A semantic study on the lyrics of Eminem’s songs

This study investigates a semantic study especially on lexical meaning and the messages in the lyrics of Eminem’s songs. The lexical meaning is to be interpreted as the meaning of lexemes depending on the meaning of sentences in which they occur. Whereby, lexical meaning concerns with the relation ship between words and meanings.

The data were obtained from the cassette of Eminem at Encore album published in 2004. To help interpret the data, this study uses a semantic theory of George Yule. To comprehend each song analyzed at Encore album, this study merely uses one kind of meanings namely lexical meaning. The study of lexical meaning has been done by many researchers. They focused on all aspects of kinds of meaning those are lexical meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning.

This study focuses one kind of meaning namely lexical meaning, including synonymy, antonym, polysemy, hyponymy, denotation, and connotation and messages used in the lyrics of Eminem. It uses descriptive qualitative method to describe each sentence or each word.

The instrument of this study is the researcher himself. It is because the data of this study are the text of the songs of Eminem’s songs. This study found that generally the lyrics of Eminem contain synonymy, antonym, polysemy, hyponymy, denotation, and connotation and messages.

At last, the songs are mostly dominated by hyponymy and followed by connotation to the Encore album of Eminem used in the lyrics of Eminem. The regretless (social message) also dominates the messages faced by Eminem.