POLITENESS STRATEGY OF REFUSAL ACT IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstrak

To build good communication, people have to use politeness strategy. The aim of this research were to find out politeness strategy of refusal act used by male and female students in social media, particularly Facebook chatting. This study also looked at the similarities and differences of their strategies. The researcher used purposive sampling and qualitative method. In this research, the participants were selected based on some requirements. They actually used Facebook, were adults, university students and non native speakers of English. The participants came from some of ethnics such as Palembang, Bali, Lampung, Padang, Batak and Java. In this study, the researcher also used simulation invitations and offer cases from Liang and Min and Khatib about refusing something in the form of sentences.

The findings of this study indicated that males used four politeness strategies of refusal act such as excuse, promise, solution and ambiguous strategies. Meanwhile, females used four politeness strategies of refusal act such as excuse, promise, solidarity and explicit strategies. They had similarities and differences in politeness strategies of refusal acts. The similarities were they used positive politeness strategy when they refused the invitation. On the other hand, the differences were males used off record strategy when they wanted to refuse the invitations, while females used negative politeness/bald on record strategy to refuse the invitations.