Discourse Analysis Mini Research Essay

This chapter presents an introduction consisting of background of study, problems of study, objective of the study, and significance of the study. 1.1 Background of the Study Language has a social function as a tool to make connection between human beings. Without language, it seems impossible for people to interact with others in their daily life because language can express people’s feeling, willing, opinion, etc. In case of communication, some public figures might influence language use in socio culture. The figure public not only as the entertainer for society but also as a trendsetter of any aspects such as the fashion style, hobby, and the language style. The later aspect is the interesting one that we want to analyze in our mini research. The influence of figure public language style toward society is could studied in Critical Discourse Analysis (commonly abbreviated to CDA). Fairclough, the founder of CDA, explains that CDA is a theory of language in relation to power and ideology (1995:1). This is a theory enabling us to discover how a ruling class rules the society through their linguistics practices. Simply put, CDA is an interdisciplinary study combining linguistic theory and social theories, such as politics, economics, religion, culture, communication, etc. in order to shed light on how the social and power domination are acted out in linguistic practice. We can found language style used by figure public in any kinds of media such as television, radio, internet, newspaper, and even in media socials. One of the phenomenal public figure is an Indonesian singer, Syahrini, who is known by her words. She produces some famous words such as sesuatu, Alhamdulillah ya, cetar membahana, and the last one is terpampang nyata. Those five words are famous among our society and everyone often use them in daily communication. How do Syahrini’s words influence language use in socio cultural? Of course, there is a reason why does Syahrini have big impact to society’s language usage. Based on the unique phenomena above, the researchers conduct the mini research entitled â€Å"Meaning Construction in Syahrini’s Utterances†. 1.2 Problem of The Study Based on the background above, the problem of the study is formulated as follow: a. How do the words produced by Syahrini influence language use in social practice? 1.3 Objective of The Study Objective of the study is: a. To find out the influence of the words produced by Syahrini toward language use in social practice CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE 2.1 Discourse Analysis According to Gillian Brown, discourse analysis is a term that has come to have different interpretations for scholars working in different disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it is concerned mainly with the structure of social interaction manifested in conversation; for a psycholinguist, it is primarily concerned with the nature of comprehension of short written texts; for the computational linguist, it is concerned with producing operational models of text-understanding within highly limited contexts. In this textbook, the authors provide an extensive overview of the many and diverse approaches to the study of discourse, but base their own approach centrally on the discipline which, to varying degrees, is common to them all linguistics. Using a methodology which has much in common with descriptive linguistics, they offer a lucid and wide-ranging account of how forms of language are used in communication. Their principal concern is to examine how any language produced by man, whether spoken or written, is used to communicate for a purpose in a context. The discussion is carefully illustrated throughout by a wide variety of discourse types (conversations recorded in different social situations, extracts from newspapers, notices, contemporary fiction, graffiti, etc.). The techniques of analysis are described and exemplified in sufficient detail for the student to be able to apply them to any language in context that he or she encounters. A familiarity with elementary linguistics is assumed, but the range of issues discussed in conjunction with the variety of exemplification presented will make this a valuable and stimulating textbook not only for students of linguistics, but for any reader who wishes to investigate the principles underlying the use of language in natural contexts to communicate and understand intended meaning. 2.2 Critical Discourse Analysis Critical Discourse Analysis is based heavily upon Halliday‟s systemic functional linguistics (Fairclough, 1992, Fairclough 1999), and the critical linguistics approach which stemmed from the work led by Roger Fowler at the University of East Anglia in the 1970s (Fairclough 1992, Coffin 2001). Fairclough supported the ideas of critical linguistics, but felt that in many respects, they did not go far enough. Fowler claims that the effectiveness of critical linguistics lies in â€Å"its capacity to equip readers for demystificatory readings of ideology-laden texts† (Fowler, 1996: 6). But Fairclough believed that this focuses excessively on the „text as product‟, to the detriment of examining how these texts are produced, and how they may be interpreted. For Fairclough, it is equally vital that we understand the process of production of the text, as well as the process of interpretation of the text. CDA aims at making the connections transparent among discourse practices, social practices and social structures, connections that might be opaque to the layperson (Sheyholislami 2001). Luke (as cited in Taiwo 2007) describes that CDA is a method of DA that reveals hidden ideas behind everyday discussion. Language is no longer seen as merely reflecting outer reality. Fiske (1994) says that our words are never neutral they carry power that reflects interest of speakers. The objective of CDA is to uncover the ideologies or assumptions that are hidden behind the words of our written texts or oral speech. 