Corpus-Based Diachronic Study of WAR Metaphor in Indonesian Political Discourse

Abstract

The use of metaphor in political discourse is pervasive. One of the common source domain used in political metaphor is of WAR source domain. The increasing use of WAR metaphor reflects the intensity of the political situation. This paper examines the diachronic used of WAR metaphor in Indonesian Political Discourse. The aim is to analyze the use of the WAR source domain of metaphor used to speak about the Indonesian Political Situation and to compare the use of the metaphor before and after the direct election system is in effect (in 2004). The data are taken from 1896 news articles related to the political situation dan political coalition, that spans from 1980 to 2020 in Tempo online magazine. The study is corpus-based with The Conceptual Metaphor Framework of Lakoff and Johnson used as the theoretical background. The data analysis is conducted in two stages, first by quantitative analysis using Antconc Corpus Concordance Software to measure the frequency of WAR metaphor used to speak about Political situation and the second is the qualitative analysis to evaluate the change and the development of metaphor use. The result of the study should reflect how the political change that occurred in Indonesia can be reflected through the language in particular reflected from the metaphor used to speak about the political condition. The finding shows that there are three categories of diachronic change of WAR metaphorical expression: the first is the terms that have been used metaphorically even before 1998 (reformation era); the second is the terms that are recorded in use as a metaphor after 1998 and the last is the metaphorical expressions that are recorded in use before 1998 but have not been recorded after that.