Semantic analysis on caption of caricature in New York Times Newspaper

ABSTRACT

‘‘Meaning’’ is typically treated as the first source for catching some exact message content of extended discourse (spoken or written) in the case of direct communication or in the case of verbal report such as in newspapers, book and the others. In this study, the characterization of meaning is situated action and reasoning as a fundamental point and significant view of this research. The focus statement of this research is framed practically and theoretically, that is currently facing toward the concept of meaning. It then presents particularly a problematical discussion of semantic terms.

The primary stage of this analysis is about meaning in the terms of denotative meaning and connotative meaning. The important point of views in this research is that, first; the writer tries to find out the scientific or academic information within the caption of caricature, in which the caption of caricature is one of the valuable resources on the interne through New York Times Newspaper. This requires simple linguistic analysis, including searches for linguistic clues such as reference phrase (“the picture above shows”) and knowledge of which verb and noun in sentence represent a depicted object. In other words, this research is intended to generate discussion about words, phrase and sentence found in caricature that published in New York Times Newspaper.

In this research, the writer uses the suitable theory that framed as descriptive qualitative method, in which the emphasizing of qualitative research threat the case of process, interpretation of meaning and exploration of concepts, the data are in the form of word rather than number and statistic. The major purpose of the descriptive method is to tell and to describe a situation or area of interest systematically, factually and accurately. Based on the operational definition of qualitative method, this method is very appropriate one with this study, because this research is dealing with the object that is in the form of word, phrase and sentence. In such case, the writer selects and uses written texts (caption of caricature) as the data from caricatures of New York Times Newspaper. However, the writer limits the data by selecting twenty of caricatures. The writer categorizes those caricatures into three parts namely: political caricature, social caricature and economical caricature. In Addition, the writer collects the data from January to May 2009. In analyzing the data, the writer identifies denotative meaning and connotative meaning that are found in the caricatures of New York Times Newspaper.

The data results of this analysis indicate and show some points, those ones could be formulated into two categories, and they are denotative meaning and connotative meaning. In other words, the writer faces that eighty percent of those caricatures talk about current issues of social problem in any cases of life such as political competition, social conflict, ideology, family’s life and sport.