Al Habiib Josy Asheva. B0318001. 2022. A Pragmatic Analysis of Politeness Strategies and Social Context in the Stages of Joker Movie. Thesis: English Department, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Sebelas Maret, Surakarta.

Politeness strategy is manifested as a product of social order, and it, therefore, becomes one of the human prerequisites to get known one another (Brown & Levinson, 1978). Further, politeness forms a communicative behavior in human languages and cultures (Leech, 2014). Additionally, people need to be selective of what the proper utterances to say and what is not. It hereby indicates that politeness guides people to respect someone whoever we are speaking to at the moment. This study aims to investigate the utterances performed by the characters in Joker movie that employed politeness strategies and observe the influence of social contexts and movie staging to the use of politeness strategies. Afterward, the analysis was upheld to pursue the supporting evidence regarding the influence of context of situation in the use of politeness strategies performed by the characters throughout the movie. This study belongs to the descriptive qualitative research which is underpinned by four major stages of analysis ranging from domain, taxonomy, componential, and cultural theme analysis blended with the combination of pragmatics and sociolinguistics approaches. The pattern of politeness strategies verbalized by the characters in Joker movie fluctuates in each stage of the movie; orientation, complication, evaluation, and resolution. Besides, the context of situation (power-distance relationship) is proven influential toward the use of politeness strategies by the characters. The supporting evidence of this study can be further observed in the matrix of componential analysis on the findings.

Keywords: Socio-pragmatics, Politeness Strategies, Social Contexts, Character, Joker.