THE COMPLIMENTS AND THE COMPLIMENT RESPONSES USED BY THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN WHEN HARRY MET SALLY MOVIE
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THE COMPLIMENTS AND THE COMPLIMENT RESPONSES USED BY
THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN WHEN HARRY MET SALLY MOVIE
BY
I DEWA GEDE ANOM BAYU ISWARA
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, FACULTY OF LETTERS
UDAYANA UNIVERSITY
2013
ABSTRAK
Jurnal ini berjudul “The Compliments and The Compliment Responses Used by The Main Characters in When Harry Met Sally Movie”. Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mengidentifikasi kategori pujian yang digunakan oleh Harry dan Sally dan untuk mengklasifikasikan jenis-jenis respon pujian yang digunakan oleh Harry dan Sally dalam film romantic komedi yang berjudul When Harry Met Sally. Teori yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah teori Herbert (1989) dalam jurnalnya yang berjudul The Ethnography of English Compliments and Compliment Responses: A Contrastive Sketch dan teori Wolfson (1983) dalam jurnalnya yang berjudul An Empirically Based Analysis of Complimenting in American English. Metode yang digunakan dalam menganalisis penelitian ini adalah metode kualitatif. Pembahasan data di awali dengan menonton film When Harry Met Sally, memberi tanda pada pujian dan respon pujian yang digunakan oleh Harry dan Sally dalam percakapan mereka. Hasil dari pembahasan ini menunjukan bahwa Harry dan Sally menggunakan pujian untuk tujuan yang berbeda. Harry menggunakan pujian sebagai strategi untuk mencari perhatian Sally dan Sally menggunakan pujian hanya untuk menjaga persahabatan.
Kata kunci: compliments, compliment responses, gender.
Sociolinguistics is the study of language in relation to society.
Sociolinguists are interested in explaining why people speak differently in different social contexts. And the effect of social factors such as social distance, social status, age, gender, class. Language can be considered as a medium for
transmitting a message, information, or idea from speaker to hearer. One of the utterances that people often use in conversation through language is compliment and compliment response. Compliment is often found in daily conversation within people in the society. People give compliment to the others in order to establish a good social relationship. In a compliment, there will be compliment response from listener to speaker.
Compliment response is a verbal acknowledgement that the recipients of the compliment hear and is reacted to the compliment. This reaction may differ from one person to another or, more importantly, from one society to another (tripod.com).
The reason why the topic was chosen because in this paper, we can discover how the expressions of the main characters in When Harry Met Sally movie use compliment and compliment response in their dialogues and also we can know the effect of gender difference in giving compliment by the main characters in When Harry Met Sally movie.
Based on the background above, the problems of this study are:
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a) What categories of compliment are used by Harry and Sally in their dialogues in When Harry Met Sally?
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b) What types of compliment responses are used by Harry and Sally in their dialogues in When Harry Met Sally?
Related to the problems of the study, the aims of this study are to identify the categories of compliment used by Harry and Sally and to classify the types of compliment response used by Harry and Sally in When Harry Met Sally Movie.
In this study, the research method was classified into three parts; they are data source, method and technique of collecting data, and method and technique of analyzing data.
The data was taken from When Harry Met Sally movie. This movie is chosen because it is like reflection about human life and in movie we can see directly how the main characters in When Harry Met Sally use compliment and compliment response. The data was also taken from the movie script in order to get data clearly, especially in conversation.
The method that was used to collect the data in this research is qualitative method. The qualitative research may use the interview, documentation, and questionnaires. This study used the documentation because the documentation is a method is used for analyzing the data in social research method. In detail, movie included in the documentation matters.
There are three techniques to analyze the data. Firstly, watching the When Harry Met Sally movie and reading the movie script then underline the compliment and the compliment response that occur in main characters utterances. Secondly, identify and quote the compliment based on the categories of compliment proposed by Wolfson’s theory (1983). Thirdly, classify the compliment response based on types of compliment response by Herbert’s theory (1989).
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5. Analysis of The Compliments and The Compliment Responses Used by The Main Characters in When Harry Met Sally Movie.
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5.1 Compliment Categories
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Conversation 1
Sally: (talking to herself) Ok, so fifteen percent of my share is ninety... six ninety. This leaves seven. (To Harry) What? Do I have something on my face?
Harry: You're a very attractive person.
Sally: Thank you.
Harry: Amanda never said how attractive you were.
Analysis: One of the Compliments on Personal Trait can be seen in the conversation mentioned above. In this conversation, Harry praised Sally. Harry said “you’re a very attractive person”. It was a Compliment on Personal Trait, because the word “attractive” show about someone’s personality.
Conversation 2
Sally: We are just going to be friends, ok?
Harry: yeaa, you are good friend!
Sally: (no response)
Analysis: Based on the above conversation, there was a compliment who uttered by Harry to Sally. Harry said “you are good friend”. It was Compliment on Personal Trait, because on the movie seen Sally can made Harry felt comfort when he was close to Sally because of her good personality. Because Harry felt comfort, he praised Sally by saying “you are good friend”.
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5.2 Compliment Response Types
Conversation 3
Harry: Thanks for the ride.
Sally: Yeah, it was interesting.
Harry: It was nice knowing you.
Sally: Yeah.
(They shake hands)
Analysis: After Sally heard compliment by Harry, Sally smiled to Harry and she responded Harry’s compliment by saying “yeah”. This response showed acceptance. So that this response called Appreciation Token. It was called
Appreciation Token because Sally received Harry’s compliment by saying “yeah” and smiled to him.
Conversation 4
Harry: You were a good friend of umm...
Sally: Really?
Harry: of course, you are.
Analysis: From the compliment response type above, it showed Questioning type. After accepted compliment from Harry, Sally was not sure about Harry’s compliment, so that she said “Really”. It was questioning, because by this word showed that the addressee questions the sincerity or the appropriateness of the compliment to the speaker.
From the findings and the analysis, some conclusions can be drawn from this movie. First, it can be said that Harry made more compliments than Sally. Of all the categories of compliments by Wolfson (1983), Harry praised Sally more often by using compliments on personal trait when they were talking or arguing with each other. Secondly, Harry more often used compliments, so automatically Sally more often responded than Harry. In her responding compliment, Sally more often produced appreciation token to respond to Harry's compliment because Sally wanted to make a good relationship to Harry (just as friends). Thirdly, in this movie, gender differences did not influence the ways used in expressing compliments between Harry and Sally. However, in this current study, women more often receive praise not because as the basis of gender but because of Harry has a special feeling to Sally and uses a compliment to attract the attention of Sally.
Furthermore, Harry and Sally used compliment for different purposes. Harry used compliments as a strategy to get closer to Sally and to attract Sally' special attention because Harry loved Sally, and Sally used compliments only to express admiration and also to maintain the friendship between them.
Amizadeh, Niloufar. (2011). A Comparative Study of the Compliments and Compliment Responses between English and Persian TV Interviews. volume 17 (1): 65 – 78. Iran: 3L - The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies.
Ephron, Nora. (1989). When Harry Met Sally movie script. New York: IMDb Screenplays.
Herbert, R. K. (1989). The Ethnography of English Compliments and Compliment Responses: A Contractive Sketch. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
ITU Gender. What is ‘Gender’. Available from: http://www.itu.int/gender/about/gender.html
TRIPOD.com. Compliment responses. Available from: http://aisaoui.tripod.com/ais2/id6.html.
Wolfson, N. (1983). An Empirically Based Analysis of Complimenting in American English. New York: Newbury House Publishers.
YouTube.com. When Harry Met Sally (1989) Full Movie HD. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4UjojgACPs.
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