INTERPERSONAL METAPHOR IN POLITICAL DEBATE

This study investigates interpersonal metaphor in political debate based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach. The objectives of the study are to elaborate interpersonal metaphor in political debate and to reason for why the debaters use the interpersonal metaphor to communicate their message(s) in light of their communicative goals in political debate. A qualitative study was applied. The data were taken from the debaters’ utterances in 2012 Jakarta gubernatorial election political debate. The data were collected by downloading the video of the debate, watching the video debate, transcribing the debate, reading the text, identifying the interpersonal metaphor in text, classifying the types of interpersonal metaphor and analyzing the clause containing the interpersonal metaphor. The findings of the study show that both types of interpersonal metaphor namely mood metaphor and modality metaphor are used by the debaters with different proportion. The use of mood metaphor in the political debate is realized by command in declarative mood, statement in interrogative mood, question in declarative mood, statement in imperative mood. The use of modality metaphor in the political debate is realized by metaphorical realizations of probability, usuality, obligation. The use of interpersonal metaphor is closely related to social context. The debaters used metaphor of mood and metaphor of modality to persuade, shorten the social and physiological distance between them and audience, induce the audience’s participation, make the debaters’ view sound more authoritative, and to highlight the firmness of their belief and disguise the subjectivity nature of their arguments.