CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
This
chapter deals with background of the study, problem of the study, objective of the study, scope and limitation,
significance of the study, and definition
of the key terms.
1.1. Background of the Study Language has a social function as a tool to
make connection between human beings.
Without language, it seems impossible for people tointeract with others in their daily life because language
can express people’s feeling, willing, opinion,
etc (Chaer and Agustina, 1995: 19). In short, language is the oral symbols that represent meaning as they are
related to real life situation and experience.
In case of communication, the
speakers will choose the strategies to have polite conversation. People use politeness
strategies in order to get their conversation
run well and go smoothly. Brown and Levinson (1978) state that recognizes what people are doing in verbal
exchange (e.g. requesting, offering, criticizing,
complaining, etc)not so much by what theyovertly claim to be doing as in the fine linguistics details of
utterances. It means that not only speaking in fine linguistics but also considering other’s
feeling are important. In other word, speaking
politeness involves taking account of the other’s feeling and being polite person means that he should make others feel
comfortable.
Being polite is complicated matter in any
language. It is difficult to be learned
because it involves understanding notonly the language but also the social and the cultural values of the community. And
language can not be separated from the
community who use it. Moreover, using language must be appropriate with the social context of the speaker. The
importantcharacteristics of the social context is the context of the person spoken to, and inparticular,
the rolerelationships and relative
status of the participants in a discourse (Grundy, 2000: 146). The speech between individual or unequal rank (due to
status in organization, age, social class,
education, or some other factors), for example, is likely to be less relaxed and more formal than between equals. Moreover,
the speech will be relaxed whenever it
happens between individuals with the same or equal ranks.
Being polite means to act with consideration
of norm applied in the society. We can
show our feeling toward other. Solidarity power, distance, respect intimacy, and etc, and our awareness of social
customs. Such awareness is also shown
through the general “politeness” with which we use language (Wardhaugh, 1986: 267). Politeness itself is socially
prescribed. This does not mean, that we must
be polite. Impoliteness, then, depends on the existence of standards, or norms of politeness. It means that the
determination of whether someone is considered
polite or impolite depends on to whom one communicates or converses. The society will possibly consider
whether he or she is polite or impolite.
In this case, politeness is socially prescribed. The society’s norms and rules will determine whether one is polite or
impolite.
Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) stated that
politeness strategies are developed in
order to save the hearer’s “face”. Face refers to the respect that an individual has for him or herself, and the
maintaining of “self esteem” in public or in private situations. In this case, usually
the speakers try to avoid embarrassing other
person, or making him feel uncomfortable.
Brown and Levinson (Grundy, 2000:
156) work with Goffman’s notion of ‘face’.
Face comes in two varieties, positive face and negative face. Brown and Levinson (2000) state that positive face is a
person with to be well thought of. Its manifestations
may include the desire tohave what we want to be admired by others and the desire to betreated as a friend
and confidence. Negative face is our wish
not to be imposed on by others and to be allowed to go about our business unimpeded with our right to be free and self
determined action intact. While Goffman
states that positive face is the needto be appreciated and negative face is the need not to be disturbed (Renkema,
1993:13). Negative face is familiar as the formal politeness that the notion ‘politeness’
immediately conjures up. But positive
face and its derivate forms ofpositive politeness are less obvious. Next definition of positive face is adequate only
if certain interpretations are born in mind
(Goody, 1996: 67-68).
Politeness strategies are used by
people to ensure a smooth communication and
harmonious interpersonalrelationship in non-hostile social communication.
Those strategies are used for
calling forms of oral and written communication.
People can communicate in written
by many kinds of medium; one of them is in novel form.
Politeness phenomena do not only occur in an
ordinary language but also in an
extra-ordinary language which is mainly used in literary texts. Novel, as one of literary works, is a literary text that is
valued by its culture that used special language
and that effects people with emotions that bring them into the imaginary world, as mentioned by Cunning (in Nafi’ah,
2003). Moreover, she says that a literary
text is also a piece of language and all languages have design, so it is obvious that literary language is rather
different from an ordinary language.
Literary text has a certain
reputation on linguistic pattering that can effect its readers emotionally according to the way those
readers perceive it, so the language has
the possibilities on making the literary text memorable.
It is interesting to choose novel
as a literary work to be investigated by using pragmatics studies on politeness
strategies. The reasons why the researcher chooses novel as one of literary works has the
uniqueness that is not owned by other
literary works, like poem and drama. Its language has clear elaborated context that support the story explicitly
(Kenereg, 1966) and also tells us how people
are interesting each other within the novel through the portrayed characters, so the story can be easily understood.
This context is important to determine
the politeness strategies used in the novel.
The phenomenon of politeness
strategies can be encountered in any context
of conversation. Novel as the subject of this research serves conversations in which the politeness strategies occur.And
John Grisham’s novel, particularly The
Clientis the interesting subject to be analyzed.
The Clientbecomes one main selection within
literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club.
It also includes into Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Selection. According to the publishers of
those weekly magazines, Grisham employs
just enough foreshadowing to keepthe suspense rolling. Since the great sell of the novel was estimated, the first
printing of the novel reached 950.000 printings
(http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=
40213529). The estimation of the publisher is obviously true. The Client eventually was sold more than 2 billion
exemplars. Even, its edition position was on the top list of New York Time for about 46
weeks (Grisham, 1994). Warner Bross as a
great production film in United States was so interested to the novel and therefore, the made it into film.
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