Politeness in Japanese Prohibition Speech Act

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze the prohibition speech act based on the level of politeness and the background factors. A Japanese drama named Good Doctor was used as data sources. Good Doctor is a famous medical drama remake of the 2013 South Korean television series. The number of prohibition speech acts contained in this drama’s dialogue become a strong reason why this drama was chosen as a data source. The use of prohibition speech act in drama character’s utterance was classified based on the prohibition pattern in Japanese in accordance with the theory of Namatame (1996). Furthermore, politeness in this prohibition speech act was also analyzed by Leech’s politeness maxim’s theory (1983). Meanwhile, the factors behind the politeness of prohibition speech act were investigated with the theory of Mizutani and Mizutani (1987). The result shows that there are several prohibition’s lingual markers found in the utterances of this drama, i.e: dame, ~naide ~na, ~naide kudasai, ~te wa ikemasen and ~nai. On the other hand, the politeness used were including tact maxim, agreement maxim, also the maxim violation in this prohibition speech acts. The politeness in this prohibition speech acts were affected by several factors, i.e.: level of intimacy, age, social relation, social status, gender, group membership and situation.