2.3 Fairclough’s Framework for Analysis Discourses are forms of social practice. They are also obviously texts (in the wider sense of the word). But Fairclough‟s framework adds a â€Å"mediating‟ third dimension â€Å"which focuses on discourse as a specifically discursive practice† (Fairclough, 1992: 71). Discursive practice is itself a form of social practice, and focuses on the processes of text production, distribution and consumption. diagrammatically as follows: This is represented Fairclough describes this framework as â€Å"an attempt to bring together three analytical traditions, each of which is indispensable These analytical traditions are: – The tradition of close textual and linguistic analysis within linguistics. – The macrosociological tradition of analyzing social practice in relation to social structures – The interpretivist or microsociological tradition of seeing social practice as something which people actively produce and make sense of on the basis of shared commonsense procedures. for discourse analysis†. 2.4 Theory of Ideology The theory of ideology that informs the discourse analytic approach of this paper is multidisciplinary. It is articulated within a conceptual triangle that connects society, discourse and social cognition in the framework of a critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1993b). In this approach, ideologies are the basic frameworks for organizing the social cognitions shared by members of social groups, organizations or institutions. In this respect, ideologies are both cognitive and social. They essentially function as the interface between the cognitive representations and processes underlying discourse and action, on the one hand, and the societal position and interests of social groups, on the other hand. This conception of ideology also allows us to establish the crucial link between macrolevel analyses of groups, social formations and social structure, and microlevel studies of situated, individual interaction and discourse. Social cognition is, here, defined as the system of mental representations and processes of group members (for details, see, e.g., Fiske and Taylor, 1991; Resnick, Levine and Teasley, 1991). Part of the system is the sociocultural knowledge shared by the members of a specific group, society or culture. Members of groups may also share evaluative beliefs, viz., opinions, organized into social attitudes. Thus, feminists may share attitudes about abortion, affirmative action or corporate glass ceilings blocking promotion, or other forms of discrimination by men. Ideologies, then, are the overall, abstract mental systems that organize such socially shared attitudes. The feminist attitudes just mentioned, for instance, may be internally structured and mutually related by general principles or propositions that together define a feminist ideology. Similar examples may be given for racist, anti-racist, corporate or ecological attitudes and their underlying ideological systems. Through complex and usually long-term processes of socialization and other forms of social information processing , ideologies are gradually acquired by members of a group or culture. As systems of principles that organize social cognitions, ideologies are assumed to  control, through the minds of the members, the social reproduction of the group. Ideologies mentally represent the basic social characteristics of a group, such as their identity, tasks, goals, norms, values, position and resources. Since ideologies are usually self-serving, it would seem that they are organized by these group-schemata. White racists, for example, represent society basically in terms of a conflict between whites and non-whites, in which the identity, goals, values, positions and resources of whites are seen to be threatened by the others. They do so by representing the relations between themselves and the Others essentially in terms of us versus them, in which we are associated with positive properties and they are associated with bad properties. Such ideologies of groups and group relations are constructed by a groupbased selection of relevant social values. Feminists, on the one hand, select and attach special importance to such values as independence, autonomy and equality. Racists, on the other hand, focus on self-identity, superiority of the own group, and hence on inequality, while at the same time advocating the primacy of their own group and the privilege of preferential access to valued