Politeness Strategy used by the main character in “Walk to Remember” movie

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the characteristic of people‟s politeness in interacting with the society. Politeness is used by individual to reach the harmony of life. For running a well and going smoothly in life, there are four types which should be fulfilled by the individual; those are (1) bald on record, (2) positive politeness, (3) negative politeness, and (4) off record strategies. If the individual can follow these characteristic, automatically the individual can reach a running well and going smoothly of life. The purpose of this research is to describe of the use of politeness expression by female. Politeness phenomenon also appears in the dialogues of movie in the terms of conversation between the characters. Therefore, the writer chooses “Walk to Remember” movie as an object of the research. The language used by the main character reflects the social phenomena when she was happy, sad or annoyed.

This study is aimed at finding the use of politeness strategies in „Walk to Remember‟s‟ movie, specifically for expressing the faith and affection of the main character. Moreover, this study is designed to find out the types of politeness strategies and the intentions for using this strategy by Jamie as the main character when she expressed her faith and affection to Landon.

This study is descriptive-qualitative since the data are collected, analysed an described in the form of words or utterances rather than numerical scores or statistics. It is a descriptive study because it tries to describe the way of politeness strategies employed by Jamie. This study has one primary data source which is the movie script of „Walk to Remember‟ taken from the internet.

This research results show that Jamie uses three types of politeness strategies as being proposed by Brown and Lavinson (1987), namely positive politeness, negative politeness and off record. The possibly reason of using positive politeness is because Jamie has big affection to do the politeness strategies. Meanwhile, the reason of using of record strategy is mainly influenced by her feeling for falling in love and faith. Positive politeness is used by Jamie when she tries to convince her father in order to reach her affection for falling in love with boy who is well-known carelessly by saving their positive face. Then, the use of strategy negative politeness is when Jamie wants to save the hearer‟s negative face.

Finally, the researcher expects this research will be able to help the next researcher who conducts the research in the same field. It is suggested to further researchers to be able to investigate other objects which might contain politeness strategy.