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SYNOPSIS OF THE THESIS ENTITLED A POILTENESS STRATEGY ANALYSIS
ON THE MAIN CHARACTERS’ DIALOGUES OF THE MOVIE PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST
By Muhammad Ihsan Fauzi 105026000984
A. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
As a means of communication and a part of culture, language has an important role in humans life. Therefore, it reflects speaker’s behavior. That is
also why language is able to build human relationships. But every speech which is spoken by speakers or hearers is not exactly alike. Those differences,
generally, are influenced by education, age, personality, sex and setting. These factors are sometimes affected how close the relationship or the interaction
between speaker and hearer is. The personality, for instance, as a matter of fact that describes our character being related with the emotional states. Or
sometimes we are conditioned by setting either formal or informal so we should decide how to behave in order to appropriate with its situation.
Of course, the differences above influence people in using language whether it is regarded as polite language or not. Hornby stated that politeness
itself is defined as hearing or showing the possession of good manners and consideration.
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It means that politeness in conversation is absolutely important to be able to establish one’s relationship with others. It should be realized by
everyone in forming good conversation because the use of language can reflect the behavior or the attitude.
1
Hornby, AS. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Sixth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2000.
2 That is the reason why the writer chooses this topic as his research.
Because politeness is a pragmatic matter, it is the main essential factor how to maintain the relationship well through language.
Politeness is a field of applied linguistics and pragmatics because politeness is one of main functional units in communication and any socio-cultural
contexts which is its use is essential for various reasons. By using both the rules of speaking and the values of society, they assist someone in developing socio-
culturally acceptable and grammatically appropriate communication. Furthermore, an in-depth look at studying politeness will help not only someone
to understand more the important how to communicate well, yet usually disclose aspects of communication that are occasionally different from language structure,
but also provide clues for improved cross-cultural communication.
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Politeness is best expressed as the practical application of good manners or etiquette in any circumstances of conversation. Moreover, speech behavior is
mirror image of community norms and attitudes. Therefore it is a culturally defined phenomenon, and what is considered polite in one culture can often be
quite rude or simply strange in another. It is because many languages have specific means to show politeness, deference, respect, or recognition of the
social status of the speaker and the hearer. For instance, German subjects tend to interact in ways that are more
direct, explicit and verbose, more self-referenced and content-oriented than English.
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In Japanese which is perhaps the most widely known example of a language that encodes politeness at its very core. Many complications aside,
Japanese has two main levels of politeness, one for intimate acquaintances,
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Dogancay-Aktuna, Seran and Sibel Kamisli. Discourse of Power and Politeness through the Act of Disagreement. Chicago: Annual Meeting. 1996.
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Hickey, Leo and Miranda Stewart. Politeness in Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. 2005.
3 family and friends, and other for the rest of the people, and verb morphology
reflects these levels. Besides that, some verbs have special hyper-polite additional forms. This happens also with some nouns and interrogative pronouns.
Japanese also employs different personal pronouns for each person according to gender, age, rank, degree of acquaintance, and other cultural factors.
Brown and Levinson proposed a theory that is widely recognized and remains relevant as universal theory of politeness. It means they considered that
every society has same sort of norms for the appropriate behavior, though these norms are varied. Brown and Levinson introduce five main politeness strategies
1 Bald on Record, 2 Positive Politeness, 3 Negative Politeness, 4 Off Record, and 5 Don’t Do the FTA. They are chosen depending on how risky the
hearer’s face in conversation is. These strategies are important to act speech politely.
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Shortly, the goal of politeness is to make both speaker and hearer relaxed and comfortable with one another, and to avoid disagreement of conversation in
order to keep social relationship well. These essentials have inspired the writer to write the thesis which is concerned with politeness as a theoretical concept within
pragmatics and with application of the theoretical model proposed by Brown and Levinson with a movie as object of research entitled ‘Pirates of the Caribbean:
Dead Man’s Chest’ . So, the topic of this study is the analysis of politeness strategies on the movie of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
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Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. Politeness: Some Universal in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987
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B. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
