A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IN BARRACK H. OBAMA’S SPEECH

Abstract

Language is fundamental to all social processes, and human do need language to communicate
to each other. In social process, there are people who communicate more than they say, they use
language that indicate meanings more than the language does. This term is called figurative language.
By conducting the study about language in use, we undertake a discourse analysis. In this research, a
discourse analysis is conducted in Barrack Obama’s first inaugural address with point of view of four
types figurative language, they are metaphor, personification, paradox, and hyperbole. The purpose
of this research are to find out four types of figurative language and interpret the meanings indicate
in that figurative expressions. In conducting this research, descriptive qualitative method was
used. The results of this research were described qualitatively from the stage categorization of the
figurative language until explanation and interpretation of the figurative expressions. The analyzing
of this research was supported by the related references to this research. By analyzing the data based
on the related theory, the result of this research showed that there are 52 figurative expressions,
where metaphor had the highest frequency as 24 expressions or 46.15%, followed by hyperbole
as 14 expressions or 26.92%, expressions of personification as 9 expressions or 17.30%, and the
least frequency is paradox as 5 expressions or 9.61%. From those result could be concluded that
in Obama’s speech contained huge number of figurative expressions. This fact showed that figurative
language is important and could influence the language to become more powerful and more artistic.
Keyword: Figurative Language, Discourse Analysis, Speech, Obama