POWER REPRESENTATION OF THE MAIN CHARACTER ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN LINCOLN MOVIE: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

The issue of power in the society is seen in the conversation between a president and his people. This condition is depicted in a historical movie entitled Lincoln. In this movie, Lincoln uses his power as a president to negotiate with his cabinet and the democrat members to gain their support for the amendment in abolishing slavery. His power is represented through his linguistic choice in his dialogue used in those negotiations. To analyze the data, this research applied qualitative and quantitative method to achieve the aims of this research which are to explain the transitivity, mood and modality used by Lincoln, to explain the dominant result of transitivity, mood and modality used by Lincoln and also to explain how the power is represented by Lincoln. The data are in the form of subtitle of Lincoln movie which is downloaded from http://www.yifysubtitles.com/. The selected data are the dialogue of Lincoln in four selected scenes in which two of them are his negotiation with his cabinet and the others are his negotiation with the democrat members. The first step in processing the data was dividing the sentences into clauses. There were 140 clauses and 24 clauses in his negotiation with the cabinet and 44 clauses and 12 clauses in his negotiation with the democrat members. The next step was classifying the clauses by considering the transitivity analysis and the interpersonal analysis using theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), Butt et al (2000) and Eggins (2004). The next was counting the dominant process, mood and modality to know the dominant process, mood and modality used by Lincoln. For elucidating the process, mood and modality in the data, theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics were applied.