Deconstructing the Letters in "Your Letters" in The Jakarta Post Newspaper to Find the Messages Through the Exploration of the Textual Metafunction

Abstract

This research was meant to find the messages that were conveyed by the addressers in the letters taken from "Your Letter" by using textual metafunction. It is a fact that English people put the main information in the begining of a message that is known as Theme and what comes later is called as 'theme. Theme and Rheme constitute a message as a whole. The message carries out an important task of conveying information from the addresser to the addressee. The addressee or analyst may has an angle in deconstructing and interpreting the message in certain text by examining the sequential and cumulative patterns of Themes, which are called as Thematic Drift. The data of the research was gained from a column in The Jakarta Post, namely "Your Letters" which were analyzed qualitatively. The result of this research showed that the Thematic Drift in the selected texts was seen to be construing the world where the message is structured. The accumulated themes can be assumed that it can discover the degree to which the message concern, so it comes to the message being carried by the letters. Those findings indicate that the textual metafunction allows us, as the language learners to develop processing knowledge of English by analyzing the authentic materials such as letters in newspapers.