A Semantic Analysis on Economic Terms Used in Economic Columns of the Jakarta Post

In the process of communication with other person, there will be many possibilities of misunderstanding and misinterpreting of the meaning from the language we use. Therefore, understanding meaning is very crucial. To get successful interaction we have to understand both explicit and implicit meaning of the word. Meaning is idea or concept that can be transferred from the speaker’s mind to the hearer by embodying them, as it were, in the form of one language or another. Semantics as one of the linguistic branches is concerns about that. This branch is important and it includes lexical meaning and contextual meaning as the discussion of this thesis.

The problems of this study are: (1) what are the lexical meanings of the economic terms used in economic columns of the Jakarta Post? and (2) what are the contextual meanings of the economic terms used in the economics columns of the Jakarta Post, mean this study aims to investigate semantic study, especially on lexical meaning and contextual meaning found in the Jakarta Post. The lexical meaning is to be interpreted as the meaning of lexemes depending on the meaning of sentences in which they occur. While, contextual meaning is the meaning of words according to the situations in which they are used. Different situations might give sentence different meanings.

The data were obtained from the Jakarta post published on 6th April 2009 until 22nd April 2009 containing 12 articles and 22 economic terms. To analyze the data, this study uses a semantic approach of John Lyons. To comprehend each term analyzed at Economic terms of the Jakarta Post, this study merely uses two kinds of meanings namely lexical meaning and contextual meaning. It used descriptive qualitative method to describe each sentence or each term.

After conducting the study, this study found: 19 terms belong to one-word terms and 3 terms belong to two-word terms. Moreover, it was found that there are 13 economic terms which have different meaning and 9 economic terms which have the same meaning. From this study, it can be concluded that most of the contextual meanings have different Meaning from lexical meanings. Finally, the writer hopes that this study could give contribution for other researchers who are eager to know more about semantics.