Politeness strategies used in caricatures published by Jakarta Post

ABSTRACT

In daily communication, people tend to choose the strategies to have polite conversation in the purpose of achieving their final goal by maintaining other’s face. Politeness in the power-distance relationship of the interactants and the extent to which a speaker imposes on or requires something from their addressee. However, politeness phenomena can also appear in written form such as column of newspaper since it provides the language that tells us how people interact each other within the newspaper through the writer and the readers, so the text is easy to be understood. Therefore, the researcher chooses to investigate politeness phenomena in caricatures published by Jakarta Post.

In this investigation, the writer’s utterances arc analyzed to find the politeness strategies usage which covers the use of four politeness strategies, namely bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record.

The descriptive qualitative method is used to conduct this research, because the aim of this research is to describe the politeness phenomena in the caricatures published by Jakarta Post. Beside that, this method is chosen because this research is natural based, and it uses the researcher himself to interact with the caricatures text as the research instrument.

Based on the findings of the study, it is found out some strategies that are applied. First, bald on record strategy which is used in the situation in which S wants to achieve the maximum efficiency of his utterance: by expressing emergency (1. 2) and (12. 1); and by expressing violent emotion (8. 1). Second, positive politeness strategy which is used in the condition in which S tries to minimize the distance between expressing friendliness and solid interest by exaggerating H’s interest (1.1), (2.2), (16.2), (18.1), seeking agreement (4.2), (7.1), (19.1), promising (13.1),(14.1), giving command (10.1), request (11.1), fulfill H’s wants (15.1), and giving reasons(7.2), (20.2). Third, negative politeness strategy which is used in the situation in which S has the main focus on assuming that he be imposing and intruding on H’s space by the use of direct request (4.1), (14.2), minimizing the imposition (8.2), giving information (10.2),(16.1), asking information (11.2), (17.1), (18.2), (21.2), expressing of be optimistic (20. !)and by generalizing (20.1). Fourth, off record strategy which is used in the condition to take some pressures off of the readers by the use of understatement (3.1), vagueness (5.2).

Furthermore, this study can lead the next researcher to conduct on politeness strategies in the other form of written communication such as magazine and the holy in the presuppose and enriching the discourse studies and analyze the other language except English, So it can broaden the knowledge in applying linguistic aspect in the various languages.