Background of the study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the study

Language is a tool for construing an experience to be a meaning so that it can be communicated. People construe their experiences to be meanings using language. Therefore, they could share information and communicate their experiences to others. Their interaction can be direct or indirect. If people say something indirectly, it means that they imply something. To do this, they may use one or both of language forms: spoken and written to communicate their experiences. They try to achieve mutual understanding in their communities. As Eggins and Slade 1997 said that interactioncommunication is not just a process of taking turn in producing sounds and words but it is a semantic activity, a process of making meanings. People elaborate their own political, philosophical, and existential posture in a continuous and changing negotiation with their social environment through language. They have to be in one-cultural boundaries while negotiating their experiences since language cannot be separated from its culture. This situational context is the one that makes an utterance, expression, or clause intelligible. People live in a context that can be thought of as their culture or society so that their linguistic representation will be meaningful while they are in their contexts, context of situation or context of culture. Each text has its own context. The context could be situational or cultural context. A literary text that is a kind of text also has cultural context. In fact, literary texts that are made by different authors and at different times must have different issuesthemes. The text of drama as part of our world has its immediate context to express the writer’s experience about life through the dialogues and the settings taken. People can refer differently to words like liberty, love, democracy, vice, illness, wealth and justice, depending on their contexts. According to Eggins and Slade 1997: 116, appraisal as one of the semantic systems that expresses attitudes in casual talk is an important device for constructing and signaling degrees of solidarity and intimacy in relationship. It focuses on the attitudes which interactants express towards each other and towards the world. Appraisal helps the interactants to negotiate their experience interpersonally to other people. Drama as one of people’s creations shows us bits of human life, thought, and world through the characters’ dialogues. The characters express the writer’s ideology and tendency within stage performance. They perform the dialogues in order to negotiate the writer’s idea to the audience. They present language forms in the dialogues as clause or clause complex. Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 512 emphasize that the fundamental element of grammar is clause. Clause presents the parameter within which the processes may unfold. Thus, this study presents the dialogues of drama that are broken down into several chunksclausessentences as the data. The writer analyzed each chunk to see whether there are appraisal devices found in the drama. Then, I interpreted the data to discover power of the drama. I limit this study on all dialogues of the drama in order to know its power and how the author presents his ideas through the dialogues he creates. Power refers to the message that the author implied. Therefore, I use appraisals as a tool to analyze the power of the drama. By applying appraisals, we can feel and understand well what the author may intend beyond the story he made. The drama I chosen, The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the greatest comedies so that it was possibly influenced by people’s customs living at that time. It may contain negotiating attitudes.

1.2 Reasons for Choosing the Topic