HEARER’S DISAGREEMENTS: THE FAILURE OF POLITENESS STRATEGIES

Speakers goals in social interaction when use politeness strategies may face problem such as disagreement. In this paper, I build a research which shows the politeness strategies can also fail in the end by facing disagreement from the hearers. Besides to minimize the face-threatening acts, politeness strategies stand as instrument to succeed the speaker’s purpose, but not always good as expected. The disagreements, somehow, will become the hearer’s responses. I categorize the hearer’s disagreements towards the speaker’s politeness strategies as the politeness failure. This qualitative descriptive research explores the politeness strategies seminal work by Brown and Levinson (1987). The data are taken from the movie The Iron Lady. The study suggests that the failure happens in all politeness strategies dealing with face-threatening acts, i.e: the negative politeness strategies (quotative particle ‘it is said, beg forgiveness, give deference, state FTA as general rule) are more frequently used among the colleagues, especially by those who have less power than the hearers; positive politeness strategies (be optimistic, exaggerate, assume or assert reciprocity, address forms), bald on record (case of non-minimization face threat) and off record (be vague) are more frequently used among the family members and used by the speakers who have more intimacy with the hearers.