An Analysis of Metaphoric Expression Found in Rihanna’s Song Lyrics

The research aimed to find out the types of metaphoric expressions in Rihanna's song lyrics. Language is fundamentally metaphorical. The reason for metaphoric in language because the way we think is metaphorical. Metaphors are used to help us to express our perspective. There were six selected songs chosen randomly by the researcher. This research was designed as a descriptive quantitative and qualitative research. In writing this paper, the researcher was used the documentation method to collect the data. The steps were reading and learning the lyrics of the song, selecting the types of metaphors expression in the song lyrics, classifying the data, making the description, and drawing the conclusion. The technique of data analysis was using David Crystal’s theory as the main theory to classify the types of metaphor, namely; conceptual metaphor, poetic metaphor, mixed metaphor, and conventional metaphor. The result of this study showed the type of metaphor that mostly used in the selected song lyrics is a poetic metaphor. The second most typically used is a conventional metaphor. Besides those two metaphors, two metaphors slightly appear in the songs. They are; conceptual metaphor and mixed metaphor. The results show that two metaphors found in all songs and three songs used all types of metaphors