social resources. The contents and schematic organization of group ideologies in the social mind shared by its members are a function of the properties of the group within the societal structure. The identity category of a group ideology organizes the information as well as the social and institutional actions that define membership: who belongs to the group, and who does not; who is admitted and who is not. For groups who share a racist ideology, this may mean, among other things, resentment, actions and policies against immigration and integration in our culture, country, city, neighborhood, family or company. Similarly, the goal category of groups who share a racist ideology organizes the information and actions that define the overall aims of the group, e.g., to keep our country white. The position category foreigners , defines the relations of the group with reference groups, such as, immigrants , refugees or blacks . In sum, the social functions of ideologies are, among others, to allow members of a group to organize (admission to) their group, coordinate their social actions and goals, to protect their (privileged) resources, or, conversely, to gain access to such resources in the case of dissident or oppositional groups. As basic forms of social cognitions, however, ideologies also have cognitive functions. We have already suggested that they organize, monitor and control specific group attitudes. Possibly, ideologies also control the development, structure and application of sociocultural knowledge. To wit, feminists have special interest in acquiring and using knowledge about the dominance of women by men. Generally though, we shall assume that ideologies more specifically control evaluative beliefs, that is, social opinions shared by the members of a group. At this mental interface of the social and the individual, however, ideologies and the attitudes and knowledge they control, also – indirectly – influence the personal cognitions of group members, e.g., the planning and understanding of  their discourses and other forms of (inter)action. These personal mental representations of people’s experiences of such social practices are called models (Johnson-Laird, 1983; van Dijk, 1987b; van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983). Models are mental representations of events, actions, or situations people are engaged in, or which they read about. The set of these models represents the beliefs (knowledge and opinions) people have about their everyday lives and defines what we usually call people’s experiences. These models are unique and personal and controlled by the biographical experiences of social actors. On the other hand, they are also socially controlled, that is, influenced by the general social cognitions members share with other members of their group. This combined presence of personal and (instantiated, particularized, applied) social information in mental models allows us not only to explain the well-known missing link between the individual and the social, between the micro and the macro analysis of society, but also to make explicit the relations between general group ideologies and actual text and talk. That is, models control how people act, speak or write, or how they understand the social practices of others. We, thus, have the  following, highly simplified elements in the relations between ideologies and discourse at various levels of analysis. In other words, ideologies are localized between societal structures and the structures of the minds of social members. They allow social actors to translate their social properties (identity, goal, position, etc.) into the knowledge and beliefs that make up the concrete models of their everyday life experiences, that is, the mental representations of their actions and discourse. Indirectly (viz., through attitudes and knowledge), therefore, ideologies control how people plan and understand their social practices, and hence also the structures of text and talk. Ideologies define and explain the similarities of the social practices of social members, but our theoretical framework at the same time accounts for individual variation. Each social actor is a member of many social groups, each with their own, sometimes conflicting ideologies. At the same time, each social actor has her/his own, sometimes unique, biographical experiences ( old models ), attitudes, ideologies and values, and these will also interfere in the construction of models,  which, in turn, will influence the production (and the comprehension) of discourse. Hence, the schema given above may be read top down, or bottom up. The relations involved are dynamic and dialectic : ideologies partly control what people do and say (via attitudes and models), but concrete social practices or discourses are themselves needed to acquire social knowledge, attitudes and ideologies in the first place, viz., via the models people construct of other’s social practices (including others discourses) (van Dijk, 1990). At many points, our theoretical approach to ideology is at variance with classical and other contemporary approaches to ideology (see Eagleton,1991; Larrain, 1979; Thompson, 1984, 1990). Ideologies in our perspective are not merely