POLITENESS STRATEGIES AMONG GAYO STUDENTS IN GAYO COMMUNITY

This thesis deal with study of politeness strategies among Gayo students in Gayo community. This research was conducted to find out the politeness strategies among Gayo students in Gayo community. Politeness strategies has four kinds are bald on record, positive politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies and off record strategy. In carrying out the study the writer applied the descriptive qualitative method and subjects of the study are four male of Gayo students and four female of Gayo students and objects of the study were Gayo student utterances in Gayo community. The utterances took from three meeting from different date. The researcher was the key instrument of this qualitative research and the researcher need tools in her research as tape recorder to record the Gayo student utterances and interview sheet. The technique of data collection, the researcher used observing all activities of Gayo students in community, recording all the utterances of Gayo students who as subject in this research, interviewing of Gayo students as subject in this study and transcribing data. In analyzing the data the researcher selected the Gayo utterances based on politeness strategies and interviewing as subjects in this research to get the valid answering. The findings showed that male of Gayo students dominantly used positive politeness and female of Gayo students dominantly used negative politeness. Male used positive politeness to build relatives or kinship, so that they do not feel awkward. And female used bald on record and negative politeness because they want appreciated each other. In addressing someone, male often used kinship word in addressing someone for example used word “KAM, SINEN” the male Gayo students express that words not only to the people who are not known, to show the closeness between speaker and the hearer as both speaker and hearer have close relationship. Different with the female of Gayo students, they express their politeness by using the name, sure name, pronoun ko, adik, kakak, abang etc, they call based on aged and status. Female of Gayo students also express their politeness in addressing some with different pronoun “akak, abang”, when they speak to the younger they used “dik”. These automatically assume that there might be some social distance or awkwardness in the situation.