TONI BLANK: A CASE STUDY OF THE LANGUAGE OF A SCHIZOPHRENE

Abstract

Schizophrenia is one of the chronic mental disorders. Patients of schizophrenia cannot communicate with others properly. Also, they cannot produce good utterances syntactically and semantically. This is caused by their language dysfunction. In this research, I am interested in analyzing language dysfunction in schizophrenia. I choose Toni Blank‟s utterances in “Toni Blank Show Session One” as the object of my research. I focus on how schizophrenic‟s language dysfunctions are classified and how these dysfunctions are being analyzed using linguistic framework. To analyze the data, I used Thought, Language, and Communication (TLC) scale and cohesion coherence frameworks. The purpose of this study is to give linguistic analysis about phenomena of language dysfunctions uttered by Toni Blank in “Toni Blank Show Session One”. The data used in this research are utterances which contain language dysfunctions from three episodes in “Toni Blank Show Session One”, entitled “Valentine Day”, “Teroris”, and “Sehat Ala Mas Toni”. I used purposive sampling to collect the data. In analyzing the data, I used Padan and Agih methods by Sudaryanto (1993). To interpret the data, I used cohesion and coherence framework. In 26 utterances which contain schizophrenic‟s language dysfunctions in “Toni Blank Show Session One”, I find that the language dysfunctions which are uttered by Toni are poverty of content, tangentiality, loss of goal, circumstantiality, illogicality, incoherence (word salad), neologism, clanging, echolalia, and self-reference. Poverty of speech, pressure of speech, distractibility, derailment, stilted speech, perseveration, and blocking are not found in the data. Keywords: schizophrenia, language dysfunction, Toni Blank