ABSTRACT
Understanding the context is an important part in interpreting poetry since most words in poetry have more than one sense within its own environment. To determine the meaning within a given context, the theory of wording or grammar is needed. The grammar used in this final project is Halliday’s Functional Grammar since it is systematically examining text in terms of the ways in which the language of the texts functions, and in the ways in which the functions relate to context; in which it covers context of situation and context of culture.
The purpose of this final project is to present the context of situation and context of culture depicted in the sonnet.This final project aimed at describing metafunction meanings found in the sonnet, describing the context of situation reflected in the metafunction analysis, and finally, describing the context of culture.
The object of the study is a sonnet entitled Sonnet XVIII that was written by William Shakespeare. The sources of data are in the form of words, phrases, sentences, and occurrences in the sonnet. The data were collected as follows. Reading the text carefully and repeatedly, identifying the data relating to the topic, classifying the data into two groups, namely metafunction meanings, and the context of situation and the context of culture. The data is analyzed by determining the ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings, and then the context of situation and context of culture as have been classified in the previous steps.
Based on the analysis, the context of situation realized in metafunction analysis shows: the field is a love poem with the social activity is telling story about a friend; the tenor is a lover to beloved, a fan to his star, and at metaphorical level, a human to God; its mode is not oral- visual channel, it is a text written to be spoken aloud with one-sided dialogue and unseen addressee. In its context of culture, the purpose of expressing the admiration, the structure begins with comparison, explanation and contradiction in the middle, ended by affirmation, and the occurrences of sonnet structures in its linguistic feature suggests that the genre of this text is literature; a poem in the form of sonnet.
On the basis of the conclusion, several suggestions can be offered. First, it is important for people who will interpret poem to get information to support the context by understanding the style of the era when the poetry life. Second, reading the bibliography of the poet is another help since the life of the poet sometimes portrays on the poetry. Third, it is good to enjoy work of literatures; we can find good knowledge, like language enrichment and linguistics knowledge within.
