The Analysis of Affixation in Taylor Swift’s Song Lyric All Too Well (the 10-minute version)

Abstract

The main objectives in conducting this research were to find out what prefixes and suffixes appearing in a song lyric, to find out the relationship between the affixation that has the highest percentage of occurrence with the content of the song, and finally to find cultural values in the song through analyzing the affixes found. The descriptive qualitative method was used in this research with Taylor Swift's song All Too Well (the 10-minute Version) as the data source. The techniques in this research began with searching and marking words that have affixation, then grouping the data according to its type (prefix or suffix), its meaning, and calculating the percentage of occurrence of each affix. In the song All Too Well (the 10-minute Version), there were 54 words that have affixation, which consists of 2 types of prefixes from 3 different words and 12 types of suffixes from 51 different words. Prefix re- was the prefix with the highest percentage of occurrence at 75% and found in 2 words. On the other hand, the suffix that had the highest percentage is suffix -ed, with a percentage of 33.33% and found in 17 words. The relation between the most frequent affixation data (of suffix-ed) with the content of the song All Too Well (the 10-minute version), was that the frequent occurrence of suffix-ed in the lyrics described a story that happened in the past. This is in line with the dominant occurrence of the suffix -ed, which had the meaning of a past tense marker. Theoretically, this research adds literature of affixing analysis in morphology as sub-discipline of linguistics, while empirically, the findings shed light on the creative inclusion of affixing, i.e. prefixing and suffixing, in a modern popular song