This thesis is entitled An Analysis of Politeness Strategies Used in “The Donald Trump’s Presidential Acceptance Speech. This study aimed at describing the politeness strategies used by Donald Trump, describing each strategies chosen by Donald Trump, and describing the factors influencing the use of those strategies.
The study used descriptive qualitative method during the research since the aimed of this study was to find out the strategies used in the Donald Trump’s presidential acceptance speech. The data were taken from utterances by Donald Trump in his presidential acceptance speech. The spoken data were transcribed into written data available on the internet. It was classified based on Brown and Levinson (1987). The study has three objectives. First, to describe the type of politeness strategies based on Brown and Levinson in the utterances used in Donald Trump’s presidential acceptance speech. It consists of bald-on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record. Second, it’s to describe how the certain strategies used by the speaker in his presidential acceptance speech. It is following the steps of data analysis through classifying the politeness strategies used by Donald Trump based on Brown and Levinson’s theory (1987). The last, it’s to explain the reasons of the strategies used by the speaker. The technique applied by finding out the proportion of each type of politeness strategies in the utterances used by the speaker and analyzing the factors influenced the choice of politeness strategies based on Brown and Levinson theory (1987).
Based on the analysis that had been done, the writer found the frequencies of the four types of politeness strategies used by Donald Trump: Bald-on-record strategy (2 times out of 57), Positive politeness strategies (36 times out of 57), Negative politeness ( 15 out of 57), and Off-record ( 4 out of 57). More importantly, Positive politeness has the highest frequency among other strategies. Even tough, the interaction between Donald Trump as the speaker and the audience as the hearer were in the social communication scope that had gap and distance it might be that they didn’t know each other very well. Donald Trump used this strategy to persuade, motivate, and corroborate the hearer’s point of view. Additionally, the hearer might feel that the speaker approved and appreciated them. And then, the speaker could also satisfy the hearer’s positive face. So, the factor influencing the use of the strategies by Donald Trump was a payoff, or a kind of priority consideration.