Background of the Study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

People need a language to communicate each other. Language is believed as a tool to communicate. It plays an important role in life, because all people use language to communicate with each other. As a function of language, communication is defined as a process of transferring and exchanging ideas, information from one person to others in order to get feedback as the result of the communication itself. It is always used in social interaction to make relation with other people, because it is the way to the social life works. To be able to interact, somebody needs to have communicative competence. Communicative competence is human ability to use the language of everyday life in real situation for example to argue, to warn, to deliver, to express, to show his messages of ideas, to wishes, and even to know when to be silent. Communication is influenced by many aspects of life, such as culture and society. Every particular group of speakers living around the world has its own culture and sociality. They both can be seen from the way the group of speakers communicates with others. Culture has important role in development and variation of language used in particular group of speaker, while society is group of people that use language to communicate. To know language influenced by the culture inside, people need to regard ethnography of communication. Ethnography of communication is a study of language influenced by the culture and society inside. The ethnography of communication aims at describing the form and functions of verbal and non- verbal communicative behavior in particular cultural or social setting. Ethnography of communication is based on the premise, that the meaning of an utterance can be understood only in relation to the ‗speech event‘ or ‗communicative event‘ in which it embedded. Formal descriptions in the ethnography of communication focus on linguistic units above the sentences and the character of such communicative events, i.e., speech situation e.g. ceremonies, speech event e.g. greetings, compliments is culturally determined. Studying ethnography can give more knowledge of other aspects of culture, communicative situations and event of the organization. In the ethnographic research, there are several kinds of speech event: talk show, debate, ceremony, news, gossip, interview, etc. Debate is a formal discussion on a particular matter in a public meeting or legislative assembly, in which opposing arguments are put forward and which usually ends with a vote. An ethnographic research of presidential debate in this thesis seeks to describe the meanings of central themes in the life word of the subjects. The main task in presidential debate is to understand the meaning of what the participants say. U.S presidential debate is considered as one of the most popular and amazing debates in the world especially for a formal debate. Presidential debate is a debate between president candidate before campaigns are started. The debate that analyzed in this thesis was held in the Magness Arena at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado. The debate was participated by two presidential candidates, they are governor Mitt Romney and president Barack Obama. The debate was lead by a panelist, Jim Lehrer of the PBS News Hour. The debate can determine appreciation and valuation of the people, because they can vote one of both candidates after the debate is over. The debate can be watched in around the world because it was broadcasted live on TV or internet.Whoever wins the polling of the debate shows that his missions or ideas are accepted well by the people in the U.S. The polling was surveyed by some U.S surveyer institutes. From the explanation above, the researcher chose U.S presidential debate as the data in this study because the researcher is interested in analyzing ethnography of communication in the presidential debate, and analyzing the way two candidate presidents tried to state their mission and vision they want to apply to the country and to know the way both candidates struggle to maintain their ideas in order to get many votes from the people in the U.S through the debate. Based on the explanation above, this study is entitled: Ethnography of Communication of the First Presidential Debate between Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama 2012.

1.2 Statement of the Problem