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B. Research Problems
The researcher formulated the research problems of this study as follows: 1.
What are the meanings of the word take in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle?
2. How are the various meanings of the word take related to one
another? 3. How are the meanings of the word take compared with the meanings
in the dictionary?
C. Problem Limitation
Almost any words, as mentioned previously in the research background part, are polysemous. When looking words up in the dictionaries, people will find
a list of meanings below the intended words. In this research, the writer focuses on the word take which belongs to part of speech verb. The data of the word take
are taken from a novel by C.S. Lewis entitled The Last Battle. The research will figure out the multiple meanings of the word take in the context of the novel.
The word take is selected because it is polysemous and considered as a productive polysemy by some researchers Norvig Lakoff, 1987; Nerlich, Todd,
Clarke, 2003; Davies Elder, 2004. The word take is a basic, core word with a great number of meanings Carter, 1998. Other interesting things about the
word take are mentioned by Norvig and Lakoff 1987 in their research, “it can
express a basic action, because it is so common…, because it is both a verb of motion and a verb of possession, because it has conventional metaphorical senses,
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and because it occurs in a great many idioms ” p. 198. Accordingly, the word
take will be a good example of polysemous words to be observed. In the next phase, the meanings of the word take will be compared with the
meanings in the dictionary. The dictionary used for the comparison is the English Oxford Dictionary OED. According to Lipka 1992, the OED
is “the most comprehensive and impressive work of English lexicography” p. 27. The special
feature of the OED is it records every word in English language and gives historical information of each sense of the words. The recording includes the
spellings, uses, and meanings. In this research, the unabridged dictionary, such as the OED, is used to preserve the validity of the content. The OED employed in
this research is the online version because of the limitation of the researcher to get the printed version. However, the online version is a fully paid-up online
dictionary. It means the contents of the dictionary are arranged by an official organization, that is Oxford, and cannot be changed or updated by random people.
D. Research Objectives
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