Language styles used in “Oprah Winfrey Show”

ABSTRACT

Language style is significant part in communication to avoid misunderstanding among people. It is the fact that people may use various styles in expressing their feelings, ideas and in conveying message to others. One’s feeling and thought will be expressed in accordance with his own way and manner. Interaction will not occur properly if someone does not speak with the right style. In this case, the ways of broadcaster reports the news perhaps can be investigated from the characteristics of language styles to show styles of formality, informality and colloquially. Such manner happens in “Oprah Winfrey Show” since she produces various ways of her language styles in presenting her program. Thus, the use of language style in talk show program nowadays becomes more remarkable to be analyzed.

This research is intended to answer: (1) “What kinds of language style are used by Oprah Winfrey in Oprah Winfrey Show?”, and (2) “What is the dominant language style used by Oprah Winfrey in Oprah Winfrey Show?” The objectives of the research are; (1) to describe the kinds of language style used by Oprah Winfrey in “Oprah Winfrey Show”, and (2) to investigate the dominant language style used by Oprah Winfrey in “Oprah Winfrey Show”.

This research uses a descriptive qualitative research because the researcher tries to discusses, analyzes and finds the social phenomena which are running naturally and not statically analyzed. In this case, the researcher adopts McCrimmon’s theory to describe the language style used in “Oprah Winfrey Show” and it is specialized on the utterances of Oprah Winfrey.

There are three kinds of language style, based on the McCrimmon’s theory: formal style, informal style, and colloquial style. After analyzing the data, the researcher finds in this research, only two styles that are used by Oprah Winfrey, they are: informal and colloquial style. Furthermore, among those styles, the dominant style used by Oprah Winfrey in “Oprah Winfrey Show” is colloquial style since it is a style which employs the popular or daily vocabulary to attract
the audience and the caller.

Finally, after finishing this research, the researcher hopes that this study could give contribution toward the researcher herself, to the readers and to the further researchers. Hopefully further researchers who want to study on the same topic to analyze language style deeper or more specific.