Disagreement strategies in the first presidential debate between Barrack Obama and McCain

In the first presidential debate, Barrack Obama and McCain discussed about some issues to win the general election president of United States. During the debate occurred, expressing of disagreement more arise. Therefore, disagreement strategies become the main problem because it related to the debate. So, the researcher took disagreement strategies that used by Barrack Obama and McCain and from the background of problem, the researcher focused on three questions, they are: what are the disagreement strategies used by Barrack obama and McCain, and what are the differences and similarities of expressing disagreement between Barrack Obama and McCain. Disagreement strategies are defined as the linguistic choice that speaker made in different context to convey the message they want to get across. Disagreement is a form of conflict because verbal disagreements are taxing communication events. There are eight strategies expressing disagreement, they are: the use of hedges and but, giving personal or emotional reasons for disagreeing, modal auxiliaries, shifting responsibility, objections in the form of a question, repetition of an utterance by next or the same speaker and non mitigating disagreement strategies. The method used in this research is qualitative study. This method can produce descriptive data in written and spoken of the debaters that can be observed. The data is taken from video and transcript of the first presidential debate between Barrack Obama and McCain. The researcher took the words that categorized in disagreement strategies, then, analyzed using Locher’s theory. Based on the result of the research, Barrack Obama used the most frequency of disagreement strategies than McCain. Both Barrack Obama and McCain used the same strategy and the same frequency of disagreement strategy, that is ‘the use of but’. For the use of hedges and giving personal and emotional reasons for disagree, Obama used the most frequency of disagreement strategy than McCain. For the use of modal auxiliary strategy, only McCain used this strategy. The other strategy is ‘objection’. Here, Only Obama used this strategy. Then, for repetition only Obama used this strategy. The last strategy is non mitigating disagreement. Obama produced more frequency than McCain. The 51 times total strategy produced by Obama. In conclusion, the eight strategies to express disagreement in which one of the strategies was mentioned above which was used more frequent of disagreement strategies was the use of hedges, but only Obama provide more frequency than McCain. In the study of disagreement strategies, the students should aware about the conflict that will always arise anywhere and anytime. Therefore, these disagreement strategies are the way to mitigate the conflict and get some points from the opposite