DIMENSION OF MEANING ANALYSIS IN JAKARTA POST: A CONTENT ANALYSIS STUDY

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the dimension of meaning in The Jakarta Post article based on the semantic theory of Kreidler (1998), which includes denotation, connotation, meaning relations, lexical meaning, grammatical meaning, morpheme, homonym, and polysemie. This qualitative research uses descriptive content analysis method. The data consists of 10 articles of The Jakarta Post that were purposively selected based on the diversity of themes and linguistic relevance. The data were collected through documentation, then analyzed systematically through data reduction, categorization, interpretation, and conclusion drawn. The results show that denotative meaning dominates the delivery of factual information, while connotative meaning is used to provide evaluative and persuasive nuances. The relationship of meaning plays an important role in building text cohesion. Additionally, lexical meanings and grammatical meanings work simultaneously in forming a complete contextual understanding. Analysis of morphemes shows that the processes of derivation and inflection successfully enrich the formation of word meanings. In addition, the use of polysemimes has been shown to be much more common than homonyms because it is able to provide a high flexibility of meaning in a journalistic context. Overall, this study successfully integrates various semantic components to uncover how meaning is systematically constructed by mass media.