COGNITIVE PROCESS OF COMPREHENDING PRAGMATIC MEANING BY SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Principally this research attempts to describe the cognitive process of comprehending
pragmatic meaning and the reasons for the cognitive process of comprehending pragmatic
meaning. This research is done by using a descriptive qualitative design. The study's data
source is the twelfth grade of SMA Swasta Methodist, there were 15 students in the class, and
only 10 were present on the day of the research as a sample. the approach used in this
research was based on Thomas’s theory (1995). There are two levels of meaning, first
meaning of utterances or semantics, and second, meaning of force or pragmatic. The data
were collected by using retrospective introspection and in-depth interviews. The findings
from problem 1 showed that the subjects of this study use five cognitive processes in
comprehending the pragmatic meaning of the text. They are, Using a combination of
explicit structure knowledge and semantic, semantic and tacit knowledge, semantic and
knowledge of the world, Pragmatic meaning, and knowledge of literature meaning of
sentence. The most dominant is using semantics with knowledge of the world. And the least
used process is pragmatic meaning. Based on the data analysis problem 2, The reasons
underlying the Cognitive Processes Based on the data analysis they are a mismatch of the
knowledge of the world, the similarity of the knowledge of the world, and Indirectness.