POLITENESS STRATEGIES PERFORMED BY CONTESTANTS IN THE SECOND US PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

ABSTRACT Latifatun Na’imah, Anni. Students Registered Number. 2813133010. 2017. Politeness Strategies Performed by Contestants in the Second US Presidential Debate. Sarjana Thesis. English Education Department. Faculty of Tarbiyah and Teacher Training. State Islamic Institute (IAIN) of Tulungagung. Advisor: Dr. Sukarsono, M.Pd. Keywords:FTA (face threatening acts), politeness strategy, debate. The use of politeness strategies is commonly found in daily conversations. Politeness strategy is a technique offered by Brown and Levinson to make communication run well by considering someone’s face. This study is aimed at finding out politeness strategies performed the candidates in the second US presidential debate. There are three objectives in this research. The first is finding out face threatening acts performed by the candidates in the US presidential debate in 2016. The second is finding out how FTAs are linguistically realized. The last is finding out politeness strategy used by tyhe candidates in the second US Presidential debater in order to redress FTAs. The formulations of the research problems are: 1) What Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) are performed by the candidates in the US Presidential Debate in 2016? 2) How are the FTAs linguistically realized? 3) What politeness strategies are used by the candidates in the Presidential Debate in 2016 to soften the Face Threatening Acts? The research method of the research study is qualitative. The research design in this study was the content analysis. The data of this study are the contestants’s utterances taken from the second US presidential debate. The data collection of this research is documentary technique by obataining the data from the second US presidential debate video’s scripts. The results of data analysis show that the contestants performed 22 times FTAs (face threatening acts). The contestant often threaten addressee’s positive face.There are 4 types of face threatening acts performed by the debaters, namely: Accusing, Insulting, Disagreeing, and Criticizing. Besides, the debaters performed politeness strategy in order to soften FTAs (face threatening acts) only in some cases. The formally realization of utterances containing accusing consists of 5 declarative sentence and insulting consists of four declarative sentences. Then, utterances containing disagreeing consists of 5 declarative sentence, the last criticizing consists of 8 declarative sentence and 1 interrogative sentence.The contestants performed positive politeness strategy from the whole data only 7 times. They often used positive politeness strategy rather than negative politeness strategy. There are only 4 types politeness strategies performed by debaters, namely: exaggerate interest to hearer, be optimistic, asking to stop doing activity and seek agreement. Based on the results of the study, the researcher hopes that this research will help the English teachers to teach student in understanding the concept of Brown and Levinson about Face Threatening Acts and Politeness Strategy performed in debate in speaking class. And also for further research, the future researchers of the same interest will conduct study of politeness strategy focusing more on other objects like speech, novel and movie