Politeness Strategies and Norms in Waiter-Consumer Communication at Student Cafes: A Sociopragmatic Analysis

This research is intended to investigate the use of politeness strategies and norms in waiter-consumer communication at student cafes. This descriptive and qualitative study is presented within the framework of sociopragmatics which can be broadly defined as the study of speech acts and the contexts in which they are performed with social and pragmatic approaches. To achieve the goal above, data on utterances expressing waiter-customer communication were collected through observation and field notes, recordings, questionnaire and in-depth interviewing. Furthermore, the data were analyzed by using the parameter of politeness strategies (Brown & Levinson, 1987) and politeness norms (Poedjosoedarmo, 2017). The research findings show that: (1) foreign students used various politeness strategies on one occasion, but violate them on another occasion and (2) English speaking waiters/waitresses used various politeness norms on one occasion, but violate them on another occasion. Keywords—politeness strategies, politeness norms, waiter-consumer communication