Every person needs others for sharing his or her expression, experience, feeling, ideas and so on. To make the life harmonic it needs social norm as it is recognized as politeness.

What is politeness? Politeness terminology is related to the ways of speaker and hearer needs to be appreciated and protected. It is universal to all cultures. In some cases, politeness affects the conversation and discovers that the level of politeness and ways of being polite varies to all people.

Politeness is also showing awareness of another person’s public self image. The form of politeness may vary each other among the culture, age, and social group.

Every new comer will feel strange to see two bus conductors wrestling, slapping and delivering vulgar sentences each other “ hei lai iduik jo wa-ang lai” (Hei, emang kamu masih hidup?). But neither of them feels annoyed, even both of them smile, hug and show their closeness again. Those characters are the form of their politeness and might be regarded as impoliteness for others.

Politeness is depend on social context or social dimension that can be viewed in various ways. Here, the interlocutors above regard that their solidarity is highly valued, they think that their utterances symbolize their closeness

In other perspective, politeness is related to personal face; something about personal privacy or image. There are two kinds of face: positive and negative face. Positive face is the feeling or state of someone who needs to be respected. Negative face is the hope of someone to be independent and not to be involved.

Politeness can also be seen in telephone conversation. It can be in terms of the way someone terminating telephone conversations (closing sequences, the initiator of closing exchanges, the length of closing, the pragmatics function in closing and the linguistic realizations of closing functions)..

A comparative study done by Dewi Nugroho in Yule found that different types of calls employ different types of sequences and that speakers of both languages closed their calls following the same types of sequences. It was also found that in Australian English calls there was almost an equal chance for the caller and the receiver to terminate the calls, while in Bahasa Indonesia calls it was highly likely that the caller did. Australian English closings were also found longer and involved more closing functions than those in Bahasa Indonesia.

Moreover, a study done by Fukushima about “Request Strategies in British English and Japanese” found that politeness strategies employed in both in English and in Japanese based on the degree of imposition; the higher the imposition the more politeness strategies employed.

So, the longer closing in terminating telephone conversation means to show politeness. Politeness can also be seen the social life, for example in the daily speech acts, like Fukushima’s research on how people make their request in certain occasion.

Based on the explanation above, what politeness of the people in our region still maintain which can we share as a kind of our uniqueness?

Sumber:

Brown, Gillian and George Yule. 1984. Discourse Analysis. London: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Batusangkar, 7 Maret 2020

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