POLITENESS: MAKING REQUESTS IN JAVANESE

Abstract

This article examines the ways of Javanese people deliver requests politely which is not only determined by the linguistic factors, but it is also strongly influenced by some concepts of Javanese cultures, such as tata krama, andhap-asor, and tanggap ing sasmito. The data of the research were collected from the conversations among the Javanese people in Blitar, East Java. The collected data were selected in relation to delivering requests, and analyzed based on the cultural Javanese concepts which have been realized in the Javanese language, such as: speech levels, the appropriate verb forms according to the subject or the object in utterances, the morpho-syntactic structures, and politeness theories proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987), Grice (1981), and Lakoff (1973). The result of this research shows that the politeness of delivering requests in Javanese can be done gradually through many different strategies: replacing the imperative suffixes with the particle ‗mbok‘ meaning please, choosing the right speech levels according to the social relationship among the interlocutors, applying the agentless passive form, changing the declarative clause into the interrogative one, and creating an appropriate supposition and condition before introducing the request.