Analyzing the experiential meanings of survivors’ expressions of natural disasters in Indonesia

Abstract

This study examines how natural disaster survivors in Indonesia construe their experiences regarding such calamities affecting them personally or environmentally from a linguistic angle. To this end, the direct expressions of the survivors were analyzed following the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. The transitivity analysis of the survivors' expressions allows us to uncover the experiential meanings in terms of Processes, Participants, and Circumstances, which correspond to verbs, nouns and adjuncts in the grammar, respectively. The survivors' direct expressions were extracted from forty conveniently and criteria-based sampled Indonesian news articles. These articles vary in terms of the types and locations of natural disasters. In total, 195 expressions were found. While the results show that the survivors construe their experience in various ways, they predominantly construe their experience as material Processes or physical events that affect them personally and environmentally. The grammar of their expressions demonstrates that they mostly position the natural disasters as Actors and themselves as Goals in the events, attesting to the agentive power of nature over humans. The survivors also understood the natural disasters in abstract ways, using relational and existential Processes. This study contributes to the public narrative and collective memory in discourses related to natural disasters.