Still Young But Full-Fledged Democracy

Abstract

This paper examines the Indonesian Democracy as the target domain of conceptual metaphor used in foreign media news reports around the 2019 general election. The study aims to identify the sub-topics of the target domain related to Indonesian Democracy and further to describe the highlighted image and view towards Indonesian democracy. The data were taken from forty foreign news reports from four different media. The Conceptual Metaphor Framework of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) was used. The data analysis was conducted in two stages; the first stage was quantitative analysis using AntCoc Corpus Concordance Software, and the second stage was qualitative analysis to analyze the sub-topic of the conceptual metaphor target domain. The result showed that from seventy-seven democracy-related discourse, there were fifteen metaphorical expressions. Three main sub-topics generally described the target domain democracy: the age and the development of Indonesian democracy, the perception towards democracy, and the importance of Indonesian democracy for geopolitical stability. The results also show that Indonesian democracy is viewed as growing in a better direction as described in metaphors such as the only remaining democratic bright spots in South East Asia and the largest displays of democracy globally.