A STUDY OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IN SELECTED SONG LYRICS BY STEPHEN SANCHEZ

There are many ways people can do to figure out their ideas and one of the ways that can be used is by song. The song usually consists of figurative language. The songwriter plays words and language to create attraction and distinctiveness towards the lyrics of the song. Sentence in the song lyrics contains figurative language. Figurative language has the ability to be more impactful for the readers. This study is aimed to answer two problems of the study: (1) To identify the types of figurative language found in Stephen Sanchez’s song lyrics, (2) To analyze the meaning of the figurative language used in Stephen Sanchez’s song lyrics. The writer used the theory from Arp & Perrine (1963) to identify the types of figurative language and the theory from Leech (1981) to analyze the meaning of figurative language. This study used qualitative method to find out the types of figurative language and to analyze the meaning of figurative language in Stephen Sanchez’s song lyrics. The result of this study showed that there are seven types of figurative language found in Stephen Sanchez’s song lyrics. There are simile, metaphor, personification, synecdoche, apostrophe, metonymy, and hyperbole. Based on the data, there are 17 lyrics that contain figurative language. The writer found simile with a total number of 4. Then, the total number of metaphor are 2. Personification has the total number of 2. The writer found 2 data for synecdoche. The total number of apostrophe are 3. Next, metonymy has 2 data. The last one is hyperbole with 2 data. Simile becomes the most dominant type of figurative language in Stephen Sanchez’s song lyrics. This study also aimed at analyzing the meanings of figurative language in Stephen Sanchez’s song lyrics. There are four types of meaning that are used in this study. They consist of connotative meaning, affective meaning, thematic meaning, and reflected meaning. Most of the meaning of figurative language found in the songs are classified into connotative meaning because they cannot be translated literally.