systems of ideas, let alone properties of the individual minds of persons. Neither are they vaguely defined as forms of consciousness, let alone as false consciousness. Rather, they are very specific basic frameworks of social cognition, with specific internal structures, and specific cognitive and social functions. As such, they (also) need to be analyzed in terms of explicit social psychological theories (see also Rosenberg, 1988), which obviously has nothing to do with mentalist reductionism. At the same time they are social, for they are  essentially shared by groups and acquired, used, and changed by people as group members in social situations and institutions, often in situations of conflicting interests between social formations (Eagleton, 1991). However, ideologies are not restricted to dominant groups. Oppositional or dominated groups also share ideologies. The main problem of most critical approaches to ideology is that they are exclusively inspired by social sciences and rather confused philosophical approaches. They ignore detailed and explicit cognitive analysis, and so they are unable to explicitly link social structures with social practices and discourses of individuals as social members. Ideologies or other social cognitions in our approach are not reduced to or uniquely defined in terms of the social practices they control (Coulter, 1989), nor to the discourses that express, convey or help reproduce them (Billig et al., 1988; Billig, 1991), or to the institutions in which they are reproduced. (For different but related approaches, see, e.g., Fairclough, 1989, 1992a; Kress and Hodge, 1993.) Discourse analysis as ideological analysis The sketch of the theory of ideology presented above provides us with a conceptual framework that also allows us to engage in ideological analyses , and, hence, a critique of discursive practices. After all, we have seen that ideologies, though variably and indirectly, may be expressed in text and talk, and that discourses similarly function to persuasively help construct new and confirm already present ideologies. In both cases, this means that there may be discourse structures that are particularly relevant for an efficient expression or persuasive  communication of ideological meanings. For instance, headlines in newspapers,, taken as prominent expressions of the overall meaning or gist (semantic macrostructure) of a news report in the press, form a special discourse category that is probably more likely to express or convey ideological content than, for instance, the number of commas in a text. On the other hand, we have no a priori theoretical grounds to exclude any textual structures from expressing underlying ideological principles. Indeed, virtually all discourse structures are involved in the functional expression of mental models of events or communicative contexts, and,  therefore, of the opinions that are part of such mental models. To wit, a racist opinion of a speaker about his black interlocutor, may be subtly expressed (involuntarily or not) by minimal intonation variations, interpreted by the black interlocutor as a racist way of addressing her, while sounding unwarrantably insolent or impolite (for many such examples of everyday racism, see Essed, 1991). Let us now examine these levels and properties of discourse and the ways ideologies may be expressed and conveyed more systematically. However, before we present a summary of preferential discourse  structures for the expression and communication of ideological meanings, we should be clearly aware of what we are looking for. Given the theory of ideology presented above, we need to attend primarily to those properties of discourse that express or signal the opinions, perspective, position, interests or other properties of groups. This is specifically the case when there is a conflict of interest, that is, when events may be seen, interpreted or evaluated in different, possibly opposed ways. The structures of ideologies also suggest that such representations are often articulated along an us versus them dimension, in which speakers of one group will generally tend to present themselves or their own group in positive terms, and other groups in negative terms. Thus, any property of discourse that expresses, establishes, confirms or emphasizes a self- interested group opinion, perspective or position, especially in a broader socio-political context of social struggle, is a candidate for special attention in such an ideological analysis. Such discourse structures usually have the social function of legitimating dominance or justifying concrete actions of power abuse by the elites. Surface structures The surface structures of discourse refer to the variable forms of expression at the level of phonological and graphical realization of underlying syntactic,  semantic, pragmatic or other abstract discourse structures. With a few exceptions, such surface structures of text and talk do not have explicit  meanings of their own. They are only the conventional manifestations of underlying meanings. Yet, such surface structures may express and convey special operations or strategies. For instance, special stress or volume or large printed type may strategically be used to emphasize