Explicatures in the headline news of Sunday Post

ABSTRACT

This research is focused on analyzing the explicature in the headline news of Sunday post using Sperber and Wilson’s theory. Explicature is a development of the logical form encoded by an utterance. The central idea of explicature is that, in interpreting an utterance, the hearer or readers do not only understand the context and the meaning of utterance. They also develop the logical form.

In written text, the explicature can be found in the headline news. The headlines are interesting text on the top of the text of news. The headline news of Sunday Post has high creativity in meaning, sentences in the way of reader’s interest to read the content of news. It is the most important part of newspaper, which indicates and provides the current issues written in English either nationally or regionally even internationally.

Related to the phenomena above, this research aims at answering the question How are the explicatures in the headline news of Sunday Post. The researcher focused this study on analyzing explicatures of headline news of Sunday Post published from March to April 2010. It is only focused on headline of Sunday Post in actual news and current issues columns.

This research is a descriptive qualitative research. It is descriptive because it describes the explicature meaning of the headline news of Sunday Post. The words in the headline news of Sunday Post is analyzed and interpreted descriptively based on explicature theory. The data source of the study is headline news of Sunday Post newspaper published from March to April 2010. The researcher analyzes the headline focused on actual news and current issues columns. The main instrument in this research is the researcher herself since in qualitative research.

Based on the finding and discussion, it is found that the utterances of the headline news can be classified as explicature due to the fact that the explicature can be fleshed out. The headline is described in some steps based on the development of explicature: Firstly, explicature is developed in specification of vague term and word sense disambiguation. Secondly, explicature is developed in words sense disambiguation; the word sense disambiguation is not against with the utterance. Thirdly, explicature is developed in reference assignment. Finally, relating with events and states, the researcher takes the certain context and encyclopedic knowledge into account in order to determine what the writer meant by this headline.