Functional Semantics Analysis on the Language of Advertisement of Well-known Electronic Products

There are many kinds of advertisement appears in the mass media. One of them is the advertisement of electronic products. The advertisers must use their language of advertisement full of messages. However, the consumers do not always easily understand the language that used in advertisements. Thus, understanding meaning becomes the most important thing in communication especially in advertising. Moreover, the main purpose of advertisements is to deliver the messages, that should be understood by the hearer or reader and finally they will respond by buying or using the product that advertised. Based on that background, this study is conducted on how the types of meaning are appeared in the language of advertisement of well-known electronic products which is specified to identify the types of associative meaning appeared and describe meaning that is emphasized.

This study uses descriptive qualitative approach that emphasizes on describing in detail the types of meaning that appears in the language of advertisement of well-known electronic products in which the data of this study are ten advertisements which taken from internet. The instrument of this study is the human instrument (the researcher herself) who is gathering and analyzing the data.

The results of this study shows that in the language of advertisement of well-known electronic products there are several types of associative meaning appears, namely connotative and affective meaning in which the dominant meaning that appears is the connotative meaning. Meanwhile there are two types of associative meaning that did not appear, namely social meaning and collocative meaning. It means that most of advertisers use connotative words to make their advertisement meaningful and sense able.

Based on those findings, it is suggested for the advertisers to comprehend and consider the meaning when they write the advertisements. In addition, it is also recommended for future researchers to conduct the research using semantics in other fields, daily conversation or any literary work such as the dialogue in movie or drama.