AN ANALYSIS OF POLITENESS STRATEGIES USED BY NETIZENS IN THE COMMENTS ON THE YOUTUBE VIDEO: BARACK OBAMA’S FULL SPEECH AT THE DNC BY ABC NEWS

Language plays a very important role in building social relationships, one of which
is the use of politeness strategies. These strategies appear in various situations, both
spoken and written. This study aims to describe the types of politeness strategies
and also identify the function of politeness strategies in the comments section of a
video speech by Barack Obama. The writer analyzes sentences in the comments
that contain politeness strategies from Barack Obama's video speech. This study
uses a qualitative method with observation techniques, and the writer focuses on
comments made in August till November 2024. This study uses Brown and
Levinson's (1987) theory to identify types of politeness strategies and also uses
Holmes (2013) to identify the function of politeness strategies. The results show
that there are 80 data containing politeness strategies: 77 data contain positive
politeness, 2 data contain Negative politeness, and 1 data contains Off record. In
addition, the writer also found 4 functions in all of the data. 78 data contained
expressive function, 10 data contained referential function, 3 data contained
directive function, and 1 data contained poetic function. The results show that
several data contain multiple functions at once. Positive politeness with strategies
(exaggerate) was the most dominant in the comments column, and expressive
function was also the most dominant in the comments column. Many netizens
praised, expressed admiration, and appreciation for Barack Obama's speech skills
and his former presidency.