Violation of Politeness Maxims in Japanese and Indonesian Irony Utterances

Abstract

This study aimed to describe the similarities and differences in the utterances of irony in Japanese and Indonesian in terms of maxim violations of Leech's (1983) politeness principle. The data in this study were taken from characters' dialogue in 8 Japanese and 9 Indonesian films. The data were collected through listening and note-taking techniques, then were input into a data card. Furthermore, the data were classified according to the type of irony utterance referring to Okamoto's theory ( 2007) and maxim violation referring to politeness principles by Leech (1983). Violation of politeness maxims found in irony utterances in both languages was then compared and contrasted based on the contrastive analysis method. The results showed that there were similarities and differences in Japanese and Indonesian irony utterances based on maxim violation of politeness principles by Leech (1983). The similarities between the utterances of irony in Japanese and Indonesian based on violations of the politeness principle, namely violations of the sympathy maxim, approbation maxim, agreement maxim, tact maxim, and modesty maxim were found in both languages. Meanwhile, the differences in an irony utterance in both languages are based on the violation of politeness principles. The most common violation of the maxims found in the Japanese irony utterance is the violation of the sympathy maxim, while in Indonesian the violation of approbation maxim was the most found in irony utterance. Moreover, in Japanese irony utterances, violation of generosity maxim was found, while in the Indonesian irony utterance, no violation of generosity maxim was found.

Representation of Irony in Whatsapp Group Chat

“…The social aspect of ironic language used is among the theories. Hendayanti et al (2022) viewed speakers of irony pretending to comply in some cases with their interlocutor, implying irony's prominent role in avoiding hurting people. Thus, fostering Indonesian students' understanding of irony may alleviate their interaction in the community concerning Indonesian people's indirect intended meaning in frequent cases.…”