The Phenomena of Public Debates on Television as Indication of Changes in Language Behavior: A Pragmatic-Semantic Analysis

摘要

Public debates frequently happen in television talk shows taking political issues have been negatively responded by people. This research aims at describing the indication of the changes of language behavior of the resource persons in talk shows live broadcasted on television with a topic in politics. The research was focused on identifying the changes of the language behavior and meanings of speech acts of resource persons through analyzing their linguistic evidences. This research applied descriptive qualitative method by implementing a case study as its research design. The data were taken from the phenomena of public debates in a television program named Indonesia Lawyers Club tvOne inviting Rocky Gerung as one of resource persons taking a political topic entitled "Perlukah Ibu Kota Dipindahkan?" (Is it necessary to move a capital city?). The speech acts were analyzed by using theory of maxim by Grice and Leech and relevance theory by Wilson and Sperber. The results showed that there is a tendency of changes of language behavior of the resource persons in the public media which is characterized by changes of the communication patterns among the resource persons from multi-face to face-to-face, violation of politeness, effectiveness and clarity in communicating their opinions, and dictions used by the resource persons containing multiple meanings to express their ideas.