POLITENESS STRATEGIES USED BY MICHELLE OBAMA AND OPRAH WINFREY AT THE UNITED STATE OF WOMEN SUMMIT IN 2016

This research investigates the use of politeness strategies performed by Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey in their conversation at the United State of Women Summit in 2016. It is aimed at identifying the types of politeness strategies and describing the realizations of politeness strategies deployed by Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey in the conversation. The researcher applied a qualitative method. The data of the research were obtained from the video and the transcript of the conversation between Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey at the United State of Women Summit in 2016 which was taken from the White House official website. The form of the data was utterances, while the context of the data was the dialogues uttered by Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey at the summit. Finally, triangulation was applied in order to verify the trustworthiness of the data. The results of this research are stated as follows. (1) All types of politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson are found in the conversation between Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey at the United State of Women Summit. They are bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record strategy. Bald on record and off record strategy are only performed by Michelle Obama. (2) In terms of the realizations of each type of politeness strategies, there are 48 sub-strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson, but there were 22 sub-strategies employed in the conversation. Positive politeness strategy has the highest variation of realizations of politeness strategy as many as 11 sub-strategies performed in the conversation. Meanwhile, bald on record has the fewest variations of the realizations that are 2 variations of the sub-strategies. Hence, there are some sub-strategies that do not occur in the conversation due to its formal context and limited time. Keywords: pragmatics, politeness strategies, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, the United State of Women Summit in 201