Women’s speech features used by main character of Royal Family in The Young Victoria Movie

ABSTRACT

Women’s speech features are several aspects of speech difference between women and men which indicate the characteristic of women’s speech. It common used for expressing powerless or subordinate position. While, Women’s speech features also have other aim, that is politeness strategies. Politeness is used by individual to get smooth communication or avoid conflict by keeping other’s face. This research focuses on analyzing women’s speech features used by main character of royal family in the Young Victoria movie which show politeness strategies.

This study is aimed at finding out what women’s speech features appearing in The Young Victoria movie used by main character of royal family and how Queen Victoria uses women’s speech features for showing politeness strategies. This study is descriptive qualitative. The researcher collected the data by watching the movie, downloading the transcript, confirming transcript by listening and reading it, highlighting the existence of the data on the transcript which is included Women’s speech features and show politeness strategies, arranging the data based on the sequence of appearing in the movie and the researcher identified the data based on Lakoff ‘s theory and Holmes’ theory.

The findings show that Queen Victoria uses eight types of women’s speech features, those are Lexical Hedge, Tag Question, Intensifier, Empty Adjective, Rising intonation, Super polite form, Emphatic stress and Avoiding Swear Word and two types of feature which were not used by Queen victoria were hypercorrect grammar and specialize vocabulary. Those reflect uncertainty, lack of confident, give high appreciation, and emotional state. Lexical hedge, Tag question, Empty Adjective, Intensifier and swear word are classified as positive politeness which express either a general appreciation of the speaker and addressee who has friendliness by using ironic, sarcastic, flattery, patronizing, expressive of solidarity, praise, envy or admiration. While Rising Intonation, Emphatic stress and super polite form are classified as negative politeness which give an opportunity to the addressee, indicates high appreciation, or minimizes the imposition someone by using redressive action or apologies. The ways of Queen Victoria using Women’s speech features to show positive politeness are using in- friendly identity maker, seeking agreement, and persuading intention. While, the ways how Queen Victoria uses negative politeness are giving different status with the addressee, using apology strategy, and minimize the imposing of addressee. The researcher suggests the further researchers to analyze women’s speech features in the real situation in other form such as in speech of Queen Elizabeth or Kate Medilton since it is not revealed yet in this study.