Politeness strategies in Barrack Obama Speech in Democratic National Convention 2012

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. Here Obama is the candidate of the president of America from Democratic party, so he has to deliver the speech in front of the audience and the official of Democratic party.Therefore, the use of politeness strategies is required and as the reason Obama chosen as the subject, because he is indicated to use politeness strategies successfully in his Speech in Democratic National Convention. Therefore, this research focuses to find out the kinds of politeness strategies used by Obama 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 Obama speech in DNC. The source of the data I kn this study is Obama speech in Democratic National Convention 2012. 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.

This study shows that Obama uses all types of politeness strategies as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). Bald on record is used whenever speaker wants to do FTA with maximum efficiency more than he wants to satisfy hearer’s face. The function of positive politeness is to maintain the positive face of audiences and satisfy what their wants. Negative politeness is used in the situation in which has the main focus on assuming that he may be imposing and intruding on H’s face. Off Record is proposed for audience to interpret what Obama means. Besides, Obama 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, researcher suggest for the next researcher to analyze the social factors of politeness strategy by using other experts’ theories and different subjects.