The Implicit meaning of “Feature” titles in the Jakarta Post: Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s Relevance theory

ABSTRACT

Since language is used to communicate, it holds an important part of human life. In fact, however people communicate each other every time, miscommunication can happen sometime. It is usually caused what speaker said is something implicit. In order to understand what the speaker means by her/his utterance, the hearer has to find the most relevant interpretation of the utterance. It is as what Sperber and Wilson stated in Relevance Theory. News is part of the form of communication which has certain purpose behind what is written. Moreover, the news’ title denotes the essence of the news, it also has implied thing to say. Thus, this study investigated the implicit meaning from the ‘feature’ titles in The Jakarta Post. The objective of this study was to find out the implicit meaning of ‘feature’ titles.

This study uses Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s relevance theory which emphasizes its analysis on the implicit meaning. The research design of this study is descriptive-qualitative since the data were collected and analyzed. The data were collected from the ‘feature’ titles in The Jakarta Post on February 2011. This study analyzed the data and made general conclusion based on relevance theory.

The result of this study shown that the implicit meaning of ‘feature’ headlines can be categorized into four categories. They are telling about refusing a common assumption, unnoticed side of something, encouraging readers to do something, and others tell about proving of something.

Since this study discussed the implicit of all ‘feature’ titles in a month, the researcher believes that this result is still too general. Therefore, researcher suggested to the next researchers who are interesting to conduct the same study, they might take a ‘feature’ headline which has some topic. Otherwise, they take another source which they think more effecting to societies’ mindset, of example cosmetic advertising in television or other mass media to expand the area of investigating. Besides, we can see the language use in advertisement and its implicit meaning.