A Sociolinguistic study of Indonesian compliment responses used by students of English department of UIIS Malang

ABSTRACT

The phenomena of language especially used in sociolinguistics are interesting to be investigated. In the society language to communicate with others, language is used to express their ideas and feeling besides maintaining social relation and personal attitudes. Language can also be used to send an unlimited number of messages including giving compliments. Giving compliment is one of language functions which often used to encourage desired behavior. Beside, there are many ways of how the compliment is expressed, and also many ways to respond to the compliment. Furthermore, the people who express or respond to the compliment will be influenced by many factors. This study was focused on the compliment responses used by the students of English Department at Ulis Malang in particular the eight semester.

Based on the background of the study, the research problems are stated in the following questions: (1) what are the types of compliment responses used by students, and (2) how are the compliment responses used.

The research method of this study is descriptive qualitative since the data were in the form of words and analyzed descriptively. The subjects are the students of English Department at UIIS Malang in particular eight semesters. Many types of compliment were uttered by those students and found by the Writer during the investigation on May 1 to June 15th, 2002. To obtain the data, the researcher spent a great deal of time observing and taking note as an instrument. Furthermore, to derive the valid data, the researcher used triangulation method. Then, the collected data were analyzed based on the research problems using the theory of compliment responses.

After analyzing and discussing the data, the researcher found the results as follows: (1) the compliment responses frequently used by males and female students are different. Praise upgrade is the type of compliment responses which dominates male responses. In the other hand, scale down type is more preferable and therefore has the highest number of occurrence in female responses. (2) By giving scale down and return types of compliment responses, women show that they are more aware with the other feeling and that they are used to involve their feeling of sensitivity and solidarity in their speech.

Finally, the phenomena of language in society are worthly and valuable thing to be investigated. People may use compliment also their responses within society. And the last, people have to use at least two languages to make the communication and interaction run smoothly.