Politeness strategies used by Pep Guardiola in FC Barcelona’s Press Conferences

ABSTRACT Politeness strategies are used in communication to show the respect to other people and satisfy the hearer. It is very important to consider those in conversation for avoiding a conflict as well as creating good harmony. Those phenomena can appear in press conferences. It is official information and a lot of mass media publish it around the world. Therefore, the use of politeness strategies is required. Pep Guardiola is chosen as the subject, because he is indicated to use politeness strategies successfully in FC Barcelona’s press conferences. Therefore, this research focuses to find out the kinds of politeness strategies used by Pep Guardiola and to find out the functions of using those kinds of politeness strategies. This study employs descriptive qualitative because it seeks to understand a certain phenomenon, namely the politeness strategies of Pep Guardiola in FC Barcelona’s press conferences. The source of the data in this study is Pep Guardiola’s press conferences on European League and International matches. The data were analyzed inductively through the observation done by the researcher himself. The approach for analyzing the politeness strategies is based on Brown and Levinson’s Theory of Politeness. The results of this study show that Pep Guardiola uses positive politeness, negative politeness, and off record as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). The function of positive politeness is to maintain the positive face of journalist and satisfy what their wants. Negative politeness is to impede the negative face of the journalist. Off Record is proposed for journalist to interpret what Guardiola means. Besides, Pep Guardiola points out to journalist that he conveys important information. This research explores politeness strategies as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) and a coach speaks English as second language as a subject. Therefore, it will be more challenging for the next researcher to analyze the social factors of politeness strategy by using other experts’ theories and different subjects