Analysis of Gema’s Style-shifting through Bell’s Audience Design Theory in Tinggal Meninggal (2025)

Abstract

Style shifting is a sociolinguistic phenomenon in which speakers adjust their speech to their audience and the identity they want to project. In fiction, it shows how characters handle social relationships and shape the impressions others have of them. This study examines the style shifting of Gema, the protagonist of the dark comedy film Tinggal Meninggal (2025), who fakes a series of tragedies to gain attention from his coworkers. Using Bell’s (1984) Audience Design framework, it aims to identify the types of style shifts Gema uses and to explain how they serve his efforts to build impressions and keep social attention. Employing a qualitative descriptive method, the study manually transcribed Gema’s utterances and classified them as responsive or initiative shifts. Of 294 utterances, 51 were identified as style shifting: 31 initiative and 20 responsive. Initiative shifts were not triggered by the addressee and departed from Gema’s baseline in pronoun choice, narrative structure, tone, and humor, projecting identities such as the sociable group member and the grieving twin Bima. Responsive shifts were triggered by the addressee and realized mainly through changes in forms of address. These findings show that Gema’s style shifting is not only a matter of linguistic adaptation but also a strategy for managing self-presentation and seeking attention. The study contributes to sociolinguistic research by showing how Bell’s framework can explain the social motives behind stylistic variation in film discourse.