Effects of Prosody on The Politeness of Javanese Interrogative Sentences

Abstract

This study aims to determine the effect of prosody on the politeness of Javanese interrogative sentences. This study analyzes the following problems: (1) The characteristics of Javanese interrogative sentence in accordance with prosody, and (2) The influence of prosody on language politeness. This research was carried out through speech production, acoustic analysis, and perception test experiments. Data were obtained from the Javanese community in the form of interrogative sentences by recording speeches to obtain the melodic curve and measuring the fundamental frequency (F0). Furthermore, irrelevant details were removed in order to make a close copy of the original utterance. The result showed that the use of prosody in interrogative sentences of Javanese speech has a distinctive character with a final and wide range of tones. Prosody influences the realization of language politeness in Javanese. The high and low aspects of tone and its width influence the realization of politeness in the community. The lower the final and wider a tone, the more polite a speech in Javanese. This research is essential, especially for the preservation of regional languages ​​that are increasingly extinct. Pragmatically, this finding is also very useful because the utterance with a good supra-segmental analysis that is combined with certain contexts produces good speech. Therefore, a speech with good prosody and in accordance with a certain society can be categorized as polite.