Theory of Semantic Features

CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY

In this chapter, the writer presents the description on the methodology used in conducting this study in order to have a guidance to do the research systematically. There are three main parts of this chapter: object of study, approach of the study, and method of study. A. Object of the Study This study deals with the lexical items related to the context of the resignation of South Korea‟s Prime Minister used in two articles from The Korea Herald and The New York Times. The one from The Korea Herald entitled “Prime Minister Quits over Ferry Disaster” and the one from The New York Times entitled “South Korean Prime Minister Offers to Resigns over Deadly Ferry Disaster”. Both articles are taken from the on- line version of the newspapers. “Prime Minister Quits over Ferry Disaster” in The Korea Herald is written by Yoon Min-sik while “South Korean Prime Minister Offers to Resigns over Deadly Ferry Disaster” in The New York Times is written by Choe Sang Hun. April 16, 2014 may be the day that many Koreans will never forget. Over 300 people died or went missing on the accident of the sinking ferry. Many of them are 16 and 17 years old high school students on a school trip to Jejudo Island from Incheon. While the chaotic situation was arousing at the moment when the family of the victims waited for reliable information of the death toll, at the same time Prime 19 Minister Chung Hong-Won made a statement to resign from the government. This kind of situation became highlight to mass media since this moment has newsworthiness and news value. Both national and International mass media published this news all together including The Korea Herald as the daily media in South Korea and The New York Times as the media outside South Korea. This study focuses on the analysis of the lexical items in the two news-articles that build the cohesion of each text. Then, after analyzing the cohesion, this study goes further on the media viewpoint of each news article seen from the cohesion. The example of the data of this study, in The Korea Herald, “Witnessing the sorrows of those who lost their loved ones and sadness and anger of the people, I felt the right thing for me to do was to take all responsibility as the prime minister.” The bold and underlined words in the sentence above are the sample of lexical items which contribute to the cohesion of the text as a form of reiteration. That is the sample of the data in this study.

B. Approach of the Study

This study uses Critical Discourse Analysis CDA as the approach to be applied in this study in order to answer the two problems formulated in this research. According to Ruth Wodak, CDA regards language as social practice and takes consideration of the context of language use to be crucial. Moreover, CDA takes a particular interest in the relation between language and ideology 2006: 2. Since this research also concerns with how the lexical choice in the news article can show how