POLITENESS STRATEGIES AT SOCIAL GATHERING OF SUNDANESE IN KECAMATAN MEDAN TEMBUNG

This research deals with the politeness strategies at the social gathering of the Sundanese in Kecamatan Medan Tembung. It was conducted using qualitative research design. The subjects of 20 persons were taken which they produced 19 conversations. The ages ranged from 25 to 70 years old. They come from various professions, namely lecturer, teacher, merchant, housewives (7 persons), captain, employee of bank, ustadzah, bird seller, meat-ball seller, tukang siomay, legislative candidate, midwife, environment leader, and student. The instruments of collecting data were observation, recording, field notes, and interviewing adopted by Bogdan and Biklen (1982). The researcher observed the subject closely and interviewed them. Then the responses were classified a verified with reference to the criteria of politeness strategies as determined by Brown and Levinson (1987), namely bald on record strategy, positive strategy, negative strategy, and off record strategy. Then the utterances were classified with reference to the parts of illocutionary speech acts especially in directives as determined by Searle (1975), namely the requesting, command, advising, asking, forbidding, inviting, permitting, and recommending, etc. then the speech level of Sundanese were classified with reference to the criteria of politeness strategies in Sundanese as determined by Satjadibrata (1956), namely the basa lemes ”refined language”, basa penengah “middle language”, and basa kasar “coarse language”. The findings show that there were four types of politeness strategies used by Sundanese speakers. In politeness strategies in directives; bald on record strategy (40.29%), positive strategy (44.66%), negative strategy (1.46%), and off record strategy (13.59%). In positive strategy shows that the hearer have a desire to be respected, and also the speaker uses positive strategy to address the hearer. The speaker calls the hearer by using the group identity and by using the nick name. And there were eight parts of directives used by Sundanese; in requesting (6.75%), command (54.85%), advising (8.86%), asking (23.63%), forbidding (1.69%), inviting (0.42%), permitting (2.11%) and recommending (1.69%). The dominant responses refer to commands because the speaker wants to give the hearer an order and tell the hearer to do something. And there were three parts of politeness strategies in speech levels of Sundanese used by Sundanese; basa lemes “refined language” (51.49%), basa penengah “middle language “(36.63%), and basa kasar “coarse language” (11.88%). The dominant responses refer to basa lemes “refined language” because the speaker wants to show her/his respect to the hearer. Basa lemes “refined language” is expected to be used when addressing, used especially the middle class people to high class people and it may occur when the differences in social status between the speaker and the addressee are very great.