Research on suicide notes has always focused on proving whether the notes are genuine or simulated. There are still very few studies on suicide notes that focus on the genders of the writer and the influence of genders in this type of letter. This research aims to examine the suicide notes in two corpora—one corpus written by males and the other by females—using two different theories. Swales’ move-structure theory is used to see the pattern of occurrence of the rhetorical moves to establish a generic structure of the notes in the two corpora, and Bhatia’s communicative purpose theory is used to see what purposes of communication are dominant in the notes. The notes are analyzed based on the gender of the writers to also examine whether gender plays a role in the use of language, especially for personal communication. The study uses a mixed-method approach, in which a corpus software AntConc is used in the quantitative design to gather more comprehensive data, and linguistic theories are used in the interpretation of the data. The analysis shows that there are differences in the dominant recurring moves and communicative purposes in the two corpora, which suggests the role of gender in determining language use in personal communication. The result of this study is hoped to add to the literature of the study of gender as well as in the broader area of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to examine the basic structure that builds the narrative of ten of the folklores in Papua using the genre approach within the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The study focuses on the presence of the rhetorical moves in each of the story, which is hoped to show the stories’ main communicative purposes as well as their schematic structures. The study uses descriptive-qualitative approach, which analyses the data interpretatively by applying Swales’ (1990) genre theory, the Move-Structure theory and combining it with the narrative elements from Labov’s (1972) Narrative Structure theory. The findings indicate all ten stories share similar structures in general despite being written by different authors—each of them has the moves orientation, complications, resolution, and coda. However, in the move realization, each story has different steps and/or step cycles. These findings indicate that the ten stories share the same communicative purpose: giving information about how some things come to be, and that they belong to the same genre. It is hoped that this research adds to the literature of genre analysis in the perspective of linguistics as well as enriches the analysis of folk literature in Indonesia.

The tale of the Sleeping Beauty is still one of the well-loved and popular fairy tales among children, especially girls. The story has been adapted into various versions but has not changed essentially—it is always about a princess saved from a curse, about good versus bad. Due to the simple nature of the story, most literary researchers no longer deem this story a valuable source of data anymore although there are still more to uncover from the fairy tale. This study attempts to examine how the female characters in the story are represented from the structural semiotics perspective using two theories proposed by A. J. Greimas, namely the Actantial Model and the Narrative Trajectory. The qualitative method is applied to interpretatively divide the story into different major events, from which an actantial diagram and a trajectory can be made before the representation is drawn. The findings suggest that the female characters in the story are mostly placed as an object of the actantial diagram and a goal in the trajectory; this means that the story puts the female characters in passive roles that comply to the traditional gender roles and female stereotypes.

Children stories can be a powerful tool for a writer to present their views of the world around them, both positive or negative ones. This article attempts to examine the message beneath a children novel, The BFG by Roald Dahl by employing Barthes’ five systems of codes. Focusing on the writerly codes, this descriptive qualitative research emphasizes on analyzing the smallest units of the stories, or the lexias. Each lexia is categorized into the three writerly codes to reveal the underlying message in the story. The findings show that despite The BFG being a children book, it consists of some serious social issues like racism. Another thing found in the research is that the issue can lead to a double meaning—whether Dahl intends to raise social awareness or that he wants to subtly say that he himself thinks of other races as inferior.