An Analysis of Love and Like Expressions in the Novel The Troble with Tamsin

Abstract

Love and like refer to emotional expressions that can be expressed through
behaviour, words or literal and non-literal. Linguistically, the way people express
their feelings is different. It can be expressed verbally and figuratively. This
research describes the emotions of love and like through words. Love is defined as
an intense feeling of deep affection and then like as part of love defined as enjoy
and please about something or someone. This study aims at investigating love and
like emotions in the novel The Trouble with Tamsin, in terms of various words
used to convey love and like expressions and the contexts influenced love and like
expression.
Parrot (2001) states that love has three types they are: affection, lust and
longing. While Rubin (1970) distinguished love and like by using loving and
liking scale. Strenberg (2007) is also divided love into three types: intimacy,
passion, and commitment.
The method used in analyzing the research is qualitative method that refers
scientific method of observation to gather non-numerical data. It refers to the
meaning, concepts definitions characteristic metaphor, symbols, and description
things. The data were taken from the novel The Trouble with Tamsin in terms of
words conveyed to express love and like.
From the analysis, the results show the emotions of love and like were
expressed in various ways, they can be expressed literally and non-literally, and
also can be conveyed by using repetition and implicature. In this novel the
characters mostly used literal words to convey emotion, such as “I love you”,
“you look beautiful” and figuratively, for example “flowers is my first love”, and
“you are an angel in my life”. In addition, the various words depend on the
contexts influenced such emotions, like physical context, epistemic context,
linguistic context, and social context. Based on loving and liking scale, it was
found the differences of love and like expressions. Love expressions were mostly
refers to sacrifice and like expressions mostly refer to praise. Furthermore, the
writer also found mixed emotions that conveyed at the same time. From the
findings, it can be concluded there were a lot of literal words used by the
characters to convey the emotional expressions of love and like expressions, but
there were some figurative language used to express the emotions, and the
characters also used repetition of certain words that reflect implicature for love
and like expressions. Finally, from the data analysis love and like expressions
were influenced by four contexts that make each expression differ each other
based on a love and liking scale.
Keywords: basic emotion, love scale, like scale, contexts