The Intended Meaning of Deictic Expressions in Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address of 20th January 2009

SUMMARY

 

The Intended Meaning of Deictic Expressions in Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address of 20th January 2009; Ima Khairun Amala, 090110101097; 2016; 142 pages; English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Jember University.

 

The use of language may have different meaning. A speaker may mean something different of what the sentence means, or a speaker may mean something opposite than the sentence means or he may even mean something more than what the sentence means. However, there are several ways in linguistic study in interpreting the meaning of sentence. One of them is by relating the structure of sentence and the context in which they are used. The most obvious way in which the relationship between language and context is reflected in the structure, called deixis. Thus, this research deals with deixis. It examines the use of deictic expressions in the address. The purpose of this research is to find out the dominant type of deixis and to show the intended meaning of deictic expressions used in the address.

The object of this study is Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address since it presents deixis phenomena where almost in every sentence of the address contains deictic expressions. The data of this thesis are Barack Obama’s First Inaugural Address script.

This research uses three steps in processing the data found. The first is identifying the utterances in the address script. The second is classifying the data into each type of deixis based on the theory of deixis by Levinson. The last is analyzing the data using deixis theory and context of situation to find out the intended meaning.

The results of this research show that Obama uses all types of deixis in his first inaugural address. However, the dominant type of deixis found in the address are ‘we-inclusive’ of person deixis with the total number of 140 (27.5%,), simple present tense of temporal deixis with the total number of 132 (26%), and spatial deixis ‘this’ with the total number of 32 (6.3%). Fortunately, these types of deixis are included in the proximal deixis. These types of deixis respectively become Obama’s context. Obama’s context is also called the egocentric of Obama. Since the egocentric of the speaker introduces the attention and intention of Obama, it can be said that the attention and intention of Obama are seen from the most type of deixis used. In other words, the attention of Obama in his first inaugural address is proximal deixis. These kinds of deixis have intended meaning; 1) ‘we-inclusive’ is the way to unite people, to get support from the people by making them as if the co-author of his speech, to hide a reference of the speaker; 2) simple present tense of temporal deixis is to emphasize how important the moment (the day) of Obama’s presidential oath, to show the audiences about what is going on in America, to show the greatness of his new government; 3) spatial deixis ‘this’ is to distance his government and predecessor, to show Obama’s position while giving the speech, and to convince that Obama’s government is the right one to lead America.