A study on Deixis Used in The National Section of The Jakarta Post

ABSTRACT

This study is focused on analyzing the National section of The Jakarta Post newspaper using deixis theory of Stephen C. Levinson. Deixis is a part of discourse analysis study and concerned with meaning inferred from an utterance or sentence. Deixis makes discourse easier and more effective in giving a means to pass more information in less time. ‘The National’ is one of sections of The Jakarta Post and often conveyed implicitly. Based on that background, the research on deixis used in the “The National” section of The Jakarta Post was conducted with the problem “What kinds of Deixis used in the National section of The Jakarta Post? And “Which type of deixis is mostly used in the National section of The Jakarta Post?”.

This research was conducted using descriptive qualitative method, because the data of this study are in the forms of sentences or words of “The National” section of The Jakarta Post published from 26th December 2006 to 3rd January 2007 based on Levinson theory.

The result of the study shows five kinds of deixis, namely person, place, time, social and discourse deixis. The first person deixis is used when journalist wants to show the speaker who produces the utterance in “The National” section. Place deixis are used to describe a location relative to the location of participant in speech event, as well as have been shown in the context. Time deixis is used to point the certain period of time when journalist shows the utterances used by the speaker and also the time of an event. While, social deixis is used to indicate the distinct social roles between participants. In addition, discourse deixis is used to refer to some portion of discourse that contains the utterance as a signal and its relation to surrounding text. The deixis used in the National sections of The Jakarta Post has different proportion. Time deixis is mostly used in the data. This is due to the context of the news which happens during the year changes. The second majority goes to person deixis especially third person deixis. This refers to the use of deixis for the referent not identified as the speaker or addressee in the context. First person deixis is not mostly use since this refers to the use of deixis for the speaker who produces the utterance in the context. The third tendency goes to place deixis. This refers to a location relative to the location of participant in a speech event, as well as has been shown in the context. Meanwhile, the next trend is discourse deixis and social deixis. Both of them are not mostly used since the words on the National section of The Jakarta Post do not mostly include the discourse and social deixis.

Based on the findings, it is suggested to the journalist to consider the words or utterances that will be presented in the news in order that the inference being conveyed is easily understood by the readers. In addition, it is also recommended for other researchers to investigate other areas, such as spoken language, telecommunication media, and also in field research. For example, daily conversation, dialect TV news, etc.