Politeness strategies used by oprah winfrey in oprah winfrey show on Metro TV

ABSTRACT

Politeness strategy is one of communication strategies that emphasizes on maintaining face and getting freedom not being disturbed. Politeness strategies can be applied in analyzing the conversation such as in the interaction of talk show؛ since it provides the language that shows US the interaction between the speaker and the hearer. Oprah Winfrey is famous talk show host who introduces the way to interact by considering the euphemistic expression in the meaning of avoiding mentioning and claiming the certain matter directly toward the addressees. Therefore, the politeness strategy of its language needs to notice.

The descriptive qualitative method is used to conduct this research, because the aim of this research is to describe the politeness phenomena in the conversation which consists of utterances of Oprah Winfrey and focuses on the narrative description. Beside that, the observation is used as the second instrument after the researcher himself. This method is chosen because this research has natural based data.

The data are the utterances of Oprah Winfrey in Oprah Winfrey Show broadcast on Metro TV in the form of dialogues, taken in January 15٦ 2006. The data were taken from the show entitled a When you accidentally kill someone”. It consists of four dialogue’s sessions which consists of 23 (twenty-three) data based on the topic of discussion. In addition, each session has different number of data. The first session consists of seven (7) data, the second session consists of three (3) data, the third consists of eight (8) data, and the last session consists of five (5) data. All those data consist of 63 Oprah’s utterances which further are classified based on the four concepts of politeness strategies theory.

The result of this research shows that all politeness strategies are used by Oprah Winfrey; namely bald on record strategy, positive and negative politeness strategy, and off record strategy. The strategies found are mostly positive and negative politeness strategies. The use of positive politeness strategies shows that the host wants to keep the relationship between her and the participant by giving good understanding and cares to the hearers which can be seen in seeking agreement. Meanwhile, the use of negative politeness indicates the significance of stressing on euphemistic expression in order to keep the status differential to have more formal interaction. The euphemistic expression used means that the speaker avoids mentioning and claiming the certain matter directly to the addressee, such as using indirect request as formal expression by considering on solidarity relation.

Based on the findings, this study can be used as an additional reference for students, lecturers, and future researchers who study discourse analysis especially about politeness strategies to have comprehensive analysis. This study suggests that the students should pay more attention in interpreting the context of the utterances especially on talk show. For the lecturers, they should innovate in giving materials about linguistic studies and introduce their students about contextual analysis in oral communication. For the further researchers, they should conduct the future research from different view which can influence the use of politeness strategies such as sexual differences, social status differences by combining or comparing the Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness strategies by another theory of politeness strategies, such as Schegloff and Sacks’ theory.