Politeness Strategies in Asking Request among Javanese Youth in Tulungagung

The willingness to respect and appreciate to other is the basic of mutual interaction. This study aims at describing the politeness behaviour of youth in Tulungagung, one of the regencies of East Java in Indonesia. This study is qualitatively approached, in particular utilzing pragmatics framework. The data in the forms of utterances containing directive acts made by Tulungagung youths. They were collected through observation technique. The obtained data were analyzed based on pragmatics framework, particularly the theori of politeness modeled by Brown-Levinson. Based on data analysis, the study reveals the findings as follow; (1) the request demonstrated by Tulungagung youths generally conveyed by imperative and interogative sentences, implying the levels of indirectness; (2) they employ some mitigating devices in the forms of particle, word, phrase, or clause to sahow their polite behaviour; (3) the politeness strategies employed are (a) bald on record; (b) request by bald on record; (c) positive politeness, covering in-group identity markes; and (d) negative politeness, including conventionally indirect, hedging, being pesimistic, deference, and apologizing. Form the perspective of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, it is inferred that the requestive behaviour of the youth of Tulungagung still shows relatively polite manners.