Politeness used by President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate 2012

ABSTRACT

Watts (2003:53) states that politeness instructs the interactants to produce a harmonious interaction socially. If someone wants to make a good conversation, he or she should understand the strategy of politeness. Holmes (1992: 296) also explained that politeness is an activity which involves taking account of the feeling of others. It means that using language that is polite as respect other people in social community.

This thesis analyzes the Politeness Strategies which is used in the first presidential debate tofind out what the type of Politeness Strategies used in debate and investigate how do the utterances convey the type of Politeness Strategies in the first of the presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. According to Scollon and Scollon (1992: 46) Politeness Strategies are divided into Involvement and Independent strategies. Further, the researcher decides the utterances of debate as the data because every candidate has strategies in the debate to show his power and emphasize to respond the issues, it has purposes to get sympathy from audience in debate and the researcher uses Scollon and Scollon’s theories.

The descriptive qualitative method is used to analyze the data in this research. The data are presented descriptively because it describes and explains politeness strategies used in the utterance debate such as describing what the types of Politeness Strategies used in debate and investigate how the utterances convey the type of Politeness Strategies in the first of the presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney based on Scollon and Scollon’s theories(1992).

After collecting the data, the researcher found out the answer problems of study based on Scollon and Scollon’s theories. The finding shows that the Involvement and Independent Strategies of Politeness is use by both President Obama and Mitt Romney. The use of Involvement Strategy is much influenced by these two characters of candidates that try to close each other. Meanwhile the use of the Independent strategy politeness is much influenced by formal situation. The context of the debate influences the choice of Politeness Strategies. The participants tend to use the involvement as the strategy to close relationship of participants in the debate, while the participants use the independent as the strategy to respect each other in the debate.

This research only focuses on politeness strategies used in debate. It is important for the next researchers who are interested in the same field to use different approaches and comparison that have be relevant theories of politeness strategies.