ABSTRACT
Studying associative meaning is the way to understand the words or sentences are used and convey different meaning in our daily communication; spoken and written form. It is very important to study about meaning, so the hearer or reader can understand what the writer or speaker means.
Meaning is the idea or concept that can be transferred from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the hearer by embodying them as it were in the form of one language or another. Associative meaning is unstable of meaning and has variants of individual experience.It is an expression has to do with individual mental understanding of the speaker. The Central Media News is one of English mass media in internet which consist of dawah news, articles, and profil.
This study aims at studying associative meaning in written text. The researcher determines the types and the use of associative meaning that was gathered from The Central Media News from February until June 2010. Furthermore, it was focused on Dawah News of the article since there are many associative meanings found.
A descriptive qualitative method is used to give comprehensive descriptions and discover the use of associative meaning in the text. Before the analysis, the data were categorized into seven categories in accordance with the number of article used as the data sources. The data of each category were presented, analyzed and concluded. After data of the whole categories have already been presented, analyzed and concluded, the researcher makes tentative conclusion. And after consulting with the informant, the researcher makes final conclusion.
The results of this study show that there are five types of associative meaning and its use. They are connotative meaning is used to deliver the experience in the real world to associate with the expression when someone heard it or used it; stylistic meaning is used to deliver the stylistic style which appears in language; affective meaning is used to communicate the feeling or emotion of the speaker or writer itself; reflected meaning is used to deliver the new sense of a word that relates to another phenomenon in the same expression; and collocative meaning is used to convey the associate of words which tends to occur in the environment.
The researcher also found that the use of associative meaning between one sentence to another are different in form; the writer uses associative meaning to perform the function of associative meaning which are related to the context and experience of the writer.
