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evaluate a thing, someone’s feeling and behavior within the texts using appraisal theory. Then we can see what the writer wants to deliver through his or her
writing. Appraisal is one of three major discourse semantic resources construing
interpersonal meaning alongside involvement and negotiation. Appraisal itself is regionalized as three interacting domains
–attitude, engagement and graduation. Martin White, 2005.
Appraisal is not only used orally but also in written texts or articles. Appraisal is widely used in opinion column to show the writer’s personal opinion
about the issue. The Jakarta Post is an example of newspaper giving chance for people to share their opinion toward an issue through texts or articles in opinion
column. Besides on the printed newspaper, we can also easily read the newspaper on the website,
www.thejakartapost.com,
with the same content to the printed one. From the explanation above, it is interesting to conduct a research on appraisal
entitled
“A Comparative Study of Appraisal in Your Letters Column Exposing
the Issue
of Infotainment
Banning Taken
from
www.thejakartapost.com
Systemic Functional Linguistics Approach ”.
B. Problem Statements
The research intends to answer the following questions: 1.
What types and forms of attitudes are employed in the texts? 2.
How do the attitudes influence the texts? 3.
Why are the attitudes employed in the texts?
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C. Research Limitation
The limitation of the research is important to avoid the expansion of the problems to be analyzed. This research discusses two texts exposing the issue of
infotainment banning in Your Letters column in
Jakartapost.
The title of the first text is ―Prohibition of Infotainment?‖. While the second one is ―Luna Maya and
Infotainment ‖. The researcher focuses on analyzing and comparing the two texts
exposing the same issue with different point of view based on the attitudes using appraisal theory.
D. Research Objectives
The objectives of the research are: 1. To describe the types and forms of attitudes employed in the texts.
2. To explain how the attitudes influence the whole texts. 3. To explain the reasons of employing the attitudes in the texts.
E. Research Benefits
The research is expected:
1. To give understanding about appraisal as a way to tell the readers or
listeners how we feel about things or people. 2.
To give understanding about the using of appraisal theory to determine the prosody and ideology of a text.
3. To stimulate other researchers to conduct further research using
appraisal theory.
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F. Research Methodology
This research uses descriptive qualitative research. According to Narbuko Achmadi 1999: 44, descriptive research is a research which tries to solve
problems based on the data by describing, analyzing and interpreting the data. It is said as a qualitative research since its purpose is to describe the types and forms of
attitude, how it influences the whole texts and why it is used in the texts. In a descriptive method, the researcher possibly compares certain
phenomena leading the researcher to employ a comparative study in the research Nazir, 1988: 64. This research employs a comparative study which compares
prosody, genre and ideology of the text to find out the similarities and differences.
G. Thesis Organization
