The politeness strategies used by the main character of the movie Soul

This study aims to identify the types of politeness strategies used by the main character in the movie Soul, and to investigate possible factors that influence the politeness strategies used by the main character in this movie. This research was conducted using qualitative approach and content analysis. The data were collected from the American computer-animated fantasy comedy-drama movie Soul, and its accompanying script, to analyze the utterances of the main character, Joe Gardner, who is a 46-year-old man and middle school music teacher. Applying politeness strategy as defined by Brown and Levinson (1987), the analysis revealed two important findings. First, when conversing with the other characters in the movie Soul, the main character employed all four types of politeness strategies: bald-on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record strategy. Compared to all strategies, positive politeness strategy is frequently applied the most because conversations generally take place among a group of individuals who are intimately familiar with and know each other particularly well. Second, the factors found to influence the use of these politeness strategies include four payoff factors, positive politeness payoffs, bald-on-record payoffs, negative politeness payoffs, and off-record payoffs. Three sociological variables of circumstance were investigated: social distance, relative power, and rank of imposition, and were proved to have some impacts on the use of politeness strategies. Essentially, the analysis findings showed that positive politeness payoffs and social distance have the greatest influence on the main character's employment of politeness strategies. Moreover, in Soul, the main character frequently combined all politeness strategies. Therefore, the context and situations of the movie could potentially be considered to affect all politeness strategies and factors. The meaning of the speaker may differ depending on how the hearers understand and interpret the utterances in given situations.