People use criticism for expressing their contrastive ideas or opinion toward an issue.
Criticism is often considered as an unpleasant language use that threatens other’s face. In
order to alleviate the threat, a speaker should operate some politeness strategy along with
the criticism Brown & Levinson (1987) proposes some classification of politeness strategy
and one of them is off record. Therefore, this study aims at finding the types of off record
politeness strategies that teenagers use in criticizing a sensitive issue and the function of
those strategies. Based on the data analysis, off record politeness strategy in teenagers’
criticism consist of ‘give association clues’ , ‘presuppose’, ‘understate’, ‘overstate’, ’be
ironic, ’rhetorical question’, ‘be ambiguous’, ‘be vague’, ‘over-generalize’ and ‘displace
h’. The highest occurrence of the strategies in the data are be ironic and understate.
Furthermore, the strategies functions as expression of agreement, disagreement,
astonishment, and detachment in which a speaker does not clearly express his/her positive
or negative response. It shows that teenagers in expressing their criticism tend to use the
off record politeness strategy of irony and understatement
