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The Gift and the Magi

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The Gift and the Magi
A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF SHORT STORY OF O. HENRY’S “THE GIFT OF THE MAGI”

RESEARCH PAPER Submitted as a Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Getting Bachelor Degree of Education in English Department by: MULYATI A 320 040 336

SCHOOL OF TEACHER TRAINING AND EDUCATION MUHAMMADIYAH UNIVERSITY OF SURAKARTA 2008

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study Story book is one of reading media which most people are interested in. They prefer to read story book other kind of book such as scientific book because story book is easy to read and doesn’t need much time to enjoy. The theme of story book varies from legend, epic, fiction, love etc. In addition, there are many authors of story book from all over the world and one of them is O. Henry. O. Henry is one of the authors of the short story who exist to explore the romance side of love. The examples of short story of O. Henry are The Last Leaf, The Gift of The Magi etc. The story of O. Henry is arranged with simple language, easy to understand, and has the total theme to be caught as an interesting story. The Gift of The Magi is a very interesting short story written by O. Henry. It is a romantic short story for the reader because it is created based on love-life experience, and the story is simple. It just needs several minutes to finish reading the story. Then, the reader really feels satisfied with the story.

Short story is one of the kinds of text which can be studied by using discourse. Discourse Analysis pays much attention to the criteria of textuality. Two of the criteria are cohesion and coherence. Cohesion and coherence

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fulfill the form of expressing ideas and a good paragraph composing a text. Both of them cannot be separated because they build the totality of meaning in text and context. Discourse Analysis puts the criteria of textuality as the most important frame, especially when the tendency of linguistic analysis leads to discourse analysis.

Baugrande in Dhian

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