Revealing Politeness Strategies Used by Rachel Chu as the Main Character of Crazy Rich Asians’ Movie Script

Abstract

Politeness strategies are strategies used by speakers to make communication run harmoniously. The choice of using certain politeness strategies is influenced by several factors including social factors. Therefore, this study deals with politeness strategies used by Rachel Chu as the main character in Crazy Rich Asians movie when interacting with several of her interlocutors who have different social class and cultural backgrounds with her. It deals with politeness strategies by Brown & Levinson (1987) as the main tool for analyzing the data. This research is aimed at revealing the politeness strategy frequently used by Rachel Chu as well as social factors such as power, distance, and rank of imposition that drove Rachel to choose a certain politeness strategy. This research used descriptive statistics research strategy since the data were in the form of utterances were calculated in form of table to find out the frequency of each type of politeness strategies and the analysis was presented in narrative interpretation to explore the utterances of Rachel Chu consisting of politeness strategies. The data, which are some of Rachel Chu's utterances were collected from the Crazy Rich Asians movie script which was obtained from https://d2bu9v0mnky9.cloudfront.net/ screenplay/cra_wbformat.pdf. There were 28 data containing of politeness strategies which were then analyzed and categorized based on the types of politeness strategies from Brown & Levinson (1987) to find out the types of politeness strategy that was frequently used by Rachel Chu. Then, the data were analyzed according to the sociological factors such as power, distance, and rank of imposition (PDR) that influence the choice of politeness strategy to find out how social factors influenced Rachel in choosing a certain politeness strategy.