Positive and negative politeness strategies of netizen comments in BBC News Instagram post the world first Hijab Sculpture

This study analyzes the manifestation of netizens' positive and negative politeness strategies in a BBC News Instagram post: ‘World’s First Hijab Sculpture’ by utilizing Brown & Levinson's (1987) politeness strategy framework. The researcher answers the following research problems in this study: (1) The types of positive politeness strategies and its representation used by the netizen in the @bbcnews post’s Instagram comment section regarding the hijab sculpture, and (2) The types of negative politeness and its representation utilized by the netizens in the @bbcnews Instagram post’s comment section towards the hijab sculpture. The researcher used a descriptive-qualitative approach to analyze the data. The data were in the form of written netizens' comments obtained from the screen captured comments in the BBC News Instagram Post ‘World’s First Hijab Sculpture’ using purposive sampling technique. The researcher identified the comments based on Brown & Levinson (1987) and classified the data by codes for each positive and negative politeness strategy. This study found 17 positive politeness strategies consisting of noticing/attending to the hearer, exaggerating, using in-group identity markers, seeking and avoiding disagreement, raising/asserting common ground, being optimistic, gifting or asking for reasons, and giving gifts to hearer. The appliance of netizens’ positive politeness is mostly a form of support towards the hijab sculpture phenomena. The negative politeness found were 23 comments manifest as being indirect, using question/hedge, being pessimistic, minimizing imposition, giving deference, apologizing, and stating FTA as a rule. The netizens express negative politeness to soften their criticism towards the hijab sculpture phenomena. Overall, the negative politeness strategy is the prominent one in this study.