A Critical discourse analysis of Transitivity in Political Article found on the Jakarta Post newspaper

ABSTRACT

Language is one of the vital things in our lives besides the air. As human beings, people need to use language to communicate with others. By language, people can transfer the idea from their minds to others. The application of the use of language can be seen in massmedia, especially in newspaper. Language which is used in newspaper is not easy to be understood for some people because of unfamiliar dictions. Based on that phenomenon, people need to study about the language in newspaper to understand the content of the news.

This research investigates transitivity in political article found on the Jakarta Post newspaper. In this research, the researcher uses Fowler’s theory which focuses on transitivity as one of the elements of ideational function of language that is applied on the sentences in the political article used to express prejudice, violence, and discrimination.

This research is descriptive qualitative because the data are in the form of sentence. The data are analyzed in the following steps: first, the researcher deconstructed all of the data into clauses so that they are analyzed by using transitivity. Those are process, participants, and circumstance. The next step is, identifying transitivity structure of each clause based on three elements of transitivity. Then, identifying all of the patterns of exploitation of the use of transitivity structure in the article. After that, identifying all uses active and passive sentences. The last step is, the researcher discussed the data findings and did verification to answer the research question.

The analysis reveals some findings covering the formulated research questions. It is found that the most of the sentences in the article is active sentences. The pattern of the active sentence is that the subject in the first position. Besides, most of the words in active sentence are indicated as material, in the form of process. It shows the interpretation of the actions. The position of the material process indicates the process of doing something.

Based on the findings mentioned above, it is suggested to the next researchers to fill the gap of this research by analyzing other elements of ideational function or other function of language, such as interpersonal function or textual function by using Fowler’s theory.