The politeness strategies used by Anne as the ambitious main character in “The Other Boleyn 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 emphasize 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 “The Other Boleyn Girl” movie to investigate politeness phenomena used by the ambitious main character.

This study is aimed at finding the use of politeness strategies in The Other Boleyn Girl’s movie, specifically for the ambitious main character. Moreover, this study is designed to find out the types of politeness strategies and the reason for using the strategy by Anne as main character when she expresses her opinion in order to reach her ambitions to be the next Queen of England and to do her revenge to Mary (her little sister).

This study is descriptive-qualitative since the data are 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 a native female adult. The data of the research are the utterances, which contains politeness strategies employed by Anne. This study has one primary data source which is the movie script of The Other Boleyn Girl taken from the internet.

The research result shows that Anne uses four kinds of politeness strategies to express her ambitions as being proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), namely: Bald on Record, Positive Politeness, Negative Politeness and Off Record. The possibly reason of using Bald on Record is because Anne has big motivation to do an FTA to the H. Meanwhile, the reason of using Off Record strategy is mainly influenced by her feeling of being betrayed at the past. Positive Politeness is used by Anne when she tries to convince her addressee in order to reach her ambitions in being the next Queen of England by saving their positive face. Then, the use of strategy Negative Politeness is when Anne wants to save the hearer’s negative face. She is prone to respect the addressee even actually she is in truly bad mood. Since this study only discusses about the ambitious main character in using politeness strategies, the writer suggests the next researchers to conduct further research to focus on one strategy of politeness.