CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background
Language is the principal means whereby the speakers conduct their social lives. When it is used in contexts of communication, it is bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways. Kramsch (1998:3) concludes the relationship of language and culture as language expresses embodies and symbolizes cultural reality. In expressing cultural reality, members of a community or social group express facts, ideas, or events based on their knowledge about the world they share with the same community. The words they use reflect their attitudes, beliefs and their point of views. In language embodies cultural reality, the community creates the experience through language. They give meaning to it through the medium they choose to communicate with one another, for example, speaking face-to-face or on the telephone, writing a letter, reading the newspaper, interpreting graphs, pictures or symbols used in social practices. The way in which people use the spoken, written, or visual medium itself creates meanings that are understandable to the community through speakers‟ tone of voice, accent,
style, gestures, and facial expressions. In language symbolizes cultural reality, a language is seen as a system of signs which has cultural value. Speakers identify themselves and others through their use of language; they view their language as a symbol of their social identity.
group live in North Sumatra are genuine such as Langkat Malay, Deli Malay, Serdang Malay, Asahan Malay and Labuhan Batu Malay (Sembiring, et. Al, 2010: 6). According to Sinar (2007: 1) Malay communities are those who are moslem, speak Malay language and run their living with their own cultures and traditions. They follow the ethnicity based on the cultural system and kinship based on parental system. Malay communities are big communities which have been shown by their historical development and movement from the west to the east. They spread around the world doing the socio-economic activities and bring their specific culture with them to be in parallel with other nations. This culture makes them strong. It is the language, literature, religion and tradition which can not be separated from culture and make them a strength for Malay communities to compete with other natures.
Malay communities identify their culture as a symbol of social identity. They speak their own language called ‟Malay‟ which consists symbols of nature.
Their ways of thinking are metaphoric (Anwar in Oktavianus, 2006:115). Natural phenomena and characters are metaphorized into their ways of life and behaviors. They usually do not say directly what they mean but they use other words figuratively. The way of speaking and thinking indicate the portrait of Malay communities in general who are polite, careful, smart, honest, friendly, and they like to obey the taditional rules and follow the communities‟ decision, to hold
somebody in high esteem. They do not speak carelessly but they make other people think of the words they use especially in pantun (Albi et.al, 2009: 85).
community identities. Many living activities which characterize the nature are expressed in the language. The expressions are used as guidelines and ways of life by the community. For example, in a case of proposing a girl to be married with, the representative of the bridegroom will use the term „kumbang‟ (beetle) for the
man (bridegroom to be) ; „bunga‟ or „kembang‟ (flower) for the girl (bride to be) and „taman‟ (garden) for the house where the girl lives in and to indicate that the girl‟s family accept the proposal of marriage, they usually use certain terms to
minimize the value or to show their low-profile for instance, „bunga kami, bunga labu‟ (we just have a pumpkin flower, it means that they have a simple and naive
girl though the girl is beautiful and smart). The examples are taken from the following quoted pantun:
Bunga yang Tuan maksud itu ada dalam taman kami. Sampai hari ini Belum ada kumbang yang hinggap padanya. Tetapi jangan pula tak kami bagitahu:
Bunga kami ini mulai kembang, belum pun tahu membedakan mana Kumbang Pianggang.
Lagi pula bunga kami ini bukan mawar bukan melati, hanya: Bunga labu, sungguhpun kembang, tapi tak berbau.
Sekianlah yang dapat saya jawab pertanyaan tuan tadi.
(Source: Sinar, 2007: 13) More or less the translation is:
The flower you mentioned is in our garden.
Up to this time, no bees fly on it but we don‟t want us not to tell you. Our flower is blooming; she doesn‟t know the difference which bee it is.
Neither of our flower is a rose nor a jasmine, it‟s only a pumpkin flower,
It blooms but no smell comes out from it.
