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Volume 10, Number 2, 2023

1. The Significance of the Cat as a Character with Moral Ambiguity in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline

Namira Azzahra, Rahmawan Jatmiko

This research analyzes the cat in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline as a character with moral ambiguity in children’s literature. Since it deals with children’s literature, it is expected, even desirable, to discuss a non-human character as long as it possesses human characteristics or is created as a form of anthropomorphic character. This study used new criticism theory, focusing on the formal elements, which are the plot of the story and the cat’s character and its characterization to analyze the cat’s role and its significance towards the main character, Coraline. By applying Janet Burroway’s character presentation methods, this research aims to analyze how the cat with moral ambiguity influenced Coraline in deciding her decisions and choice. This research also discusses the relationship between the cat with Coraline in order to know how deep Coraline’s trust towards the cat is, to know the significance of a character with moral ambiguity, and to investigate the cat’s role in the novel by analyzing the plot of the story. The result shows the significance of the cat in influencing and changing the main character’s mind and point of view. The existence of a character with moral ambiguity is quite unusual in children’s literature which mostly has prominent narratives about polarity; nevertheless, the cat’s presence has a significant role because it not only guides Coraline but it also serves as an illustration that not every people with a bad attitude is evil; even though the cat has moral ambiguity in its character it accommodated Coraline in escaping from the Beldam.

Keywords: children’s literature, new criticism, Coraline, the cat, morally ambiguous character.

2. Politeness Strategies in Performing Commissive Illocutionary Acts in Joseph R. Biden’s Inauguration SpeechCoraline

Alifia Gresiana Rahmani, Ni Gusti Ayu Roselani

This research aims to explore the use of politeness strategies in the performance of commissive illocutionary acts in Joseph R. Biden’s inauguration speech. The politeness strategies were classified based on the theory of politeness strategies by Brown and Levinson (1987). The commissive illocutionary acts performed are promise, guarantee, and refusal. The result showed that there are 39 performances of commissive illocutionary acts that are found in the speech. The classification and analysis showed that out of 39 utterances, there are 17 occurrences of bald on record, 10 occurrences of positive politeness, and 12 occurrences of off-record. The result shows that, in delivering his inauguration speech, Biden tends to use the most straightforward way of speaking to issue an act.

Keywords: politeness strategy, speech act, commissive illocutionary act, political discourse, inauguration speech.

2. Hedging Expressions Used by Indonesian and American Writers in Newspaper Headlines Coraline

Ma`rifatus Sa`adah, Tofan Dwi Hardjanto

Newspaper headlines contain the main and most important news articles in the newspaper. They are aimed to present news as accurately as possible. On the other hand, newspapers are also a company that aims to make a profit from every news that is published. Thus, they have other interests besides conveying news as accurately as possible. One possible strategy to balance these two different interests is to use a hedging strategy. This research is an attempt to find out the forms and functions of hedging expressions used in headlines from two newspapers, The Jakarta Post and The New York Times newspaper. The headlines that are used as the object of study are limited to the headlines containing news about the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also compares the forms and frequency of hedging expressions used in The Jakarta Post and The New York Times. The data were quantitatively analyzed with the help of the concordance software Wordsmith 4.0 (Scott, 2004). A qualitative analysis method was also conducted to classify the forms and functions of hedging expressions. A taxonomy proposed by Salager-Meyer (1997) was employed to analyze the forms of hedging expressions, and Hyland’s (1996b) taxonomy was applied to identify the functions of hedging expressions served in the newspaper headlines. The results show that both groups of writers tend to employ hedging expressions in terms of the forms and functions in a similar way. Moreover, there was no significant difference in the use of hedging expressions by the two groups of writers.

Keywords: hedges, hedging, headlines, newspapers.