Appraisal System in Kurt Cobain's Suicide Letter

This thesis is entitled "Appraisal System in Kurt Cobain's Suicide Letter". The objectives of this study are to describe appraisal devices used by the writer (Kurt Cobain) in his suicide letter and to discover the meanings of the content of Kurt Cobain's suicide letter. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The collected data were in form of sentences, phrases, clauses, words, and then they were classified into their categories to get conclusion. The data were collected by searching and downloading Kurt Cobain's suicide letter from internet as source of data, retyping, reading and comprehending the text, and then collecting appraisal items. The data were analyzed by identifying appraisal items used by Kurt Cobain in his suicide letter, classifying appraisal items into appraisal devices, interpreting appraisal items, and then drawing the conclusion. The result of this research shows that there are 132 appraisal devices produced by Kurt Cobain in his suicide letter. The analysis of data shows that Kurt Cobain produces more attitude (42%) than graduation (30%) and engagement (28%). It means that almost every Kurt Cobain's utterance has more than one attitude and graduation. The most engagement is mono-gloss because all of source of attitude is from the writer (Kurt Cobain). In the data, the writer shows more negative than positive attitude. The most attitude expressed by Kurt Cobain is judgement (57%), followed by affect (30%), and the fewest attitude is appreciation (13%). It means that Kurt Cobain tends to evaluate character or behavior. In giving judgement, he tends to give negative judgements for his capacity. In amplifying attitude, Kurt Cobain uses more force (87%) than focus (13%). It means that in amplifying his attitudes, Kurt Cobain tends to use gradable words than non-gradable words