THE SPEECH MOTIVE: AN ANALYSIS OF AN APOLOGY SPEECH VIDEO ON YOUTUBE WHICH IS POTENTIALLY FOR A DEFAMATION

Abstract

This study is triggered by the phenomenon of how YouTube videos can be a criminal acts source and one
of them is defamation. The video analyzed in this study is related to the murder case of police by a police
general which not only attracted the people’s attention by the strange case but also by some war
statements delivered by each part’s lawyers, the video which is picked in this study was in the topic of
apology. This study proved the potential defamation by the textual function theory of systemic functional
linguistics (SFL) and then continued by analyzing the pattern in theme and rheme progression. The
findings defined that due to the topic of the video ‘apology’ the theme types which are realized showed
inconsistency. Due to the relation of theme and meaning intended in it, an apology should mainly show
an ideational theme because an apology is a personal feeling of the speaker, however, in the video the
theme mainly or 59,7% is realized in textual function which is due to theory textual function is identical
to stories. The findings are also supported by the theme and rheme progression pattern which is explained
that four main messages are delivered by the speaker such as (1) apology, (2) blaming, (3) accusing, and
(4) accusing the police department. Those ideas clearly defined that the speaker was not purely telling his
apology but mainly exposing his predictions due to some actors which aren’t proven.