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Topic shift in chatting among close friends

Conversation is one of important things in people everyday life because
they have to communicate with others both in formal situation and informal
situation such as chatting. It is an informal talk, which can happen in any
situation, any place, and any time and has many kind of interesting features. In
this case, the writer is interested in analyzing the topic shift in chatting among
close friends. She wants to find the topics, which occur in that chatting and the
markers that they used to sign the topic shift. The Reason why the writer analyzes
those problems is because she thinks that it is important for the participants of
conversation to understand about this problem and they have to aware about these
to make the conversation goes smoothly even in informal conversation.
Discourse theories used in solving these problems are McCarthy and
Brown and Yule’s theories on topic, topic shift and topic boundary markers.
Besides, she also used previous study written by Novita Shierly as her related
study. Other references are also used in order to support the analysis.
In this study, the researcher uses the qualitative approach. At first, she
collects all the data and transcribes it into written form. In this case, the data used
by the researcher is Indonesian language. After getting the data transcription, the
writer analyses, classifies, tabulates the number into percentages and discusses the
finding.
From the interpretation and conclusion of this analysis, it can be seen that
the most favorite topic in this chatting is about Person especially friends. It
showed the closeness of their relationship because by talking about Person, they
share their feeling and emotion. While the markers that they often use to mark the
opening of topics are ‘omong-omong’(by the way)and ‘eh’, the changing topics
are ‘tapi’ (but) and ‘terus’ (then) and marker of cause and result ‘jadi’ (so) as the
only marker that they use to sign the closing topic.