That‟s all my answer for your question.
ceremonies such as getting a new baby, moving to a new house, wedding, etc. Sinar (2011: iii) states that in Malay ethnic group, practising oral tradition such as pantun is used as an art of communicating among communities to show language politeness. This tradition had been practised from generation to other generation in any cultural practises to make good relationship. The speakers of pantun, commonly created directly the pantun they conveyed. They mastered, used many vocabularies creatively, dynamically and contextually to express the theme of pantun they conveyed. They should be able to arrange words related to any situation and goals needed but now it is different. The speakers of pantun are trained in an institution or a cultural service to make them able to be a cultural mediator.
Nowadays, in conducting a ceremony such as a wedding ceremony, most Malay people do not follow all the procedures and use the objects as what had been done by the ancestors. Some procedures are reduced or combined into one and the objects or elements are simplified related to effectivity. Even the leader or the speaker of the ceremony is not one of the members of the family as it was but a person who is paid to say the family‟s goal. The person is hired from a cultural link service called telangkai who is capable and has been trained in mediating family‟s meeting related with the cultural events. Consequently, it
lowers the value of originality because it can be the same person will use the same language or message in different family‟s wedding ceremonies.
where people competes each other to get something through the development of technology.
The technology development causes the exchanges on environment which influences the community‟s mindset, life-style, moral values following the new culture or trend informed by the products of technology such as TV, radio, internet, newspaper, magazine, etc. This situation will lead to the disappearances or even lost of culture. The acceleration of the community development as the result of the technology development in information and communication needs to adapt with attitude and cultural values (Sinar, 2011: 5).
However, some other Malay communities still believe that Malay culture and tradition are able to fit with the development of era and people‟s need. They still maintain their ancestors‟ culture, traditions and carry out them for some
reasons even though there are changes. They believe, developing nations should not ignore the cultural traditions and values of the local communities. They should be aware of social and cultural dimension and keep them before they are forgotten and disappeared (Sinar, 2011: 7).
guide nations having national identity in order to create a condusive climate and harmony among communities. Therefore, the local cultural values are able to positively and productively respond to modernization in parallel with nation values (government rules 2004 in Sinar, 2011: 5). There are two problems faced by Indonesian nations as stated in that rules, 1) there has been a crisis of national identity, in which social solidarity, hospitality used to be national unity and national characters but they simultaneously decrease as the materialism values increase. In addition, the use of good and correct language is also reduced because of modernization and 2) inability of nations to manage tangible and intangible cultural asset.
language and the activities, the Malay ethnic group shows their identity and symbolize on their ideas which can be understood as communicating meaning.
This is related to what Kress & van Leeuwen (in Bell and Garret, β001:187) say „Language is always realized through and accompanied by other
semiotic modes. When people speak, they articulate the messages not only using words but also through a combination of speech sound, rhythm, intonation and accompanied by facial expression, gesture and posture. When they write the message, it is expressed not only linguistically but also through a visual arrangement of marks on a page. They use multimodal‟. Baldry, Kress and Kress
and van Leeuwen as quoted by Fei in O‟Halloran (β006: ββ0) note that people live in a multimodal society which makes meaning through the co-deployment of a combination of semiotic resources. Visual images, gestures and sounds often accompany the linguistic semiotic resource in semiosis. Kress & van Leeuwen (in Norris, 2004) say that language can no longer be thought as the primary mode of communication and that other semiotics have to be taken into account when analyzing communication.
Furthermore, Matthiessen (in Royce, 2007:1) states that multimodality is an inherent feature of all aspects of lives. People can interpret this condition in terms of the strata organization of semiotic systems by reference to the context of culture in which different semiotic systems operate as suggested by Halliday:
Cultural meanings are realized through a great variety of symbolic modes, of which semantics is one; the semantic systems are the linguistic mode of meaning (quoted by Matthiessen in Royce, 2007:1).
language. His statement implies that the understanding of meaning not only requires the analysis of language in text, but also the study of other semiotic resources such as images, gestures, sounds, etc. operating independently as well as interdependently on different levels in multimodal texts (Fei in Guijarro and Sanz, 2008: 1602).
