FINDING MEANING of FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE USE in ADVERTISEMENTS for FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION

Abstract

This descriptive research was conducted in order to describe the kinds of figurative language use in English written advertisements of beauty product. The intention of this research was to describe the figurative language used that covered apostrophe, hyperbole, metaphor, metonymy, paradox, paronomasia, personification, simile, synecdoche, transferred epithet, and understatement. The data used in this research was beauty product advertisements taken from Her World magazine, August 2008 edition. Her World magazine was chosen because it presented beauty product advertisements. The type of data in this research was qualitative data because the data were in the form of words, phrases and sentences. The researcher used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyze the meaning of figurative language use in advertisements for foreign language education. The research result found thirty-one English written advertisements of beauty product in Her World magazine. The consideration of choosing the advertisements was based on the common values in education, especially in the language expressions and the pictures of the objects. Thus, the researcher only took fifteen advertisements of Her World magazine. From the selected advertisements above, not all the types of figurative languages were included in the advertisements. The types of figurative languages were hyperbole, metonymy, personification, simile and transferred epithet. The highest frequency of figurative languages found in Her World magazine was hyperbole expression because its purpose was dramatizing the selling point. From the research result and discussion above, it can be concluded that there was significant use of various kinds of figurative language in English written advertisements found in Her World Magazine. In addition, learning figurative language could be done through reading advertisements. Then, it was suggested to the future researcher to use advertisements as references to conduct further research dealing with similar problems. This research result could be used for teachers and lectures as the authentic materials in teaching reading interpretation. Besides, the result of this research was expected to make the students of foreign language more critical in analyzing the meaning of advertisements by connecting the relationship of the meaning of verbal and non verbal language.