Background of The Study

1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of The Study

Language is one of the most crucial and important aspects in human life. As Gleason 1998: 2 mentions that language is so basic to the existence of human that life without words is difficult to envision. Because speaking, listening, reading, and writing are such fundamental aspects of daily lives of human, they seem to be ordinary skills. Language use guides humans through the day. It facilitates humans’ relationships with others and helps humans understand world events, arts and sciences. Hartley 1982: 83 states, “Language unifies and divides. It symbolises a common bond. It ties people together and it marks them off as distinct from others. At all levels and in all communities, language is a symbol of group and individual identity.” This statement shows that language is indeed an important thing in human lives which gives specific characteristics in the communities. Hartley 1982: 11 defines language as a means of verbal communication. To communicate by speaking is not a gratuitous act; it is purposeful, and thus language has an instrumental aspect. Communication can only take place successfully if the means of communication is agreed upon by its users, and thus language has a social conventional aspect. Society could not exist without language and indeed, for some, it is a defining characteristic of the human race itself. One of the most essential need in human life is communication. As social individuals, human needs to interact and communicate with each other. Hall 1968: 2 158 cites, “language is the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols.” Lado 1961: 2 also mentions that language is primarily an instrument of communication among human beings in community which speaks the same language. Furthermore, language also becomes an essential need in human life which makes human becomes able to express thoughts, needs, emotions and desires through language. In order to be able to express thoughts, needs, emotions and desires, language as a system of symbols play a big role in human life. Language as a system of symbols consists of a system of sounds, grammar and meaning in order to communicate to one another in communicating ideas, emotions and desires as Sapir 1949:7 states that language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. One of the wayof communicating ideas that is mostly done by human is speaking. Siahaan 2008: 95 states, “Speaking is a productive language skill, it is a mental process.” This means that it is a psychological process by which a speaker puts a mental concept into some linguistic form, such as word, phrases, and sentences used to convey a message to a listener. So the speech production is the process by which the speakers turn their mental concept into their spoken utterances to convey message to their listeners in the communicative interaction. In the process of delivering message or communicating, a speaker transfers the message to a listener or addressee by uttering words or messages to the listener or addressee. But before delivering the message, the speaker needs to process what is in his mind into system of language in order to be uttered and to be understood by the addressee. 3 In producing speech or in the process of speech production, people strive to create relevancy between thought and utterance and also the way to avoid errors or mistakes in producing speech to ensure that the thought is delivered to be understood precisely by the listener or addressee. This kind of effort in producing speech is called “ideal delivery”. Clark and Clark 1977: 261 say that ideal delivery is the correct way of executing a sentence where the speakers know what they really want to say and say it fluently. However, in the reality, some speakers fail to reach the goal of creating ideal delivery and almost every speaker makes errors unconsciously. Gleason and Ratner 1998: 312 noted that when we think in words, the thoughts come in grammatical form with subject, verb, object, and modifying clauses falling into place without our having the slightest perception of how the sentence structure is produced. It is not always the case that the thoughtscome in correct grammatical form nor that we always select the right words to express the meaning we wish to convey. All of us have experienced, either as speakers or hearers, utterances that seem to have gotten mixed up on their way out. This shows that speech errors may happen during the production of speech and they occur mostly without the speakers’ consciousness while producing speech. According to Clark and Clark 1977: 268, there are nine types of common speech errors, namely silent pause, filled pause, repeat the repetition of one or more words in a row, retraced false start the repetition of one or more words before the corrected words, unretraced false start the direct correction of a word, correction, interjection, stutter, and slips of the tongue or tongue-slips. Clark and Clark 1977: 270 divide Tongue-Slips into seven types, they are Anticipations, Perseverations, Reversals, Blends, Haplologies, Misderivations and Word Substitutions. 4 Clark 1977: 35 says, “ The common speech errors that are often made by the speakers who broadcast are related to the psychological principles which can be applied to the practical problem of speech, for instance, speech errors”. This makes the process of speech production is closely related to the process of thought. Therefore, speech errors as the field of analysis in this thesis are also related to psycholinguistics as the study of human mind and language. In addition, it is also because there is no two disciplines that are more closely related than linguistics and psychology. Both deal with language, one by definition and the other by necessity Bolinger, 1975: 273. Umar and Napitupulu 1994: 35 states that psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation of language in mind in processing and producing utterances and language acquisition.” Stern 1983: 296 states, “Psycholinguistics deals directly with the process of encoding and decoding as they relate states of message to state communicators.” So the definitions of psycholinguistics focus on the interrelation of language producing and perceiving between speaker and listener. The speaker produces speech and the listener perceives and understands the speech so understanding the speeches between speaker and listener is an essential thing in communication as what is going to be analysed in this thesis between the speakers in the interview. Hutapea2009: 21 says that “ideal delivery is frequently heard in the speech of actor, practiced reader, orator, newsreader, etc. They execute most types of sentences in a single fluent speak under one smooth intonation.” The statement concludes that speech errors tend to happen mostly in spontaneous conversations like daily conversations, formal meetings or interviews and are seldom found in planned speech of actor or other planned speeches. 5 TV Program has also been a very influential and essential thing in social life which brings certain information to people about things that are going on in the society. The problem is that there are not many TV programs in Indonesia which use English as the media of broadcasting because English is not considered as first or second language but as foreign language in Indonesia. Bloomfield 1953: 57 states that English has been spoken by more native speakers than any other language. If we count the important factor of foreign speakers, English is the most widespread of language. So English has been in consideration of being an international language, and as a matter of fact, English has also been a compulsory subject learned in many countries around the world including Indonesia. On account of that reason, the TV Program which uses English seems important and useful to be analysed. While watching an interview or talkshow on TV, people rarely notice the errors that are made by the speakers and even the speakers often make errors unconsciously in their speeches. Therefore, it is thought to be essential to analyse the speeches ininterview on TV Program to know the errors that have been created by the speakers in delivering their speeches. This analysis is also aimed at proving that ideal delivery is frequently heard in the speech of practiced reader or newsreader, as found in the speeches of Desi Anwar as the narrator in the TV Program. Face to Face is an exclusive talk show which interviews world figures that made influence to the world. Face to Face is hosted by Desi Anwar, an Indonesian news presenter who holds her educational background in England. The guests in this TV program are Bill Gates, Christoph Benn, Dato Sri Tahir and Nafsiah Mboi who are high-profile figures, executives and philanthropists. Thomas 1999: 12 mentions that language often serves the interests of dominant social groups, usually because 6 these are the groups who have most control over it: politicians and lawyers, owners of international media conglomerates and other influential, high profile figures.Because of the prestige and popularity of the speakers, the TV Program and the variations of speakers native and non-native, the speeches in this interview are interesting to be analysed. The speeches of the people who are involved in the interview will be analysed based on Clark and Clark’s common types of speech errors that have been mentioned above to find the most dominant type of speech error that is made by the speakers in the interview, to find the speaker who makes the most error and also to prove that ideal delivery is frequently found in planned speeches while speech errors tend to happen mostly in spontaneous conversations like daily conversations, formal meetings or interviews and are seldom found in planned speeches.

1.2 Problems of The Study