Politeness Strategies and Social Dimensions in Tulsa King Season 1 TV Series: A Sociopragmatics Study

Aditya Akmal Firdaus, Ida Zuraida Supri

Abstract


Television discourse presents a rich yet underexplored site for examining how politeness strategies shift dynamically within asymmetrical relationships across extended narrative arcs. This study analyzes interactions between Dwight and Tyson in Tulsa King Season 1 using a qualitative descriptive design. Data were collected from 14 purposively sampled dialog excerpts and analyzed through qualitative content analysis based on Brown and Levinson's (1987) Politeness Theory and Holmes and Wilson's (2017) social dimensions framework. Findings reveal that all four politeness strategies are present: bald-on-record appears in five data points, negative politeness in four, off-record in three, and positive politeness in two. The status scale remains a structural constant, while social distance and the functional scale shift most visibly over time, driving a transition from unmitigated directness in early episodes toward more relationally attentive communication later in the season. The study concludes that politeness strategies function not as fixed communicative tools but as responsive instruments shaped by evolving social dimensions within a structurally unequal but relationally transformative relationship. This study contributes to sociopragmatics by offering a replicable framework for analyzing the dynamic co-evolution of politeness strategies and social dimensions in serialized television discourse.

Keywords


Sociopragmatics; politeness strategies; social dimensions; TV series.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.36269/sigeh.v6i2.5083

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