Koherensi dalam Lirik Lagu Night Changes Milik One Direction Melalui Penanda Wacana: Studi Wacana = Coherence in One Direction's Night Changes Lyrics through Discourse Markers: Discourse Study

This study explores how coherence is constructed in the lyrics of the song Night Changes by One Direction through the use of discourse markers. The analysis uses Schiffrin's (1987) interactional model and Fraser's (1999) pragmatic taxonomy of discourse markers. Song lyrics differ from normal written or spoken discourse in their heavy reliance on brevity, ellipsis, and emotional suggestion. This raises the question of how coherence is achieved when explicit connectives are relatively sparse. The study uses a qualitative descriptive design and discourse analysis method. The study identifies and classifies all the discourse markers found in the lyrics and analyzes the semantic and pragmatic functions of each discourse marker in connecting the lyrical propositions. Six discourse markers were identified in twenty-two instances and categorized in three of Fraser's (1999) four categories: elaborative (that, and, how), contrastive (but, even when), and temporal (when); no inferential markers were identified. Elaborative markers are the most frequent category, specifying the referents of the song's recurring images of desire, memory, and change, though they function largely as connective tissue rather than as the drivers of the song's emotional argument. Contrastive markers, though fewer in number, occupy the single structural turning point of the chorus, where the paired markers but and even when pivot the narrative from anxiety about impermanence to unconditional reassurance, while the temporal marker when, recurring in every chorus, grounds that anxiety in the concrete, shared moment of waking. The study concludes that the markers in the lyrics are sufficient and adequate when sufficiency is considered with respect to the generic properties of lyrical discourse: explicit markers cluster at the lines carrying interior, evaluative, or argumentative weight, while descriptive and imagistic lines cohere through implicit means such as schema-based inference and lexical cohesion. The results imply that the frameworks of Schiffrin and Fraser, developed for conversational and prose discourse, respectively, remain useful for lyrical texts but also point to genre-specific gaps, such as the extension of the elaborative category to obligatory subordinators and the cyclical repetition of markers across recurring structural units, that existing discourse marker theory has yet to address.