Tri Wahyu Purwanti, Request Strategies Employed by Male and Female Characters in The Devil Wears Prada Introduction Request is one of the classifications of speech act that concerns with the act of asking for something or getting someone to do something. The speech act of request is a prominent action in daily interaction. Requests are often uttered at school, workplace, home, and everywhere. A request has been considered a noteworthy subject for the research of speech acts, and the writer is interested in doing this study because requests are ‘Face-Threatening Acts (FTAs)’ (Brown and Levinson 1987: 70–71 as cited in Rue and Zhang, 2008: 1) because it entails an imposition on the addressee, therefore, a certain strategy is needed to prevent an imposition on the addressee. According to Reiter (2000: 33) there are a number of social factors, such as gender, age, familiarity, the social status of the participants and the weight of a particular imposition, which will determine the kind of politeness strategy employed in performing the speech act. By knowing those factors, a speaker can produce appropriate strategy of request. In this study, the writer focuses on the two factors that closely related in the occurence of request strategy, they are gender and social status. As Holmes (1995: 19) stated that women are regarded as subordinate or less powerful group than men in many communities, but in this emancipation era women appear to be leaders. They have more power than men or have higher status than men. Artikel Hasil Penelitian Mahasiswa 2012 Abstrak Meminta tolong adalah meminta seseorang untuk melakukan atau tidak melakukan sesuatu atau menyatakan keperluan atau keinginan akan sesuatu. Meminta tolong adalah tindakan yang mengancam wajah (‘Face-Threatening Acts (FTAs)’) (Brown and Levinson 1987: 70–71) karena meminta tolong membuat lawan bicara keberatan. Oleh karena itu, strategi khusus diperlukan untuk mencegah keberatan lawan bicara. Tujuan kajian ini adalah untuk mengungkapkan strategi meminta tolong yang dilakukan oleh enam karakter di film The Devil Wears Prada dan untuk mengkaji hubungan antara strategi meminta tolong yang dilakukan oleh ke enam karakter tersebut dengan jender dan status sosial. Kajian ini menganalisa ungkapan permintaan tolong yang dipakai oleh tiga karakter pria dan tiga karakter wanita dalam film tersebut dengan meanggunakan teori Blum Kulka (1989). Permintaan tolong yang terpilih diklasifikasi berdasarkan jender dan status sosial. Hasil dari kajian menunjukkan bahwastrategi meminta tolong secara langsung paling banyak dilakukan oleh kedua karakter yang memiliki status yang berbeda-beda, kecuali karakter pria yang memiliki status subordinate menggunakan strategi meminta tolong secara langsung dan strategi meminta tolong secara tidak langsung sebanding. Kata kunci: pragmatik, meminta tolong, jenis kelamin, status sosial. Abstract Request is to ask someone to do/not do something or to express the need or desire for something. Requests are ‘Face- Threatening Acts (FTAs)’ (Brown and Levinson 1987: 70–71 as cited in Rue and Zhang, 2008: 1) because it entails an imposition on the addressee, therefore, a certain strategy is needed to prevent an imposition on the addressee. The purpose of this study is to reveal the request strategies of six characters in The Devil Wears Prada and to investigate the correlations between the different request strategies employed by six characters in the movie with gender and social status. This study analyzes the utterances that consist of requests, used by the three male and female characters in the movie by using Blum Kulka’s (1989) theory. Selection of request was classified based on gender and social status. The result of this study shows that direct request strategy is used mostly by male and female character with different status, except the male subordinate used direct request strategy as equal as indirect request strategy. Keywords: Pragmatics, request, gender, social status. Tri Wahyu Purwanti, Syamsul Anam, Sabta Diana English Department, Faculty of Letters, Jember University Jln. Kalimantan 37, Jember 68121 E-mail: triewp@gmail.com Request Strategies Employed by Male and Female Characters in The Devil Wears Prada (Strategi Meminta Tolong yang dipakai oleh Karakter-karakter Pria dan Wanita dalam Film The Devil Wears Prada) 1