Paper 029: The Construction of Coronavirus in English-Language Indonesian Newspapers: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis
AL FAJRI, Muchamad Sholakhuddin (Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia)
Keywords: Media representation, Coronavirus, Covid-19, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics
Abstract
This study aims to examine the construction of Covid-19 in English-language Indonesian newspapers by using corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The data were collated from news articles containing the word “Coronavirus” or “Covid-19” published in two English-language Indonesian news media from January to July 2020. This resulted in 3055 texts with 1,233,822 words. Collocation analysis was employed to reveal discourses by focusing on verbal and adjectival collocates of “Coronavirus” and “Covid-19”. A span of five words on either side of the search term was set and MI score was used as a measure to calculate the collocates. A collocational pair that occurs less than 10 times and has an MI score less than 3 was excluded. The top 100 resulted collocation lists were then grouped thematically on the basis of their semantic meaning, adopting UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) (Piao et al., 2015. Concordance analysis was also carried out to better interpret the collocates and to examine them more qualitatively. My preliminary findings suggest that Covid-19 is constructed as an enemy in war/conflict by using WAR metaphors (e.g. fight, combat, and battle). Portraying this pandemic as a war may force people to be obedient to the government Covid-19 policies as evidence of their patriotism. However, this may also lead to an authoritarian government. For example, the Indonesian government imposes Regulation in Lieu of Law (Perppu) No. 1/2020 on the response to the COVID-19 pandemic that includes the impunity (both civil and criminal law) for policy-making officials in taking any extraordinary measures, which can be misused by the government. Coronavirus is also represented as a deadly disease (example of collocates: kill, threaten, deadly, contagious, and fast-spreading). This portrayal may help make people more aware of the danger of Covid-19. However, it also can create unnecessary fear and stigma. For instance, some people reject the burial of Covid-19 dead in the cemetery near to their residence, in spite of using Covid-19 burial protocols, because they are afraid of being infected.
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This looks to be a very interesting paper. I hope you enjoy the conference! – Organizing committee
@AL FAJRI, Muchamad Sholakhuddin
Thank you for an interesting talk! May I know why only the top 100 collocates are examined? What’s your justification? Do they occupy the majority (e.g. 70%+)?
Hello! I found your talk quite interesting, since I also observe the proliferation of war metaphors in the Philippine media. Do you think you could find the same metaphors in television or radio broadcast news and news disseminated via social media? I’m asking this because in the Philippines, newspaper readership is believed to be on a gradual decline since 2013. I do not know if the same goes for Indonesia, but it might be a good thing to consider.