politeness strategies applied by the characters of the great debaters movie

This research explores politeness strategies used by the characters in The Great Debaters movie. The data used in this research were collected from 166 pages of The Great Debaters movie transcription. The analysis is based on Brown and Levinson‘s politeness strategies and Spolsky’s factors affecting someone’s politeness in speaking. The research results showed that the characters in The Great Debaters movie applied the types of politeness strategies, namely off-record, baldon-record, positive politeness, and negative politeness. Moreover, the characters also revealed the factors affecting the characters’ politeness in speaking, namely language style, register and domain, and slang and solidarity. However, the characters did not show language and gender factor in their conversation since they were mostly engaged in the same topic, namely a debate competition.   DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.2016.190103