The Utterance of Money Enticement-Based SMS: A Challenge to the Indonesian Politeness and Unification Sustainability

Abstract

The paper was inspired by the incoming short message service (SMS) offering financial support through cheques. The aim of this study was to identify the characteristics of SMS, and to examine the deictic expressions and the impositives and commissives of tact and generosity maxims under the perspective of the politeness principle. Data for this study were gathered from April 2019 to August 2020 through electronic observation of 24 cases sent by s to h’s personal phone number at different times and dates. Descriptive analysis was applied to understand the contents of SMS. The results of the research were corroborated with a few dimensions of information that the SMS texts promised money ranging from Rp. 100 to 175 millions. The web page addresses were fake and the senders’ names were not written. In case of person deixis, the second person singular “you” appears explicitly and implicitly. All of the web page addresses were considered psychologically spatial deixis and the temporal deixis of time and day exist. The illocutionary goal is not competitive (a), so the politeness becomes a positive character. The SMS texts are convivial (b), meaning that the illocutionary goal coincides with the social goal, for instance greeting and congratulating, but not inviting or thanking. The goal sounds great because it consists of courtesy or politeness, but the linguistic behaviour does not follow such a goal. The SMS threatens domestic politeness, and the unification for life sustainability could be disturbed. The SMS texts present bad implications for politeness in Indonesia and contribute a negative paradigm for national unification sustainability. The study suggests the importance of selection processs capability by the SMS provider in an organizational context.
 Keywords: Utterance, SMS, money-enticement, deixis, politeness, unification sustainability