to be polite when we explore our idea to the addressee in any reasons. It is because politeness is one of the topics of pragmatics which studies about a strategy of communication that emphasizes on how to be polite in words and actions. Politeness phenomenon also appears in the dialogues of movie in the terms of conversation between the characters. Therefore, the writer chooses Jersey girl movie to investigate politeness used by the children.

This study is aimed at finding the use of politeness strategies in Jersey Girl’s movie. Moreover, this study is designed to find out the types of politeness strategies and the reason for using the strategy by Gertie as the main character when she expresses her opinion in order to reach her wants. This study is descriptive-qualitative since the data were collected, analyzed and described in the form of words rather than numerical scores or statistics. The study is descriptive because it tries to describe the way politeness strategies are used by children. The data of the research are the utterances, which contains politeness strategies employed by Gertie. This study has one primary data source which is the movie itself. The researcher also used movie’s script of the film from internet.

The result of this research shows that Gertie uses four kinds of politeness strategies being proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) to express her opinion, namely: Bald on Record, Positive Politeness, Negative Politeness and Off Record. Furthermore, based on the finding of this research, the researcher found that the strategy which is mostly used by Gertie is Bald on Record. It means that Gertie likes to speak direct, clear, ambiguous and concise ways when she intends achieve her wants. Moreover, he found that there are many reasons of Gertie in using those kinds of politeness strategies. It mostly influenced by her feeling of emotion, environment, and the situation when she uses politeness strategies. The result of this study is useful for the next researchers who are in the same area of this study. For the next researcher, he suggested to choose different field research and different theory, in order to enrich the area of study and investigation.