Positive Politeness Strategies Performed by International Guest Speakers in Mata Najwa Exclusive Interview

Abstract

It is necessary to recognize particular communication strategies in order to construct a decent conversation and social relationship amongst interlocutors from diverse cultures and norms. Politeness is one of the communication strategies used to maintain the interlocutors’ feeling so the conversation flows in harmony. In society, interview and talk show becomes popular programs in acquiring information. This study aims to examine the positive politeness strategies performed by international guest speakers in Mata Najwa Exclusive Interview. As the primary source, the data were taken from the interview’s transcript. A descriptive qualitative method was used to analyze the positive politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson. The findings show that there are 13 types of positive politeness sub-strategies performed by four international guest speakers. Those are noticing (attending to the hearer), exaggerating, intensifying, using in-group identity markers, seeking agreement, avoiding disagreement, presupposing/asserting/raising common ground, joking, asserting/presupposing speaker knowledge, offering/promising, include both speaker and hearer in the activity, give/ask for a reason, give gifts (sympathy, good, understanding). The highest number of sub-strategy was presupposing/asserting/raising common ground which occurred 19 times. This study is expected to contribute in English language teaching specifically in comprehending cross-cultural understanding (CCU) in relation to Indonesian context.

Translation techniques of the positive politeness utterances in the Pay It Forward movie

“…Intensify interest to hearer and Exaggerate are different from the research by Yolanda & Bram (2022), Pratama et al (2022), Maula et al (2023), andBintangtricahya et al (2023). The dominant positive politeness strategies as the results of the research by Yolanda & Bram (2022) was include both speaker and hearer in the activity, by Pratama et al (2022) was give gifts to hearer, by Maula et al (2023) was use in-group identity markers, and by Bintangtricahya et al (2023) was presuppose/assert/raise common ground. This difference happens probably due to different contexts or media involved in the research.…”

“…Syukur et al (2020) on speech acts of single-child adolescents, Mustaqim et al (2023) on pragmatic functions on Japanese wordplay, Darmapratiwi & Pratiwi (2024) on translation strategies of metaphors in novels, and Indrowaty et al (2024) on the pragmatic approach in learning speaking skills/kaiwa in Japanese. One of the popularly researched aspect of pragmatics, to support human interaction varieties, is the so-called Brown & Levinson's theory (1987) on positive politeness strategies to observe people talking or communicating within their positive politeness utterances, as elaborated within various research of this kind by Jansen & Janssen (2010), Marpudianto (2020), Yolanda & Bram (2022), Patama et al (2022, Puteri et al (2022), Nurmawati et al (2019), Maula et al (2023), Bintangtricahya et al (2023), andErlinda et al (2023), to mention a few. There then comes into play the so-called politeness within social actions.…”