The intended meaning of smurf words in smurf comic strips

Abstract

This thesis is a study which uses discourse analysis theory to analyze the coherence on the language used in comic strips. The writer wonders how the readers understand the meaning of `Smurf? in the comic strips which the `Smurf' words carry different meanings. Besides, the writer also wants to find out what is the intended meaning of `Smurf? in the comic strips. To limit the research activities the writer takes six pieces of comic strips taken from Smurf magazine in May and June edition, 1991, as her data. In analyzing the data the writer did several steps. First, she described the context of situation, by using the theory of Hyme?s Ethnography of Speaking. Second, she described the meaning of each dialogue in each comic strip based on Brown and Yule theories on Coherence concerning the two aspects of recognizing coherent texts, namely; the general socio-cultural knowledge (frame, scripts and schemata) and the inference. Third, she noted down all the intended meaning in `Smuff words that had been underlined. From the analysis, the writer finds out that the word `Smurf? in the comic strips is used to replace different vocabularies. Although the word `Smurf' is not used to replace particular words, there are some of them have the same meaning, like the words; make, fly, to do and surprise. Finally, the writer finds out that language and culture are interrelated. That?s why to convey the intended message from the comic strip, the readers have to know about social background knowledge and cultural background knowledge used in the comic strip. Since the Smurf comic strips used a lot of `Smurf words, the readers have to interpret the intended meaning by themselves. Without social background knowledge and cultural background knowledge the readers might end with misunderstanding or misinterpretation in reading the comic strip