POLITENESS STRATEGIES

Abstract

People usually tend to use some politeness strategies in order to make the communication process between speaker and hearer going smoothly without any sense hurting each others. This paper is only focused on describing about Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies. According to Brown and Levinson, there are four politeness strategies, namely: bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record and fifteen substrategies of positive politeness and ten substrategies of negative politeness. It is important that during the communication which happens among the participants use a polite language. Being polite to the hearer is generally more important to do than being polite toward the speaker itself, because if the speaker uses the polite language to the hearer in fact he does not only respect the hearer but also he maintains his own dignity.