CONCORDANCE EXERCISE

INTRODUCTION

I have a dream is a public speech by Martin Luther King Jr. which he wanted to call for racial equity and end the discrimination towards Negros in America. This speech was delivered on 28 of August 1963 in front of 200,000 civil right supporters at Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

A. WORD LIST

By using the Antconc software, I discovered the frequencies of words in ‘I Have  a Dream Speech’ . By choosing the ‘word list’ option I discovered 10 frequent words that give impact on the listeners. The frequent using of these words  shows that Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to stress certain words in order to leave impact on the listeners.

NO	WORDS	FREQUENCIES
1	Freedom	20
2	Negro	14
3	Dream	11
4	Justice	8
5	Satisfied	8
6	White	6
7	Black	4
8	Hope	4
9	Free	3
10	Brotherhood	3

B. CONCORDANCE

The lecturer gave 10 keywords for us to analyse and for my group, we were assigned to analyse the frequency, meaning and manner of keyword ‘satisfied‘.

1.FREQUENCY

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

By using the concordance option in Antconc software, we can see that the word ‘satisfied‘ was repeated 8 times.

2.MANNER

In this speech, Martin Luther King Jr. used mesodiplosis (repetition of the same word or words in the middle of successive sentences) to make the word ‘satisfied’ is memorable. He repeated the word 8 times in the middle of each sentence in on of the paragraph of his speech. By repeating the word for a few times, he also showed that he wanted to stress the word to leave huge impact on the listeners.

3.MEANING

By delivering the speech, Martin Luther King believe that the the Negros deserve racial equity and the discrimination towards Negros should end. In the speech. the word ‘satisfied’ shows that the Negros actually did not deserve the the discrimination and they should be given the same right as white. in this speech, Martin Luther King Jr also stressed that the Negros will never satisfied if they did not get the same right as white.