Deixis used in the readers’ forum of The Jakarta Post Newspaper

ABSTRACT

Every utterance is made in a particular place, at a particular time and it occurs in a certain situation. It is made by a particular person (the speaker) and it is usually addressed in some other persons (the listener). The speaker and the listener are of a crucial centre because both of them have multiple roles in utterance. Deixis is a part of discourse analysis which is concerning to the context of utterance referring to who is speaking, the time or place of speaking, the gestures of the speaker or the current location of the discourse (Levinson: 1983).

The readers’ forum is one of column which contains some opinions and comments and it covers many are up to date issues. Readers’ forum also includes some opinions and comments with its various forms of people’s opinion from every perspective of life such as social and political perspectives.

The purpose of this study is to understand clearly about the references of the text and what the language points out or what it refers to. This research was conducted by using descriptive qualitative method. It is descriptive because the data are words such as description of deixis used in reader’s forum. The data were in the forms of words or utterances in the readers’ forum of the Jakarta Post which were published from March to April 2009 during the general election.

The results of this research show that there are five kinds of deixis, namely person deixis, place deixis, time deixis, social deixis and discourse deixis. Time deixis appears to point to the certain period of time when the utterance is produced by the speaker. Place deixis is realized to describe a location relative to location of participants in speech event, as well as have been shown in the context. Likewise, the person deixis is used when the speaker shows the inspirations to the addressee. Moreover, social deixis is shown to indicate the relation and the absolute social deixis. Mostly, the readers’ forum used the relational social deixis because the writers assume that they have the equal social status.

Based on those findings, it is suggested for the writers to consider the deixis types when they write the opinion. In addition, it is also recommended for the future researchers to conduct the research using deixis in other fields, like debate contest or any literary work.