Deixis Analysis: How It Portrays Emotion of Girls’ Adolescence in The Album Sour (2021) By Olivia Rodrigo

Abstract

Deixis or deictic expressions are used in daily communication often without one’s realization of its deeper purposes.  This research aims to identify the meaning behind each deictic expression used in the album SOUR by Olivia Rodrigo (2021) and analyze how each deixis portrays the emotions of adolescents through the song lyrics in the album. This paper used Yule’s (2017) and Saeed’s (2003) framework to examine the types and the meaning of each deixis and used combined narratives from Berkum (2019), Foolen et al. (2012), and Lakoff (2016) to analyze how deixis represent one’s emotion. The study concludes that the lyrics in the album SOUR used five types of deixis which are person, spatial/place, temporal/time, social, and discourse deixis. Those deictic expressions were proven to not only convey a substantive meaning that affects the lyrics but also convey the emotions of the authors through the lyrics. Therefore, the explanation of how one’s emotion can be represented through deixis became the novelty of this study. This study emphasizes the importance of using deixis through language.