Therefore, it is clear that in multimodal analysis, visual modes have important roles in relation with verbal ones. Based on those principles, it is useful to make a research (as a final task to get Doctorate Degree) on Traditional Wedding Ceremony Dynamics of Deli Malay Ethnic Group in Medan using Multimodal Analysis to get the data how meanings are made in relation with the involvement of language, and other semiotic symbols used in every step of the wedding activities.
compartment called „tepak‟. All the ingredients are an important menu in Malay culture functions to serve and welcome the guests. This tradition symbolizes the spirit, bravery, or medicine for the person who eats it. In every Malay cultural event, tepak sirih always accompanies since the ingredients inside it symbolize the characteristics of Malay communities. „Sirih‟ means patient, esteemed,
having good manners, eventhough he/she is a courageous person. „kapur‟ means holy, having good emotion related to handling problems although he/she is able to get angry or bad-tempered in order to gain good aims. „Gambir‟ symbolizes perceiving and courageous, „tembakau‟ symbolizes making sacrifice for someone else‟s interests, it can symbolize good or bad. „Pinang‟ symbolizes good
generations who are ready to help, compassionate (Sembiring, et.al, 2010: 6). Through this dissertation, the language as verbal mode and anything which accompanies and supports the realization of language in the wedding ceremony as non-verbal / image are analyzed to uncover how both modes of communication interplay to send messages, indicate ideology, power, and ways of life symbolize the reality.
Analyzing language, image or symbol and their relationship to make meanings is seen as a frame characterizes the cultural discourse since the language is structured differently from the image. Therefore, information resulted from linguistic and semiotic elements appeared as language phenomena can be mapped or framed as a characterization of a certain discourse.
structures of relations of elements in a specific mode and between modes, which have become established overtime rather than seeing grammar as a system of formal rules of correctness. Halliday (1985:101) explains grammar goes beyond formal rules of correctness. It is a means of representing patterns of experience...and it enables human beings to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of their experience of what goes on around and inside them.
This notion of grammar has been extended to encompass the mode of the visual as noted by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996:1) ‟just as grammars of language
describe how words combine in clauses, sentences and texts, so the visual grammar will describe the way in which depicted people, places, and things combine in visual statements of greater or lesser complexity and extension‟.
Grammar is used as a conceptual tool to explore how meanings are actualized through language, images and other aspects of visual in the traditional wedding ceremony, particularly, how meanings are made through the intricate weaving together of meaning across and between these modes.
choice between different uses of color, different compositional structures or others.
The meaning of any text comes from the interplay between types of meaning in Halliday‟s metafunctions as to represent what is going on in the world
(ideational meaning); to bring about interactions and relations between people (interpersonal meaning); and to form communicatively meaningful whole entities (textual meaning). Each can be viewed as the result of selections from a range of possible meaning-features, and the action of selection represents the work of cultural producer when producing or making a text.
As a tool to disseminate information, a wedding ceremony provides value or view of many social events which have the potential for expanding people‟s awareness of how social events affect their individual lives such as events reported in the ceremony. Therefore, there are certain structures of verbal and visual images patterned by the cultural producer to encode power and ideology influencing people to follow.
1.2 The Formulation of the Research Problem
Having identified the aspects and dimensions of language in context and semiotic elements involved in the wedding ceremonial discourse. This research is to see how verbal and visual components made meanings of the DMTWC text with: a) is the verbal meaning similar to visual meaning, b) is there combination of verbal and visual meanings making new meanings, or c) do verbal meanings project the visual meanings indicate ideology, power, and ways of life? Through the analysis of meaning, the problems are formulated as follows:
1) How do verbal and visual components in the dynamics of Deli Malay traditional wedding ceremony in Medan create meaning?
2) How does the realization of language and symbols used in the ceremony formulate to indicate ideology, power and influence ways of life?
1.3 The Objectives of the Research
conduct the wedding ceremony. This research is expected to give contribution to a local culture so it will enrich and strengthen the national culture. Through the analysis of Deli Malay Traditional Wedding Ceremony (DMTWC) text, the objectives of the research are:
1) to describe the results of analyzing meaning of the verbal and visual components used in the Deli Malay traditional wedding ceremony, whether each component of verbal and visual contributes to make meanings of the DMTWC text, or both components combine together to make meanings of the text or it might be the verbal components project the visual meanings. The meanings are analyzed based on metafunction covering ideational, interpersonal and textual function. Therefore, the verbal analysis is related to find the realization characteristics of verbal components using transitivity system, logico-semantic relationship, mood system and thematic system. While visual analysis is related to find the realization characteristics of visual components using narrative structures and conceptual structures; interactive meanings and modality; and the systems of informational value, salience and framing,
2) to formulate a model of realization between verbal and visual modes of communication to report the events and the structures they make to express different meanings indicating ideology, power and influence ways of life,
1.4 The Research Significance
to convey meanings, commonly covering moral message and ways of life. After having finished the research, the findings are expected to give academic and theoretical benefits as well as practical and social benefits.
