An Analysis of Negative Politeness Strategies as Found in the Movie Series of The Chronicles of Narnia Movie

Abstract

Politeness strategies refer to communication strategies used by people in interaction
or communication to show their good manners. Furthermore, politeness is one of the ways
used to create the efficient, non-antagonistic, and mutually cooperative exchange of idea,
feelings, and usually consider to the faces of the interacting parties. There are four types of
politeness strategies, they are; bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness and
off the record. In this study, the writer focused her analysis on the negative politeness
strategies used by the characters in the movie series, The Chronicles of Narnia Movie.
In this research, the writer applied Brown and Levinson’s theory (1987) to analyze
negative politeness strategies used by the characters in the movie. Negative politeness
strategies are used to redressing hearer's negative face and emphasize prevention of
imposition on the hearer. In other word, negative politeness is addresser’s respect towards
the addressee giving him/her freedom to action. The aim of this research to discuss about
the negative politeness strategies used by the actors and the markers used to show the
negative politeness strategies in the movie series. The method used in this study is
qualitative method. Qualitative research is a research strategy that indicates the relationship
between theory and research a usually emphasizes on how theories were generated by using
words not numeric (Bryman and Bell, 2007). The data of the research were taken in the
movie series of The Chronicles of Narnia that entitle the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
movie. From the movies series, it was found there were some utterances that express the
negative politeness strategies used by the characters.
From the data analysis, the results show eight strategies of negative politeness used
by the characters. They are: (1) be conventionally indirect, (2) question hedges, (3)
minimize the imposition, (4) give deference, (5) apologize, (6) state the FTA as general rule,
(7) nominalize, and (8) go on record. Then, the writer also found the markers used by
movie characters to maximize the negative politeness strategies to avoid Face Threatening
Acts (FTA), such as; will you, please, pretty please. Based on the findings, the writer found
three of negative politeness strategies that are often used by characters in the movie series,
they are give deference strategy, apologize strategy, and go on record strategy with the
different form of markers to maximize the negative politeness strategies.
Keyword: politeness strategies, negative politeness strategies, contexts