or attract attention to specific meanings, as is the case when shouting at people or in screaming newspaper headlines. In the same way, special into national contours may help express irony, (lack of) politeness or other semantic or interactional meanings and functions. These examples already suggest that surface structures may express or control the ways in which events are interpreted by speech participants. A large banner headline may emphasize the biased summary of a news event, about a race riot, for instance, and insulting volume or intonation may similarly inequality between speaker and signal social  hearer. Theoretically, this means that communicative contexts may  ideologically controlled models of events or of  represent women or minorities in a negative way, and such opinions will not only influence the meanings of the text but also, indirectly, the sometimes subtle variations of the graphical or phonological surface structures. Indeed, whereas the meanings of the text may not explicitly express or encode prejudice or social inequality, surface structures may let anyway. In general this means that such surface structures must be marked. They must be out of the ordinary and violate communicative rules or principles, i.e., those of normal size headlines, normal volume or intonation in polite transpire such hidden meanings  speech, and so on. Depending on meaning and context, then, such deviant surface structures may signal, express, or convey similarly deviant properties  of models, such as a specially negative opinion about the competence of a woman or a black man. In other words, ideological surface structures primarily function as signals of special meanings or model structures, and  may, thus, also contribute to special processing of such interpretations of text and talk. Special graphical or phonological emphasis may also manage the importance of information or beliefs, and, hence, the hierarchical organization of models in which important information is located at the top. Conversely, meanings and beliefs may be de-emphasized or concealed by non-prominent graphical or phonological structures when they express meanings that are inconsistent with the goals or interests of the speaker. Intonation, such as the tone of racist insults, may also conventionally signal specific social relations, and hence also ideologically based inequality. That is, they also influence the context models of the communicative context. The same is true for other forms of non-verbal communication, such as gestures, facial expression, proximity, and so on, which also may signal interpersonal and social relations, and, therefore, ideological meanings. Finally, it is well known that accented speech of sociolects or dialects express or convey social class, ethnicity, gender, or social relations of familiarity or intimacy, as has been shown in much sociolinguistic and social psychological research (Giles and Coupland, 1991; Montgomery, 1986). Again, it is obvious  that such social relations may also be structured in conflict and inequality, and so presuppose ideological differences. Accents may thus signal or express prestige, accommodation, dominance, resistance or other ideologically controlled social relations. CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODS There are four aspect that are discussed in the chapter of research method. That are : (1) type of research, (2) data and data sources, (3) data collection methods, and (4) data analysis 3.1 Type of research In this research, the writer uses qualitative research. According to Creswell (1997, p.15) Qualitative research is an inquiry process of understanding based on distinct methodological traditions of inquiry that explore a social or human problem. The researcher builds a complex, holistic picture, analyzes words, reports detailed views of informants, and conducts the study in a natural setting. The researcher analyzed CDA in the words produced by Syahrini. Therefore, later the researchers described the result of their analysis which tried to find out the influence of the words  produced by Syahrini toward language use in social culture. 3.2 Data and Data Sources The data sources were taken from the words produced by Syahrini. She is an Indonesian singer who is known by her words such as sesuatu, Alhamdulillah ya, cetar membahana, jambul khatulistiwa, and terpampang nyata. Those words are produced by Syahrini herself and they have a significant influence language use because many people use them in daily communication 3.3 Data Collection Methods There are three steps in collecting data, those are : 1. The writers searched the words produced by Syahrini from the internet. 