IMPACTS OF INTERPERSONAL METAPHOR ON GRAMMATICAL INTRICACY AND LEXICAL DENSITY IN THE TEXT OF PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE BETWEEN BARRACK OBAMA AND MITT ROMNEY

The objectives of the study are (1) to identify types of interpersonal metaphor used in the text of presidential debate between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney, (2) to describe the impacts of interpersonal metaphor grammatical intricacy (GI) and lexical density (LD) in the text of presidential debate between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney with reference to congruent coding, (3) to explain the ways interpersonal metaphor have impacts on GI and LD in the text of presidential debate between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney. This study is descriptive qualitatively-based. The data are taken from the utterances produced by both Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney in the presidential debate that took place on October 22, 2012 in Boca Raton, USA. The data are collected by dowloading the full debate from www.youtube.com, watching and listening to the debate, transcribing the utterances produced in the debate, rewriting the transcription to become a series of paragraphs and printing out all the complete paragraphs as the data. Then they are analyzed by identifying the types of interpersonal metaphor found in the utterances, unpacking or rewording all types of interpersonal metaphor into the congruent coding, finding the ratio of GI and LD for both metaphorical codings and metaphorical codings, analyzing the impacts of interpersonal metaphor on GI and LD with reference to congruent coding and analyzing the ways interpersonal metaphor has impacts on GI and LD. The findings reveal that both types of interpersonal metaphor namely metaphor of modality and metaphor of mood are found. In terms of metaphor of modality, the three values namely high, medium and low are identified as the following proportions: 18 utterances (25.71%) with high value, 28 utterances (40%) with medium value and 8 utterances (11.42%) with low value. Meanwhile the rest is metaphor of mood which is realized in questions as many as 14 utterances (20%) and command which occur twice (2.85%). All of metaphor of modality and metaphor mood have the higher ratio of GI compared to the congruent forms. As for LD, the result was various; this is to say that to one side, the presence of interpersonal metaphor in some utterances cause the utterances to have higher ratio of LD than that of the congruent codings. On the other side, the ratio of LD in some of the congruent codings are higher than that of some of the interpersonal metaphor utterances. The presence of interpersonal metaphor utterances also make the debate carry with it more features of spoken language and fewer features of written language. This can be seen through several aspects such as immediacy of feedback found in the debate which is categorized as immediate feedback, everyday lexis, hesitations, non-standard grammar, grammatical complexity and less nominalized utterances.