Politeness strategies in Steve Jobs’ Speech in Stanford University 2005

ABSTRACT

Politeness strategies are used in communication to show the respect to other people and satisfy the hearer. It is very important to consider those in communication for avoiding a conflict as well as creating good harmony. Those phenomena can appear in delivering speech. Steve Jobs is a great person in delivering speech, it is proven from his successful presentation and this speech was delivered in front of students of Stanford University Therefore, the use of politeness strategies is required and as the reason Steve Jobs is chosen as the subject, because he is uses politeness strategies successfully in his speech in Stanford University. Therefore, this research focuses on finding out the kinds of politeness strategies used by Steve Jobs and to find out the functions of using those kinds of politeness strategies.

This study uses descriptive qualitative because it seeks to understand a certain phenomenon, namely the politeness strategies in Steve Jobs’ speech in Stanford University. The source of the data in this study is Steve Jobs’ speech in Stanford University 2005. The data were analyzed inductively through the observation done by the researcher himself. The approach for analyzing the politeness strategies is based on Brown and Levinson’s theory of Politeness.

The results of this study shows that Steve Jobs uses Bald on-Record positive politeness, negative politeness, and Off record as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). The function of positive politeness is to maintain the positive face of audiences and satisfy what their wants. Steve Jobs uses Negative Politeness Strategy by lowering his position to maintain hearer’s face. Off Record is proposed for audience to interpret what Steve Jobs means when he produces some ambiguity utterances. Besides, Steve Jobs points out to hearer that he wants to convey important information.

This research explores politeness strategies as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) and a speech as a subject. Therefore, the researcher suggests to the next researcher to analyze the social factors of politeness strategy by using other experts’ theories and different subjects.