A SEMANTIC ANALYSIS ON ONOMATOPOEIA IN “JOKER” MOVIE SCRIPT
No Thumbnail Available
Files
Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Widyatama University - WIBEST
Abstract
As one of the types of figurative language, onomatopoeia is commonly used in every context, even in
entertainment products such as films. "Joker", a movie released in 2019, is no exception. It relies on the
different sub-types of onomatopoeia to describe actions or to be part of the dialogues as the transcript
demonstrates. This study focuses on the use of onomatopoeia in the movie, especially 1) the frequency of
various subtypes of onomatopoeia that appear in Joker’s movie script, 2) whether they appear in the
dialogues or the description, and 3) how their usage helps to build the messages conveyed in the movie. It
employed the qualitative descriptive approach to provide a description of how onomatopoeia is used in
various scenes and circumstances found in the movie. From the 47 data found, 17 (68%) were considered
unique, while the remaining 8 (32%) are variants of the unique words. There was more onomatopoeia found
in the description (38 data or 81%) than in the dialogues (9 data or 19%); the most frequent sub-type was
that of mechanical sound. Even though almost all the data were lexically well-established, the contribution to
meaning was highly dependent on context. It may be concluded that the dominant sub-type replicates the
paralinguistic communication by human and non-human characters, while the least frequent was due to no
animal or its resemblance appearing in the movie. The research suggests that more investigation may be
needed into similar film genres to justify or refute the findings of the study.