Concerning with the findings, academically the findings of multimodal realizations of meanings made in the traditional wedding of Malay can be used as the conceptual model specifically the realizations of meaning which are seen in both verbal and visual realizations with reference to the metafunction of language use. Moreover, the contribution of the research provides scientific idea for linguists, mainly to the linguistic researcher to conduct researches on linguistic phenomena appear on the object concerned, as well as to conduct multi-disciplinary study to enrich studies concerning with linguistic and discourse phenomena. Such findings provide motivation and useful input for Indonesian linguistic experts to conduct multimodal analysis on any type of Indonesian discourses, in order that they find out the structure and create specific nature of Indonesian discourse.
people will increase their quality of life; strengthen their national personality and dignity.
1.5 The Scope of the Research
This research refers to the concept of multimodal analysis that is a language analysis which analyzes the language use verbally in relation with visual elements accompanying the language. Multimodal analysis is aimed at investigating two modes of communication (verbal and visual modes) interplay each other to send information or to create meanings. Kress and Van Leeuwen in Young and Fitzgerald (2006: 170) focus a study on how different meanings are made by each mode, and the interplay between them. They suggest that a transformation in communication has led to a greater reliance on the visual over the verbal. They also question whether everything that is communicable verbally is also communicable visually, and whether in certain situations, one mode is better than the other.
2011: 226). While Deli Malay live around the city then the word choice are mostly figuring the city life, for example: Pulo Brayan bukanlah pulau, jalan layang seperti bukit, kedatangan kami sangat terpukau, karena penyambutan tidak sedikit (quoted from
Lala‟s ceremony, β01β). The dialectical differences are mostly on pronouncing the vowel
sound /a/ in which in Asahan Malay it is pronounced /o / while in Deli Malay it is pronounced /e/ but they do not change the meaning of the words.
Deli Malay Traditional Wedding Ceremony (DMTWC) which are taken to be the source are the wedding ceremonies conducted in Medan.
Traditional Wedding Ceremony in Deli Malay is conducted through some steps of activities; actually there are 27 steps namely: Merintis. Risik kecil, Jamu sukut, Risik besar, Meminang, Naik emas, Ikat janji, Akad nikah, Malam
berhinai curi, Malam berhinai kecil, Malam berhinai besar, Mengantar pengantin
laki-laki, Hempang pintu, Bersanding, Tepung tawar, Cemetuk, Makan nasi
hadap-hadapan, Serah terima pengantin laki-laki kepada keluarga pengantin
perempuan, Mandi berdimbar, Sembah keliling, Malam bersatu, Naik halangan
(naik lepas pantang), Meminjam kedua pengantin oleh pihak keluarga laki-laki
kepada pihak keluarga perempuan, Memulangkan kedua pengantin kembali oleh
pihak keluarga laki-laki kepada pihak keluarga pengantin perempuan, Naik
sembah besar, Pengantin pindah kerumah sendiri.
(http://library.usu.ac.id/download/fs/daerah-ramlan.pdf / accessed on Sep. 8th 09) Concerning with data consuming and analyzing, the research is limited and focused on the process before and after Akad nikah (married contract) , mengantar pengantin laki-laki (taking the groom to the bride‟s house), hempang
(spreading the potpourri), hempang kipas (bridal couch barrier), tepung tawar (congratulating and praying for the happiness and prosperity of the married couple), bersanding (bride and groom are seated side by side on a couch called „pelaminan‟), and makan nasi hadap-hadapan (the spreading meals) the couple
and their family are served with various, colorful and delicious traditional food for their lunch.
