An analysis of lexical and contextual meaning on the idiomatic expressions found in Jalalluddin Rumi’s poems

Idiomatic expressions are often used by the people when they are communicating. Idiomatic expressions have existed since human language exists. An idiom is an expression which can be a term or a group of words whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal definitions. It can be a phrase or sentence whose meaning is not obvious through knowledge of the individual meanings of the constituent words but must be learned as a whole. The Meaning of idiomatic expression can be defined by two ways: lexically and contextually. From its lexical viewpoint, the meaning of idiomatic expression is the meaning that is conventionally assigned to the dictionary. However, contextual meaning is the meaning of a word according to the situations in which they are used.

Idiomatic expressions are very unique property in the linguistic. Idiomatic expressions are often used in writing a poem to express feeling, imagination, and thought. This study looks at idiomatic expressions used in Jalalluddin Rumi’s poems as an object of the study.

This study is conducted to (1) identify the lexical meanings of idiomatic expressions in Jalalluddin Rumi’s poem and (2) to identify the contextual meanings of idiomatic expressions in Jalalluddin Rumi’s poem. The purpose of the study is to find out the idiomatic expressions of the poem, then to describe the meaning of them lexically and contextually. This study focuses only on the idiomatic expressions used in Jalalluddin Rumi’s poems.

This research applies a descriptive qualitative method to discuss, and analyze the social phenomena. After identifying the idiomatic expressions used in the poems, then the data are presented and analyzed. The data are obtained from doing library research and from some books related to this study.

This study found that there are forty six kinds of idiomatic expressions with their lexical and contextual meaning used in Jalalluddin Rumi’s poems from ten data which are presented in this study. Lexical meaning of idiomatic expressions used in the poem of Jalalluddin Rumi presents how the meaning of ords in general as written in the dictionary, while the meaning of idiomatic expressions contextually is the meaning of idiomatic expressions according to the situation where they are used. The writer found that most of the contextual meaning of idiomatic expressions has the same meaning with lexically. Moreover, from the twelve data, the contextual meaning dominated the meaning of idiomatic expressions than lexically.

Finally, researcher expects that this research will be able to help the next researchers who are conduct in the same field of study. The researcher expects that somebody who will conduct in the same study will be able to manage others objects, such as the idiomatic expressions used in novel, movie, or others.