Positive politeness strategies used by Jack Ma in World Economic Forum; 'Meet The Leader' Session

This thesis examined positive politeness strategies used by Jack Ma in World Economic Forum ‘Meet the Leader’ Session. The aims of this study are to figure out how are positive politeness strategies applied by Jack Ma and also the factors influenced Jack Ma in choosing the positive politeness strategies in his utterance. In analyzing the data, the writer used qualitative approach, in which might be useful to describe the ways of positive politeness strategies applied by Jack Ma. Since the data of this study in the form of utterances which includes word, phrases, and sentences so that qualitative approach is very appropriated. The researcher mainly employs Brown and Levinson’s theory (1987) to analyze the kinds of positive politeness strategy and the factors influencing the choice of politeness strategies. As the result of this study, the researcher found 47 data of positive politeness strategies that is applied by Jack Ma in ‘Meet the Leader’ session at World Economic Forum. The researcher found 9 out of 15 strategies of positive politeness among them notice, attend to hearer, exaggerate, intensify interest to the hearer, use in group identity marker, seek agreement, avoid disagreement, be optimistic, include both speaker and hearer in activity, assume or assert reciprocity. Furthermore, the factors that influenced Jack Ma in choosing the positive politeness strategies are payoff and relevant circumstance. Those factors are influencing all of the data with different scales or degree.