Deixis Analysis of the Song Lyrics of The Tale of Jenny and Screech Trilogy by Ren

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine three different forms of deixis and interpret the most dominant use of deixis contained in the song lyrics of The Tale of Jenny and Screech Trilogy. The researcher chooses Ren's trilogy album as the focus of the study due to the presence of deictic terms with reference meanings. Therefore, the song lyrics may be analyzed pragmatically using George Yule’s (1996) theory of deixis. This research was performed using the descriptive qualitative approach. The data used is three songs from Ren's Trilogy, which are then categorized into different kinds of deixis according to their own criteria. The findings revealed that in three types of deixis found in the song lyrics of The Tale of Jenny and Screech Trilogy, there are 148 person deixis, 14 spatial deixes, and 17 temporal deixes. The most dominant deictic expression used in The Tale of Jenny and Screech Trilogy is person deixis. Furthermore, from 148 person deixis, it can be explained that there are different numbers of each type of person deixis. The songwriter uses more third person deixis with a total of 79 words of deixis expressions used in these songs, while there are 40 numbers of first person deixis and 29 numbers of second person deixis. Referring to these results, the usage of personal deixis reveals the role of the participant and each character of the song. The higher number of this third-person deixis is considered as having distal meaning. In these songs, the word “they”, “he”, and “she” is not replaced by “you”, which means the songwriter did not want to be involved in the story. Most of the appearance of this third-person deixis represents the songwriter’s perspective toward the tragedy in the story.