22 received and exchanged by doing communication. Besides, McQuail and Windahl
1993 describe communication as any of „an action on others, an interaction with others and a reaction to
others‟ p. 5. Communication can be held in two different ways, namely in spoken and written way. Written communication is the
way people give, receive or exchange the messages by using discrete symbols, letters and words for instance Linell, 2002. In doing written communication,
people may use some media. The media can be in the form of emails, text messages, letters, faxes, reports, memos and even advertisements.
4. Review of Related Studies
This section contains some previous studies which are closely related to the focus of this research which is illocutionary acts in relation to politeness
strategies as shown in written messages. There are three related studies which have been done by Nabilah Fairuz Al-Bantany 2013, Katrina Pariera 2006 and
Elmianvari and Kheirabadi 2013.
a. Nabilah Fairuz Al-Bantany 2013
Al-Bantany 2013 conducted a research entitled “The use of commissive
speech acts and its politeness implication: A case of Banten gubernatorial candidate debate”. The purpose of this research was to examine the use of
commissive speech acts in the debate and the realization of politeness in the use of speech acts. This study was a qualitative study which processed the data gathered
by downloading the debate. The data were analyzed using the theory of speech acts by Searle 1969 and the theory of politeness by Brown and Levinson 1987.
The result of this research showed that commissive speech acts appeared in the PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
23 debate for 53 of the utterances. Moreover, politeness could be seen in those
utterances which were uttered by all of the candidates in relatively the same way.
b. Katrina Pariera 2006
Pariera 2006 conducted a research entitled “The use of politeness
strategies in email discussion about taboo topics”. This research aimed to analyze the politeness strategies, based on Brown and Levinson‟s 1987 theory, which
were used in a series of email sent to close friends and to strangers. The participants of this research were 29 university students who were on controlled
age 21-29 years old and all of them were native speakers of American English. The researcher used discourse completion test DCT proposed by Billmyer and
Varghese 1996 to gather the data. The data were gathered from online survey program which asked the participants to write down the email about four taboo
pictures provided by the researcher. The participants had to write the email both to their close friends and to strangers. After gathering the data, the researcher
compiled and coded those emails based on the theory of politeness strategies by Brown and Levinson 1987. The result of this research stated that Brown and
Lev inson‟s framework on politeness did not accurately predict how politeness
would be used in email. Some predictions were correct but most of them were in contrast with Brown and Levinson‟s prediction for face-to-face interaction.
Politeness strategy which was mostly used in email was negative politeness to enclose intimacy. However, there was a decrease of negative politeness strategies
when there was a decrease in intimacy, something which people might not see in face-to-face interaction.
24
c. Elmianvari and Kheirabadi 2013
Elmianvari and Kheirabadi 2013 conducted a research entitled “The
study of EFL students‟ requests based on politeness theory”. They analyzed whether politeness theory proposed by Brown and Levinson 1987 was
applicable to data elicited from EFL students attending a language institute in Iran or not. The participants were 21 female Iranian who learned English as foreign
language. Their age ranged from 17 to 26 years old. The participants, who were students, were asked to email their teacher as a class activity and make a request
in an appropriate and polite form. After the emails were gathered, they were analyzed based on Holtgraves and Yang‟s 1992 coding scheme. The researcher
measured the degree of politeness showed in the students‟ email request. The finding showed that almost all of the emails could be considered as polite and
only two of them located somewhere in the middle of politeness‟ scales. Based on the finding, the researchers could conclude that most of the students expressed
their requests in a polite, formal and indirect way through long sentences in attempt to save the negative face.
B. Theoretical Framework
This research aimed to analyze the illocutionary acts and politeness strategies shown by the participants, who were seventh semester students of
English Language Education Study Program, in their written messages. Furthermore, this study focused on two research problems as stated in the first
25 chapter which are to analyze illocutionary acts and politeness strategies shown in
the written messages. In order to answer those research problems, the researcher relied on the theories proposed by Searle 1969 and Brown and Levinson 1987.
The first research problem aims to analyze the illocutionary acts which tended to appear in the written messages of seventh semester students sent to the
lecturers. The researcher used the theory of speech acts, particularly related to illocutionary acts, proposed by Searle 1969 to answer this research problem.
Searle 1969 proposes that speech acts can be divided into three categories, namely locutionary acts, illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. This research
focused on illocutionary acts that may appear in students‟ utterances shown in
their written messages. Illocutionary act itself is divided into five categories, namely assertive, directive, commissive, expressive and declaration. Based on the
data which were gathered through questionnaire, the researcher could classify students‟ messages into those five categories of illocutionary acts. The
classification might describe the illocutionary acts which appeared in students‟
written messages. The second research problem is going to analyze the politeness strategies
which tended to be used by the students in their written messages sent to the lecturers. The theory of politeness strategies by Brown and Levinson 1987 was
used as the main theory to answer this research problem. There are four kinds of strategies on politeness based on Brown an
d Levinson‟s theory, namely bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness and off record. The researcher used
the four strategies to classify the utterances of the seventh semester students of PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
