TYPES OF ELLIPSIS USED IN THE
JAKARTA POST HEADLINE NEWS
By Kurniawan
A newspaper is a printed
publication appearing daily or weekly and containing news, advertisement, and
articles on various subject (Lord, 2001:782). It is one of printed media which
gives a lot of contributions to the people. By reading it, the readers can see
phenomena and event happening in inland or overseas. A newspaper has important
roles for people, since it brings some missions, such as informing the news,
giving education, and entertaining the readers.
From a newspaper, readers can get
many kinds of information like politic, economic, sport, entertainment,
culture, etc. Although information can be found in other media like TV, people
still need newspapers because of the news completeness. Most of information
about the local news, this kind of news can be got easily in each newspaper.
Beside delivering information, a newspaper also provides advertisements and
useful articles to the readers. So, newspaper becomes a demand of society.
Because of the important role of
newspaper, a newspaper needs to be able to transfer the news to the readers
with exclusive language that is brief, solid, simple, fluent, clear, unadorned,
and interesting. The language used must avoid long-winded explanations, be able
to present a complete information, be able to use effective sentence, use alive
diction, and be able to understood easily by the readers. Those characteristics
becomes something that must be available in the newspaper language manner
because a newspaper is read by all social stratum that do not have the same
education level. In the other words, the language used must be understood with
minimal intelectual standard.
Therefore, the language used in
newspapers becomes the most essential thing. It can determine the quality of
the newspapers. However, in the fact there are still many ambiguouslanguages
which can be found because of the grammar (structural ambiguity) or the diction
(lexical ambiguity) especially in news titles. This can cause misinterpretation
or error of thoughts, a process of reasoning or argumentation that actually is
not logical, wrong way, and misleading or, a sympton of thought error which is
caused by a forcing a logical principles without paying attention ot the
relevance (Sumaryono, 1998:9). The writing of news titles is sometimes rather
difficult moreover in an English newspaper. One reason for this is that news
titles are often written in a special style which is very different from
ordinary English. In this style, there are some special srules of grammar, and
words are often used in unusual ways (Swam, 1996:359).
In writing a news title, the use
of ellipsis can not be avoided. It is the omission of words from sentences that
are automatically understood so that the words do not need to be stated (www.geocities.com/eowilliam11/guide.html).
The use of ellipsis is basically for effectivesness of the sentence so that the
process of delivery and acceptance of the content or aim presented are
described in the readers mind (Suroso, 2001:7). There are some types of
ellipsis which are commonly used in the news titles. The following is the
example of news title using elliptical sentence.
Four
arrested with 176 kg of marijuana in Jakarta
The
structure of the sentence is simple past tense in passive mood. Some parts of
the sentence are omitted. The auxiliary verb is dropped from passive structure,
leaving past participle. The complete structure of the sentence is:
Four
people were arrested with 176 kg of marijuana in Jakarta
It
is also an ellipsis after determiner because the noun after the determiner is
dropped. It happens because the word people
has been clear. Based on the context, it is impossible to be replaced with the
word animal or other words.
Such ellipsis are often found in
the news titles. Besides effectiveness reason, it is also for making them
interesting. However, because of the language problems especially those of
structure and vocabulary used in the English news titles it often arises
misinterpretation. Accordingly, knowing structures and types of ellipsis in the
news titles is very necessary in order to understand them easily.
In this research, the researcher
would like to analyze the structure and type of ellipsis used in the news
titles of The Jakarta Post. The Jakarta Post is one of newspaper
which fulfills criteria as a good newspaper with brief, solid, simple, fluent,
clear, unadorned, and interesting language. This English newspaper is widely
read by Indonesian people for whom English is a foreign language. Therefore, it
is not surprising that most of the readers may have difficulty in understanding
the news titles or misinterprete them.
Considering such phenomena, this
study describes about ellipsis used in the news titles. In order to know types
of ellipsis used, the researcher analyzes news titles of The Jakarta Post.
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