The focus of this study is on the realizations of the politeness strategies, in conveying the speech acts among ten Indonesian patients and ten English speaking expatriate respondents.
The data corpus was collected from twenty sessions of medical interactions between the physician and the twenty respondents in some different locations in Jakarta. The source of data was natural conversations held by the physician, who was simultaneously the researcher, and the twenty respondents. The data collecting was done by recording the conversations, and no recording was done without the consent from the patients. The collected data and the transcription of the recordings are then processed, classified, analyzed, and finally a conclusion is drawn.
The patients' speech acts are then classified and analyzed in terms of the politeness strategies in language use (Brown and Levinson, 1987), and the degree of politeness is measured in terms of a rating scale from the least polite (grade 1) until the most polite (grade 5). The patients' speech acts studied in this research are the (representative speech acts of reporting illness complaints to the physician, and the indirect directive speech acts of asking questions about the disease, its treatment and its prevention.
Based on the empirical data we draw a conclusion, that there is a significant difference between the realizations of the speech acts, and the realizations of the sub-strategies of the on-record plus negative politeness and of the on-record plus positive politeness, conveyed by the Fl and Ml patients and by the FE and ME respondents.
The findings of this study on the realizations of the speech acts and the realizations of the politeness strategies are presented below.
(a) In the realizations of the speech acts, in conveying the speech acts of asking question and the speech acts of reporting, the FE and ME respondents conveyed a total number of 155 speech acts, by contrast the Fl and Ml patients conveyed only 45 speech acts.
(b) In the realizations of the sub-strategies of the negative politeness (b.1) in terms of the kinds of sub-strategy utilized, the FE and ME respondents conducted four kinds of strategy, i.e. nos. 1, 2,4, and 5, by contrast the Fl and Ml patients conducted only two kinds of strategy, i.e. nos. 1 and 5. (b.2) In terms of the number of occurrences of the sub-strategies utilized, the Fl and Ml patients performed the sub-strategies in a total number of 76 times, by contrast the FE and ME respondents conducted the sub-strategies in a total number of 185 times.
(c) In the realizations of the sub-strategies of positive politeness, (c.1) The Fl and Ml patients did not conduct any sub-strategy of the positive politeness at all, or the Fl and Ml patients did not dare to show the polite friendliness to the medical doctor, because Indonesian patients regard the social factors of 'Distance' and "Power* highly, towards medical doctors, (c.2) The total number of occurrences of the realizations of the sub-strategies of positive politeness, conducted by the FE and ME respondents was 91 times. By contrast, the Fl and Ml patients did not conduct any sub-strategy of the on-record plus positive politeness.
(d) Thus there were significant differences in the language behavior between the FE and ME respondents and the Fl and Ml patients. |