Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Communication is a means of human social relationship, it has become the basic needs for people to communicate each other. As stated by Beth Haslett in her essay: Communication is an organized, standardized, culturally patterned system of behavior that sustains, regulates and makes possible human relationships Haslett, 1989: 20. In communicating with each other, people‟s main goal is to transfer their idea to other people. The idea transferred can be in the scope of people‟s feelings, general information about their environment, and many more. Just as Haslett said in her principles of communicative development stages: 3 Communication has three general purposes: to express thoughts and desires, to establish communication with others, and to share knowledge Haslett, 1989: 26. Communication can be divided into 2 categories, which are one-way communication and two-way communication. In both categories, usually there are various expected responses. People with tendencies often use their action of communicating with other people not only to transfer their ideas but also to persuade people following their beliefs and thought. Language is very powerful in communicating ideas. The use of language can be very intimidating, persuading, threatening, pleasing, or even inspiring. Language can be viewed as the symbolic code that underlies verbal communication. Verbal communication is the use of language to create and maintain human relationship. Haslett, 1989: 22 Different styles in saying one particular point of view can give different effects and reactions. In the scope of persuading others, the choice of language style helps to change people‟s behavior or even make them do the things or actions the persuader wants them to do. It happens as in advertisement, such as in campaign advertisement. Referring to Brembeck and Howell 1976: 324, there are two types of campaigns. They are commercial and social action campaign. In commercial campaign, the purpose is to “merchandize goods andor services for profit” 1976: 324, while in social action campaign, the main purpose is to Stabilize or modify patterns of living for groups of people for reasons other than private profit 1976: 324. Advertisement, as one of publication media, is used by these campaigns to publish their ideas, to make people share the same thought as them, to change people‟s behavior, or even to make people do things as they are told to. In political campaign there are many aspects of persuasion, politics, and mass communication and influence. One type of campaign media is through video campaign. A video campaign is made of two elements, audio and visual. In the scope of linguistics, the audio the spoken utterances is more suitable to be analyzed. The audio of the video campaign deals with the use of language and how it is used to deliver the persuasive message to the people. The use of language in the audio can be analyzed through its textual features. Textual features, as defined by Verdonk 2002: 19, also deals with sounds. In this case, since the object of the study is the spoken utterances of a video, the data analyzed are both spoken and written text. Since The US is the most powerful country in the world, we may take a look on Barack Obama‟s presidential campaign. One of the advertisements used by Barack Obama is in the form of a video campaign which helped him won The US presidential election in 2012. The choice of textual features shown in Barack Obama‟s presidential video campaign when he ran for office in 2012 was inevitably helped him to win The US presidential election for the second term. The choice of textual features presented in the video is related to the persuasion strategies employed in the video since the video is a campaign video and it has a persuasive message to be delivered. The textual features in the video were meant to deliver the persuasive message in order to get people‟s attention. The significance of studying the campaign strategies as seen through the textual features as spoken in the video campaign is to enrich the linguistic study in building a persuasive message through the language. The further benefit will be the ability to explore the power of language in influencing others to take a specific action regarding to the persuader‟s purpose.

B. Problem Formulation