CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study I personally believe
we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. ~Jane Wagner Language is by its very nature
a communal thing; that is, it expresses never
the exact thing but a compromise - that which is common to you, me, and everybody.
~Thomas Earnest Hulme, Speculations, Language
can be defined
as means of
communication for human
in life.
Language is important. When
people want to communicate, to make a real social life with the other human beings, making a friend,
they use language. When people want to
say something to others, they use language. When people want to be supposed by others,
they use language.
When people want
to show our
existence in the
world, they use
language. When people
want to express
whatever in our
mind, they use language. But,
it is not
just done well
when someone has
uttered his language.
Though it looks, it is not that
simple, language is good when someone as a speaker can make others as listener understand what he
means.
Whatever people speak, it must
have meaning. Meaning is what is referred to or indicated by sounds, words, or signals. The
last three terms mentioned before can be
named language. So, language and meaning seems cannot be separated, whenever a language is spoken, it must have meaning.
Certainly there is science that studies about
language and meaning.
The study about
language is called
Linguistics.
Linguistics has many branches;
they are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and semantics.
Semantics is the branch of linguistics dealing with the meaning of words
and sentences. Semantics
is concerned with
the study of
meaning, and the relationship between meaning and language as phenomena, or
in the other words, meaning is the main
object in Semantics. As others, Semantics has also some parts in it, two of
them are
meaning properties and
meaning relations. In
this thesis, the
writer will try to
explain about both meaning properties
and meaning relations.
Study about
meaning properties and
meaning relation will
give us some advantages, especially
in understanding about
words, sentences, and
meaning.
Meaning properties is one of
several features or components which together can be said to make up the meaning. Meaning
properties is like analyzing what the speaker intends
by his/ her
utterance. It is
useful when it
requires us to
know about the background of
the speaker’s intends
in his/ her
utterance, possibly the
speaker’s background of education.
Meaning relations is the
relationships of meaning or sense that may be set up between two individual and groups of
lexical items. In meaning relations, we
may know that one word possibly may have
two meanings or more, so we can use it in appropriate
to the condition we
are within. It
can be useful
such in this
condition, when we are in a
condition that requires us to speak politely, we can change the word we want to speak with the other word that
has similar meaning but more polite in pronouncing, in order to not insult our
listener.
Factually there
are many ways
to express what
in mind about
our surroundings, whether it is a
critic, or an argument. One of that many ways is literary work. Literary works can be divided into poem,
novel, articles, prose, play and essay.
For examples, a man makes an
essay as a way to criticize the reigning government today
in his country.
While the other
one makes a
poem about his
argument and disagreement
about the economic
policy in his country.
in America, Amiri Baraka has
written an essay
about the September
11th 2001 tragedy,
titled I will
not apologize, I will not resign.
The word
essay derives from
the French infinitive
essayer, “to try”
or “to attempt”. In
English essay first
meant “a trial”
or “an attempt”,
and this is still an alternative
meaning. An essay is a piece of writing which is often from an author’s personal
point of view.
Essays can consist
of a number
of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos,
learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author.
An essay has been defined in a variety of ways. One definition is a “prose composition
with a focused subject of discussion” or a “long, systematic discourse”. One of many
authors that have ever written essay is Amiri
Baraka.
Amiri Baraka who was born in
1934, in Newark, New Jersey, United States of America, is
the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, music, history, and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary
political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues
extensively in the USA, Africa, and the Europe.
His writings
have become controversy
over the years,
particularly his advocacy of rape and violence towards white
people, and Jews. Critics of his work have
alternately described such usage as ranging from being vernacular expressions of
Black oppression to outright
examples of racism, sexism,
homophobia, and that they
perceive in his work.
The essay titled ”I Will not Apologize, I Will not Resign” talked about;
when Amiri Baraka wrote a poem titled
"Somebody Blew Up America" which is about the September
11, 2001 attacks.
The poem was
controversial and full
of critical for racism in
America, and includes
angry depictions of
public figures such
as Trent Lott,
Clarence Thomas, and
Condoleezza Rice. The
poem also contains
lines claiming Israel's
involvement in the World Trade Center attacks: Who knew the World Trade Center
was gonna get bombed Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers To stay
home that day Why did Sharon stay away? ...
Who know why Five Israelis was
filming the explosion And cracking they sides at the notion Baraka stated that
he believed that Israelis and President (George W. Bush) were involved in the September th attacks, telling what he described as
information that had been reported in
the American and Israeli press and on Jordanian television.
He denies that the poem is
anti-Semitic, but points to its accusation which is directed against
Israelis, rather than
Jews as a
people. The Anti-Defamation League denounced the
poem as anti-Semitic,
though Baraka and
his defenders defined his position
as Anti-Zionism.
So that
is why the
writer is interested
in analyzing meaning
properties and meaning relations in Amiri Baraka’s essay “I
will not apologize, I will not resign”.
The writer
wants to know what
Amiri Baraka feels
when he wrote
this essay that time,
and to whom he wants to show his feeling
and arguments; and how he wrote it, by
analyzing the meaning properties and meaning relations in it.
1.2 Problems of the Study According
to background above, the problems of the analysis are formulated as follows: a.
What types of
meaning properties and
meaning relations found
in Amiri Baraka’s Essay “I Will Not Apologize, I Will
Not Resign”? b. Which is
the most dominant
type of both
meaning properties and
meaning relations used
in Amiri Baraka’s
Essay “I Will
Not Apologize, I
Will Not Resign”? 1.3
Objectives of the Study By concerning to the problems of the analysis as mentioned above, the writer does expect to be able to achieve the
objectives below: a. To
find out each
type of both
meaning properties and
meaning relations found in Amiri Baraka’s Essay “I Will Not
Apologize, I Will Not Resign”.
b. To
find out the
most dominant types
of both each
meaning properties and meaning relations
found in Amiri
Baraka’s Essay “I Will
Not Apologize, I Will
Not Resign”.
1.4 Scope of the Study In any literary works,
there are so many types of both meaning properties and meaning relations can be found out. In the
process of analyzing the problems of
this thesis, it is just limited on the analysis only in the essay titled “I Will
Not Apologize, I Will Not Resign” by
Amiri Baraka.
This analysis is focused on meaning properties based on Leech (1981: 29), is divided
into meaningfulness, ambiguity,
redundancy, anomaly, and
contradictory.
And meaning relations
based on the theory from
Saeed (2003: 63) are
antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy,
homonymy, meronymy, and
polysemy; found in
Amiri Baraka’s Essay “I Will Not
Apologize, I Will Not Resign”.
1.5 Significances of the Study Theoretically, this
thesis can explore
and add knowledge
for students of language
in terms of semantics, especially in both terms of meaning properties and meaning
relations. The reader
of this thesis
can understand how to describe
the semantic component of a word
or how to define the semantic field of a word. This thesis
can also improve
increase the vocabulary
of students by
knowing about meaning relations.
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