Background of the Analysis

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Analysis

People need language as a tool of a communication, however it cannot be sapareted from human beings life. We use language to express our ideas, emotions and desires. Besides it is as a medium to share information. Study of language is linguistics. And the branch of linguistics that is concerned with how meaning is expressed in language is called Semantics. Halliday 1978:2 defines language as a units of semantics. Language is a system of meaning that is to say that when people use language; their language acts are the expression of their meaning. Halliday views language learning how to mean that is how to make meaning such as the following: Language is being regarded as a means of expressing what human organism ‘can do’, in interaction with other human organism, by turning it into what ‘he can mean ‘semantics system is, in turn, encoded into what he can say the lexico grammar system, or grammar or vocabulary: to use our own folk linguistic terminology, meaning are expressed in wordings. Wordings are finally recoded into sounds or spellings the phonological and orthogrphic system. The analysis of meaning has been proved as one of the most difficult and exclusive tasks in linguistics description. Thus, a semantic approach can help us to understand the nature of language. Leech 1974:9 said that Semantics as study of meaning which is central to the study of communication becomes more and more crucial factor in social organization, the need to understand it becomes more and more pressing. Semantics is also at the center of the study of human mind-thought Universitas Sumatera Utara process, cognition, and conceptualization-all these are intricately bound up with the way in which we classify and convey our experience of the world through language. From the definition above, we can say that Semantics is a division of linguistics dealt with words meaning, it is a study of meaning. One part of Semantics is meaning properties and relations. In this thesis, I just talk about meaning relations. Kreidler 1998:46 said that sense relations is seen in the way words do or do not, go together meaningfully. Then, Palmer 1983:84 states: “Sense relations between words that are of semi logical kind, those that are on a narrow interpretation”. Further, Palmer 1983: 84 divides meaning relations into six parts namely: hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy, relational opposite, polysemy, homonymy and meronymy. From the Quotations above, it can be inferred that meaning relation is some meaning which have relation. There are some kinds of meaning relations such as: Synonym is used to mean sameness of meaning Palmer, 1976:59. Antonym is used for oppositeness of meaning Palmer, 1976:78. Homonym is several words with the same shape and Polysemy is one word with several meaning Palmer, 1976:67. Hyponym is relationship between the meaning a word of which may be said to be included in that of another word Palmer, 1976:76. Relational Opposites is a quite different kind of ‘opposite’ is found with pairs of words which exhibit the reversal of relationship between items Palmer, 1976:81. And meronym is a part-whole relationship between lexical items. Universitas Sumatera Utara Novel is a literary work. It uses medium to convey the information or message to the reader. Jacob and Illan, 2003:3 in their book The New Encyclopedia Britannica state: “novel is an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexcity that deals immaginatively with human experience usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in specific setting”. By reading novel, we can get meaning. In this thesis, based on the statement above, I am interest in analysing meaning, especially meaning relations in words in the novel The Color Purple. Word is the minimum free form, the smallest form that may occur in isolution. Not all words seem to have the same kind of meaning. There are two kinds of word, namely; full words and form words. Examples of full words are tree, sing, blue, table and of form words it, the, of, and, is. Full words seem to have meaning clearly and form words can not give meaning clearly. They can still be said to have meaning, if it has connected with other words. Form word is a grammatical kind and full words is lexical kind. The Color Purple was written by Alice Walker in 1982. The novel tells about the life of a woman who suffers many forms of violence perpetrated by the people who are supposed to love and protect her. I use the novel The Color Purple as the subject of the research. The novel is choosen because it contains expressions that have meaning relations. Universitas Sumatera Utara

1.2 Problem of the Analysis