for those definitions, pragmatics is the branch of Linguistics on how the use of language meaning in the context reaches the understanding of interlocutors.
2. Face and Politeness
a Face
In Yule’s opinion 1998 : 60 defines face as a public self image that has a purpose to save or threat other people. Face gives the main part on how people
express their ideas to other people. Meanwhile, Goffman in Holtgraves, 2002 : 38 explains that face has a
value positevely in a person to claim for himself or herself by others perspective through contact. In addition, face is powerful to create perspective by using face
expression or face style. As human beings, every person has a face to keep from anger, shyness,
happiness, and so on. In the book of Yule 1998 : 61, face that people have to save is named face wants. According to the idea of face wants and how to use it,
these are Face Saving Acts and Face Threatening Acts as stated below. As stated by Yule 1998, FSA is one method in the use of face when an
utterance or an action avoids a potential threat to a person’s public self image. It can be seen in the example:
Perhaps you could just ask him if he is going to stop soon because it’s getting a bit late and people need to get to sleep.
Yule, 1998 : 61 In the example, the speaker asks for the hearer to stop the music in polite
way by using “Perhaps you could” because people need to sleep. It is a way how FSA occurs in the statement.
Besides, FTA is a way which utterance or action threatens a person’s public self image, that is the definition from Yule 1998 : 61. It is shown in the
utterance, “I’m going to tell him to stop that awful noise right now”. The example shows the way the speaker threatens her or his face to ask for the hearer
with directly expression.
b Politeness
There are many definitions of politeness. Yule 1998 : 60 explains that the concept of politeness is a strategy to perform awareness of another person’s face,
which means it is a method to reach the situation or context based on the social status or strata.
Politeness is called pragmatic mechanism focused on a variety of structures that collaborate to the speaker to gain the smooth communication. Its definition
is explained by Trosborg 1995 : 24. This concept supports the communication between the speaker and the hearer to create understanding each other.
Watts 2003 defines that politeness is not something people got when they are born but it is something to be learned and to be adopted in the society.
Then, it can be reflected in the social life since politeness is a thing that people learn step by step and there is no truth right in politeness because context and
situation are two things that influence to do politeness. Based on some terminologies of politeness from those experts, politeness
is a way to save awareness in people face, therefore it is very useful to figure out in the communication between the interlocutors. In order to do that, a certain
type of strategies is needed to be chosen.
