Background of the Analysis

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Analysis

People use language to communicate with others every day. As a user, knowing the meaning of others utterances is needed to avoid misunderstanding between hearer and listener. Simply, the most important thing in communication process is the attainment of understanding the meaning. Linguistic has a branch, semantics that can help us exploring knowledge about meaning. Semantics is studying about meaning of words, sentences, phrases, and how that meaning is formed which related to feeling, idea, concept, and imagination of human. When we are dealing with meaning and there is no context consider, it means we are doing semantics. The writer interests to analyze semantics in advertisement because advertisement is the way of many people or companies to promote their services or products which can increase selling. Promotion is very important because however good a product is, it will not find any buyers, if no one knows about it. As a creator, an advertiser knows how, when and where the message should be transmitted to reach most people of the target group. Suhandang 2005:14 says, the advertisement main job is to inform about product and service as efficient as possible to public. To make effective and efficient, advertiser uses chosen words which all of them have certain purpose. In advertisement, language is a tool to tell message from the producer to the consumer. An advertisement that is success in communication process if it delivers Universitas Sumatera Utara 2 messages by words or pictures, and got consumer’s response by buying or using or doing something that has advertised. But sometimes, there are utterances that make consumer confused. The consumer is difficult to understand words on it. Therefore we might know what the utterances purpose is, to know what kind of products or service we need. The writer analyzes meaning of words on advertisements that has taken from Oprah Magazine. Oprah Magazine is one of popular woman magazine in this world. And the writer interests choose woman beauty product advertisement as her object of the study because many women in this world want to be more attractive and beautiful. Women realize that beside having inner beauty, they need something from outside to make them more attractive and beautiful. They need woman beauty products in this case: hair treatment, hair color, nail enamel, body lotion, and foundation and they get information about woman beauty products from advertisements. Advertisements have be able to make public women believe that their products can help them to be. They have to be solutions for women’s problems. This study has various relations with other researcher, which have done by Emodi who has analyzed semantic of the language of advertising. In her journal, she finds that emotional connotative meaning is the mostly used by advertisers, and itconnected with pleasantries. She finds that signifiers and signified have a place in the meaning of the language of advertising. Sugitanoto also investigatesthe language of advertisements of automotive, electronic, and women beauty products from newspapers and magazines. In his thesis he analyzes the semantics meaning, phrase construction of taglines language of automotive, electronic, and women beauty products that is used. He finds conceptual, connotative, and affective meanings are often found in advertisements of automotive, electronic, and women beauty to Universitas Sumatera Utara 3 persuade many readers to buy the products. And then, Putra, from the whole analysis in his thesis which contains 10 political cartoons he finds connotative meaning is the most dominant type that is appeared in polotical cartoons. These various study help the writer to continue the study about meaning or semantics in advertisements. The writer uses Leech theory about meaning in analysis this object of the study. Leech distinguishes meaning into seven types; the importance is conceptual meaning, and then connotative meaning, stylistic meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning, and thematic meaning. The writer investigated the language of advertisement of woman beauty products and it is emphasized in the seven types of meaning by Leech. Based on the description above, the writer chooses “Semantic Analysis of Woman Beauty Products Advertisements”. The writer is going to explore the meaning in used that appears on the object of the analysis.

1.2 Scope of the Analysis