Gratitude strategies used by the characters of Charlie Bartlett movie

ABSTRACT

Gratitude strategy is the ways of choosing the words or phrases to express one‟s kind feeling or appreciation on other action, saying, or benefits received. It is considered unique because people look at it as politeness behaviour, as the crucial part to build and establish social relationship. And the researcher assumes that the act of expressing gratitude may vary because of two important linguistic features such as different social backgrounds and gender of the speakers for the example, young people may show gratitude to old people more polite than older people to young people. It would seem socially unacceptable if people speak the same ways to all kinds of people surrounding them.

This thesis entitled Gratitude Strategy Used by the Characters of “Charlie Bartlett” Movie is intended to analyze gratitude strategies. This thesis focuses on analyzing types of gratitude expressions and gratitude responses and how gratitude expressions and gratitude responses are used by the characters of "Charlie Bartlett‟ movie.

This study applies descriptive qualitative method in finding gratitude expressions and gratitude responses strategies that are used by the characters. In analyzing the data, this study follows four steps: (1) taking the data and explaining the context of the data used by the characters of Charlie Bartlett movie to understand what the speaker‟s utterances; (2) classifying and describing the data from each category based on Aijmer‟s theory of gratitude expressions and gratitude responses; (3) discussing and analyzing the data using the theory of gratitude strategies proposed by Aijmer; (4) making conclusion based on the findings and discussions of the data analysis to answer research problems.

The results of the study show the types of gratitude expressions that are used by the characters of Charlie Bartlett movie are thanking somebody explicitly, expressing appreciation of the act, stressing one‟s gratitude, and expressing emotion. Furthermore, the gratitude responses that are used by the characters are minimizing the favor and expressing pleasure. In expressing gratitude, there are some types of politeness strategy that are used by the characters both upper and lower class: they are be voluble (speak a lot), be taciturn (speak little), Exaggerate (interest, approval, sympathy with H), given names or nicknames and be optimistic. While independence strategy that is used by the characters is using family names and titles. Finally, the researcher suggests to the next researcher to examine gratitude strategy by using other theories. In addition, they are suggested to investigate more deeply than the researcher did in this study about gratitude expressions and gratitude responses.