The comparison of politeness strategy produced by the native speakers of English and the Indonesian speakers

Vistiari, Rizki (2002) The comparison of politeness strategy produced by the native speakers of English and the Indonesian speakers. Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.

Abstract

This study discusses Indonesian speakers? ability to produce polite utterances based on politeness strategy in the approximative speaking norms as the native speakers of English in natural communication. In cross-cultural communication with the native speakers of English, Indonesian speakers must consider the social distance, the amount of imposition, and the relative status of the participants to produce contextually polite utterances, since politeness is important to smooth daily communication. Thus, this study was first figured out the most frequently used politeness strategy by the native speakers of English, whether bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, or off record strategy when they had conversation with the Indonesian speakers. Secondly, it figured out the most frequently used politeness strategy by the Indonesian speakers when they involved in communication with the native speakers of English. To get the data I recorded three meetings took place, among the weekly meeting, between the native speakers of English and the Indonesian speakers and analyzed their utterances containing politeness strategy following Brown and Levinson (1987). The findings on this study show that the native speakers of English and the Indonesian speakers used positive politeness as the mostly used strategy and claiming common ground with the use of in-group identity marker was used to do the positive politeness strategy. Negative politeness was used as the second mostly used strategy by these speakers, however, the distribution of other strategies was different. Positive and negative politeness produced by the English native speakers followed with the bald on record and off record strategy. While the Indonesian speakers? positive and negative politeness followed with off record and bad on record strategy. Thus, since the Indonesian speakers were able to produce politeness strategy as the native speakers, from the similar use of the mostly used strategy, it reflected that the Indonesian speakers were able to produce utterance in the approximative speaking norms of English by acquiring, understanding, and producing the politeness strategy in their interaction with the native speakers.

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