Politeness Strategies in WhatsApp Text Messaging Between Sundanese Students and Lecturers

摘要

This study aims to reveal politeness strategies used by Sundanese students when sending text messages to their lecturers via WhatsApp chat application. For the data, this qualitative study used 57 text messages from six students majoring in Sundanese language at a university in Bandung. Drawing on Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies, the study revealed that the students used all of the four politeness strategies with negative as the most frequently used strategy and bald on-record the least frequent one. These findings suggest that the students are aware of asymmetrical power relation with the lecturers. It is expected that this study would give insight into politeness strategies in mediated communication particularly between Sundanese students and their lecturers.