Deixis Used in “This Odd World” of “The Jakarta Post”

ABSTRACT

Knowing a language means to know how to produce and understand sentences and utterances with particular meaning. However, it is not only the meaning that the speaker intends to communicate through producing a particular utterance, but also the context of the utterances is very important to understand the encoding of the relationship of the speakers to the world around them. In all languages, the reference of many words and expressions relies entirely on the context. To know the context of the written language in the discourse, we have to determine the speakers who produce the utterances and the speaker’s or writer’s position in space and time.

This research aims at analyzing the deixis used in “This Odd World” of the Jakarta Post by using Karl Buhler theory. According to the background, this research is conducted to answer the following research problem “what types of deixis are used in “This Odd World” of The Jakarta Post”. It uses descriptive qualitative method. The data are in the form of Sentences and utterances written by the journalist. The data are selected from The Jakarta Post published from February, 3rd 2007 – February, 27th 2007.

Based on the analysis in research findings, this research found that there are three types of deixis in “This Odd World” of The Jakarta Post namely, “person”, “place”, and “time” deixis. The deixis mostly used by the journalist is “time deixis” because the sentences and utterances are constructed by the verb tense as the deictic expressions of time deixis, and “person deixis” because it becomes center deixis of the utterances. “Place deixis” is not dominant because the text of “This Odd World” of The Jakarta Post is mostly in the form of report which is used the past tense that indicates time deixis.

This analysis is expected to be a new additional source of information for increasing the knowledge of deixis theory from Karl Buhler. Furthermore, the researcher suggests that the next researchers conduct and make more complete analysis on the same field.