A critical discourse analysis on the advertisements found in Jakarta Post

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, the great development of economical aspects of life has led the businessmen to have high competition among others to set up promotion. There are many kinds of communication media that can be used such as magazine, newspaper, radio, television, etc. In line which newspaper media is an effective one for many people to read newspaper when they do not watch the television or other. This kind of communication media helps much the advertisers to promote their products to the customers or the readers.

Related to the phenomenon above, this research aims to answer the two following questions; the firstis how the advertisers maintain the cohesion and the coherence on the advertisements found in Jakarta Post newspaper and the second is what do the statements imply on the advertisements found in Jakarta Post newspaper. This research focuses only on twenty-eight advertisements that have critical discourse.

This research is a descriptive qualitative research, because it tries to describe and explain the condition of the data naturally and descriptively. The data of this study are all consumers advertisements namely; goods and services advertisements in Jakarta Post newspaper from March Ist up to April , 2006; with twenty eight goods and services advertisements. The research instrument is the writer herself as the main instrument. To analyze the data, she uses several steps. The first is collecting the data. The second is reading the Jakarta Post advertisements. The third is choosing the data which are related to the problems of the study, selecting the data which are related to the purpose of the study. The last is conducting analysis. Data analysis is conducted as follows; categorizing the data in accordance with research problems, analyzing the data being classified, discussing and interpreting the data from each categories and making tentative conclusion after discussion.

The study has resulted in several points. The first is that the structure of advertisements uses grammatical and lexical cohesion. The second is that the advertisers use sentences that have an implied meaning to persuade the customers or the readers. The third is that by using theories and concepts of critical discourse analysis, the advertisements use sentences that can persuade the readers and customers.

From the findings above, several suggestions are offered. The first is for English teacher. They should give subject of critical discourse analysis to the students so that they can understand deeply about critical discourse and can analyze it perfectly. The second is for future researcher. CDA can be used as reference to conduct researches in the same fields; namely critical discourse analysis.