The Philosophy of Lutung Kesarung Text: Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

Abstract

Text of Lutung Kesarung is one of narrative text which is very well known in West Java. However, the philosophy of the text has not been comprehended very well by a lot of West Javanese communities. This research would like to explore the philosophy of the text so the result of the research brings some advantages for the communities. The theory used for the research is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) because the theory of linguistics involves language and social context. The scopes of the research are material process analysis and the ideology of the text. The method of the research uses qualitative, grounded theory. The data were collected from written text. Material process data were taken from the clauses which involve physical activities. The verbs used were examined then they were analysed with theory of material process of SFL. Context of social involves two aspects, namely; context of situation and context of culture. Context of situation involves field, tenor, and mode. Context of culture is associated with the structure of the text. The result of the research indicates: (i) Transformative verbs used in the text indicate the forgiving Prabu Rarang for her mistake. Creative verbs used in the text indicate Prabu Rarang perform competition to legalize to be a queen. (ii) The ideology of the text teaches us that we have to forgive persons who do mistake because they are not conscious to behave in communities. Prabu Rarang represents bad behaviour, while Prabu Sari represents good behaviour. Both Prabu Rarang and Prabu Sari exists in our body. When we are greedy, jealous, selfish, and alike, we are Prabu Rarang. When we are calm, kind, helpful, friendly, and alike, we are Prabu Sari. The text teaches us how to encourage Prabu Sari in our live instead of Prabu Rarang. Lutung is associated with greediness, while Kesarung means unhappiness, dissatisfaction, imbalance in the life. Lutung Kesarung means persons who behave greedily will have unhappy life. This research is categorised as multi disciplinaries so this research brings some positive impacts for researches such as; semiotic, teaching, sociolinguistics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, and literature. This research is expected to be useful for communities by comprehending the philosophy. In addition, this research is expected to trigger other linguistic researchers to explore the philosophy of other local narrative texts because there are a lot of other narrative texts which have not been explored yet.