A study of cohesive devices found in the main character’s utterances of drama ‘Macbeth’ by William Shakespeare

This research is intended to analyze the cohesive devices found on the Macbeth’s utterances in the drama entitled “Macbeth” in which the devices organize semantic (meaning) relationship between an element and the others. The organization of those elements is categorized as cohesion which is also viewed as one of the elements helps the audience to follow easily the train of thought of the speaker or the writer. Macbeth as the main character of the drama entitled “Macbeth” written by William Shakespeare has constructed many cohesive devices both in grammatical and lexical cohesive devices. Besides Macbeth, the supporting characters also express their utterances by using grammatical and lexical cohesive devices. This drama includes spoken text in the form of dialogues among the characters. Thus, it becomes interesting object to be researched. The problems are covered by the question "What types of grammatical cohesion are found in the drama entitled “Macbeth”?" and "What types of lexical cohesion are found in the drama entitled “Macbeth”?”

This research uses descriptive qualitative research method in which the data are taken from the utterances expressed by Macbeth during his dialogues with other supporting players. The data are analyzed by exploring Halliday and Hasan’s theory of cohesive devices.

This research has obtained the following results. On the grammatical cohesive devices which comprise reference, ellipsis, substitution and conjunction, this research finds that the most widely used is reference which function is to indicate reference pronoun. Then, in the second position is followed by conjunction which function is to indicate a connection between ideas. Next, the tie of substitution is found in which it makes the language expressed accurate by substituting specific terms. The last is ellipsis; its function is to simplify the sentences of utterances. Nevertheless, on the lexical cohesive devices which cover reiteration and collocation, it is found that the most widely found is reiteration namely repetition followed by metonym, antonym, synonym, and hyponym. However, Collocation is rarely found.

From the results, it is expected that this research is useful for teachers, students, preachers and any other professions who has intension to produce more qualified and rationale text of speech which can achieve their aim.