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Table 3.0 below gave the example from the analysis of politeness strategies in having adjacency pairs found in the data by the characters in the
movie Sydney White.
Table 3.0. The Example List of Politeness Strategy Produced by the Characters of Sydney White Movie
No Politeness
strategy Character
Utterance Reasons
1. Positive
Politeness Sydney
What do we do? Include both speaker and hearer
in the activity.
2. Off-record
Lenny Yeah, vision not
impaired. Sense of balance
restored. Feeling in fingers
and toes.
No visible...
-Be incomplete. -
“hanging in the air”
3. Negative
Politeness Sydney’s
father Just
a little
something. -Hedges on illocutionary force.
-As a modifier of propositional content.
-Act as a weakener
4. Positive
Politeness Sydney’s
father Its
actually something
you could use at college.
-Be optimistic. -Emphasize a fact or a
comment or that something is really true.
5. Negative
Politeness Dinky
Oh... Oh, I wish. -Be pessimistic.
-The speaker is not taking full responsibility for the truth of
the utterance.
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CHAPTER IV RESEARCH RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This chapter consists of two parts, namely the discussion of adjacency
pairs in Sydney White movie based on Levinson and the discussion of politeness strategies in having adjacency pairs based on Brown and Levinson.
A. Adjacency Pairs in Sydney White
An adjacency pair is the smallest structural unit exhibiting the quality of utterances between at least two people as Goffman states in Holtgraves 2002, p.
93. It refers to ‘conversational sequences’ in which the utterance at least consist of two utterances by different speakers. The utterance by one speaker a first-pair
part depends upon an utterances by another speaker a second-pair part. It is a sequence of two related utterances by two different speakers. In the Discussion
below, there are the result of eight types of adjacency pair found in the data which are shown by the characters in the movie Sydney White, namely question-
answernon-answer, request-acceptancerefusal,
offer or
invitation- acceptancerefusal, assessment-agreementdisagreement, blame-denialadmission,
greeting-greeting, summons-answer, and apology-acceptancerefusal.
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1. Question–Answer or Non-Answer
The adjacency pair occurred in this scene is question –answer. Question
and answer is a type of adjacency pair which has the highest occurrence of frequency. As the name of question
–answer, this pair functions to deal mostly with curiosity. Question is a sentence, phrase or word that asks for information
OALD, 2010, p. 1200. Answer is something that somebody says, writes or does to reach to a question or situation OALD, 2010, p. 51, in the conversation above,
the questions lead to answers.
Dialogue 1 Sydney
: Dinky Dinky What do we do?
Dinky : Oh, you just grab a guy.
1 Disc A min 21
The new members of Kappa had to fulfill some requirements during the Kappa pledge ritual. The first pledge task was the date dash. Sydney and her
friends were required to find a boy for a date in the midnight without any preparation such as no changed clothes, no makeup, no brushed hair or teeth.
They had to do the requirement in a hurry because they only had 15 minutes. Then they had to meet together again at the State Street Diner.
When doing the task given by Rachel, Sydney seemed a bit confused about the task. She did not really understand the task which seemed to be strange
action for her to convey. Some of girls roughly pulled the boy they met then quickly run back to the Kappa Phi Nu house. As the result, Sydney was getting
confused because mostly all her friends had already entered the place for their returning. Fortunately, at the same time, she heard
someone’s sneezing in a bush
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and asked for a help. At that time, she met Lenny, a strange boy who was asking for help. She asked him to be her date.
A question leads to an answer and non-answer. In the conversation above, the question led to an answer. In the first conversation, the bold sentence
“What do we do?
” which was uttered by Sydney showed that she asked Dinky what she should do. Sydney asked for information to Dinky because she did not understand
what should she did. The implied meaning of her question was that she did not want to have the wrong action about the first pledge task because the task seemed
to be strange action for her to convey. She chose to use WH- questions; “What” in
order to get the information. The “?” punctuation mark that was put at the end of a phrase or sentence also showed that it was a question.
As the response to Sydney’s question in the first conversation, Dinky gave an answer of what being asked her. Her utterance
“Oh, you just grab a guy,” implied that what Sydney should do was finding the boy for date. Moreover, there
were no special requirements to get the boy for a date. 2.
Request–Acceptance or Rejection The adjacency pair used in the second type is request
–acceptance. A request is an action of asking somebody to do something formally or politely
OALD, 2010, p. 1254. It usually leads to an acceptance. Acceptance is the act of accepting a gift, an invitation, an offer, etc OALD, 2010, p. 7. While rejection is
something which cannot be used because there is something wrong with it OALD, 2010, p. 1241.