2. Listing the words produced by Syahrini 3.4 Data Analysis In analyzing the data, the writer used some steps as follows: 1. Identifying and analyzing the words produced by Syahrini using Fairclough’s dimension of discourse 2. Drawing conclusion CHAPTER IV FINDING AND CONCLUSION 4.1 Finding Ideologies Syahrini as one of the popular artist I Indonesia has her own characteristics of ideal beautiful person, moreover women. Unconsciously, she creates her own version of the ideal women characters. She prefers to see the ideal women based on their physical appearances. She phanatically sees the beautiful women are they who have good physical appearances, such as slim body, white skin, straight nose, bulu mata lentik, and having jambul. It can be proved with the utterances regularly used by her like Cettar Membahana, Jambul Katulistiwa. It can be concluded that he prefer to see the author beauty rather than the inner beauty of women. The following supports the above explanation. Here are the utterances regularly used by Syahrini, : 1. Sesuatu 2. Cetar Membahana 3. Jambul Khatulistiwa 4. Bulu Mata Anti Badai Text Analysis Those utterances are merely concerned with the diction choice and structure formation. As we know, those utterances spelled by Syahrini who is one of famous artist or singer in Indonesia. She prefer to say (datum 1) in expressing her feeling toward something. The expression of (1) represents her regret or interest expression like mempesona, meriah, gokil. For example: Trans TV sesuatu banget ya or Ayushanti memang sesuatu. Instead of saying Trans TV gokil banget she prefers to say Trans TV sesuatu banget. In Bahasa Indonesia sesuatu has the equal meaning as  something. The diction something or sesuatu usually has the position as noun, but here Syahrini use this diction as adjective. On the other hand, Syharini usually say Cettar Membahana. Cettar membahana has the equal meaning as Luar Biasa or Amazing. Instead of saying luar biasa, she prefers to say cettar membahana. Cettar in Bahasa Indonesia followed the theory of onomatopoeia which defines as language formation influenced by the sound of something. Cettar expresses the sound of fireworks when it burnt-out. So cettar menas something burnt, eye-catching, interesting, or extraordinary. Besides that, she also adds the diction membahana after the word cetar. Membahana has almost the same meaning with cetar, but membahana here as adverb and better as adjectives. Form those explanation above cetar membahana means kill the expression of something amazed, great. In fact there is the expression like â€Å"luar biasa† or â€Å"meankjubkan† in Indonesia there Syahrini used the exaggeration expression in expressing something. Next, Syahrini also used the expression â€Å"Bulu Mata Anti Badai† instead of saying â€Å"bulu mata lentik†. She prefers to say bulu mata badai perhaps it caused many disasters happened in Indonesia lately, so that she exaggerate her utterance using one of the name of those disaster. Actually there is nit the regular expression between bulu mata and anti badai, but she just combining the utterances with other utterances so it will create new strange language, or perhaps it can call controversy language. Discourse Practice Those utterance used by Syahrini above clearly in order to attract her popularity as one of Indonesian singer. She seems has plan to use those utterances rather than the other utterances proved above in order to be extraordinary in expression something. By those utterances above, she wants to get more attention by her fans, or moreover the Indonesian people. The utterances like sesuatu, cetar membahana, and badai expressed something exaggerated. Here, Syahrini plans to use them regularly in many times. It seems like  she always update her new expression again and again when she was  interviewed by the infotainment journal. Nowadays, who doesn’t know Syahrini? Almost all Indonesian people know her, with her controversy utterances also. Sociocultural Practice Syahrini as one of the popular artist in Indonesia needs to attract her popularity. That’s why she does it by using the controversy utterances or language in expressing something. Before, it had been existed the utterances sesuatu, cetar membahana, and sesuatu in Indonesian. Today, the changes of language formation can be created freely in order to get some intentions. The change in discourse practiced by Syahrini influence the sociocultural of Indonesia and Indonesian people. By the utterances used by Syahrini that have been illustrated above, the people imitate that expression from children until adult use that utterances. CONCLUSION From those explanations above, it should be underlined that her utterances above imply the deep meaning beside it. One of the reasons is that she say the exaggeration expression in order to get more intentions from her fans. Moreover, she also wants to get extra intention from Indonesian people. NO 1 2 3 4 Utterances Sesuatu Cetar Membahana Bulu mata anti badai Jambul Khatulistiwa Meaning Luar biasa More than sesuatu Bulu mata lentik Jambul Keren REFERENCES Choyimah, Nurul. 2013. CDA handout. Unpublished Paul Gee, James. 2011. An introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method. New York: Routledge Fairclough N., 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Polity Press: Cambridge. Fairclough N., 2000. Discourse, social theoryand social research: the discourse of welfare reform. Journal of Sociolinguistics4, pp. 163-195 Kata Syahrini. [Online]. Available: http://www.dusunblog.com/2012/11/kata-syahrini-cucok-mokorocodot.html [Accessed from the Internet on May 22, 2012] Syahrini Manfaatkan Jargon Unuk Popularitas. [Online]. Available: http://www.cumicumi.com/posts/2011/09/24/23004/26/syahrini-manfaatkanjargon-untuk-popularitas.html