AN ANALYSIS OF DEIXIS IN LOIS LOWRY’S NOVEL THE GIVER

Each word or expression in language has meaning and reference, so does deictic expression. Yet the problem is not every deictic expression, or also called indexical, cannot be understood by only seeing its meaning semantically. It needs context to know how deixis works. This research entitled AN ANALYSIS OF DEIXIS IN LOIS LOWRY’S NOVEL THE GIVER focuses on the analysing of deixis word used by Jonas in English novel The Giver. The aims of this research are to describe the type of deixis, to understand the reference of deictic expressions, and to discover the most dominant deictic expression and the most dominant reference in the deictic expressions used by Jonas in Lois Lowry’s novel The Giver. The data are taken from an English novel entitled The Giver written by Lois Lowry and analysed by using Stephen C. Levinson theory. The method of this research is a descriptive qualitative. The result of this research shows that there are 869 data from 296 Jonas’s utterances which contain deixis. From the data, this research discovers five major types of deixis by Levinson. Those are 689 data (79.29%) belonging to person deixis, 43 data (4.95%) belonging to time deixis, 18 data (2.07%) belonging to place deixis, 43 data (4.95%) belonging to social deixis, and 76 data (8.75%) belonging to discourse deixis. There some deictic expressions that are included into only one type of deixis. There are also some deictic expressions that are included into more than one type depending on its use. There are some deictic expressions that has only one reference such as my, myself, me and mine that refer to Jonas/the speaker. On the other hand, there are some expressions that have more than one reference, such as I refers to Jonas and someone who is given orders in the community/common people. Thirdly, the most dominant deictic expression used by Jonas is “I” which includes in first singular person deixis. Deictic expression “I” is occurred in 247 data. Meanwhile, the most dominant reference in the deictic expressions used by Jonas is the speaker himself (Jonas) which happens in 328 occurrences/data