Background of Study INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of Study

Human always communicates to others in their daily activities. Communication is used by them in their speech community to interact with others in communicative events. The event itself may involve spoken oral language or written language. 1 These kinds of language are called text. Text is used in linguistics to refer to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. 2 Spoken and written text can be used in many different communicative purposes, such as a sermon, a casual conversation, a shopping transaction, a poem, a newspaper advertisement, a wall poster, a shopping list, a novel, etc. Besides those communicative purposes above, there is a kind of written text that has not been mentioned before. It is magazine. Magazine has many types, such as weekly and monthly magazine. One of the monthly magazines is U.S. News and World Report Magazine. U.S. News and World Report Magazine is monthly magazine that is published in America. It contains photographs, pictures and impressive articles about education, health, politics, and business in America. 1 David Nunan, Introducing Discourse Analysis London: Penguin, 1993, p. 6. 2 Halliday and Hassan, Cohesion in English London: Longman Group Limited. 1976, p. 1. Based on the content category, magazine like U.S. News and World Report Magazine can be divided into three groups. They are news, opinions, and advertisements. News group covers direct news, picture news, and investigation news. Opinion group covers articles, editorial, and editor’s note. Editor’s note is almost the same as editorial. The difference between them is in the writer. Editorial is usually written by an editor or editorial staffs, it can be editor’s opinions or editorial staffs’ opinions. It is different than editor’s note which is always written by editor, so it is just editor’s opinions. Both of them are like written texts but are very different from spoken text. In written text, as editor’s notes, we need to understand the grammar and vocabulary used in constructing the sentences which make up each text. The sentences that make up the text not only have to be grammatically correct but also have to make sense because grammatically correct sentences alone will not ensure that the text itself makes sense. To make sense, it must have meaning. As Halliday said that a text is best regarded as a semantic unit: a unit not of form but of meaning. 3 In addition to the structure and meaning of individual sentences, we need to know how the sentences relate to one another. And to know it, we use cohesion. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it. When this happens, a relation of cohesion is set up, and the two elements, the presupposing 3 Ibid., p. 2. and the presupposed, are thereby at least potentially integrated into a text. 4 In order to be easier to understand it, look paragraph below that is taken from Editor’s note in U.S. News and World Report Magazine, August 2010 edition. “Comarrow zeroed in on how it handles the baffling diseases known as cystic fibrosis and shows how rigorous the caregivers are about finding best practices while giving its young patients humane treatment. The photos by Charlie Archambault give you a frank understanding of the daily struggles of a child with a chronic disease that no set of statistics could ever convey.” 5 In the above paragraph, the word baffling disease has the same meaning as chronic disease. Both of them mean disease that cannot be healed, because it is in serious condition. Because baffling and chronic have same meaning, they are called near synonymy. The phrases baffling disease and chronic disease are specific vocabularies for health sector. By understanding the meaning of every word using cohesion, readers are easier to understand a text. So, the writer takes some texts from Editor’s Note in U.S. News and World Report Magazine to be researched its cohesion because those texts discuss about many different sectors, such as health, education, politic, and business which are assumed by the writer as difficult sectors to be understood by people who aren’t common in those sectors everyday. The writer’s hypothesis is there are many kinds of cohesion devices on editor’s notes in U.S. News and World Report Magazine in order to make those texts have cohesiveness and can be understood easily by the readers. This library research will prove the validity of writer’s hypothesis. 4 Ibid., p. 4. 5 Bryan Kelly, “Not Just by the Numbers”, U.S. News and World Report Magazine August 2010, p. 4.

B. Focus of the Study