Politeness Strategies As Persuasive Tool In Magazine Advertisements Circulated In Lombok Tourism Spots

Abstract

This research aims to illuminate the pragmatic function of politeness in the world of advertising as a rarely-talked-about communicative act. Politeness theory presented by Leech (1983) and analyzed by Brown and Levinson (1987) in the form of taxonomy is known to be one of the most important factors for a successful communication and  it is highly guaranteed as the most persuasive instrument. The main focus of this research is to explore the politeness strategies adopted and adapted in English and Indonesian ads and to find their persuasive factors by comparing and contrasting them. To reach the objective, a corpus of  100  advertisements both in English and Bahasa Indonesia were collected from some magazines which are mainly available at the main tourism spots in Lombok. Each advertisement containing words was then analyzed in term of category and sub-category of politeness strategy in the two languages. The frequency of each strategywas then computed. From the research, it was ultimately found out that the politeness strategy, based on the Brown and Levinson’s  taxonomy, indicated that English ads exploits more Positive politeness strategies while in Indonesian ads tend to use Negative politeness strategies.