Exploring the Projection of the Colonizer/Colonized Binary through the Use of Adjectives in Selected Short Stories: A Corpus-based Study

the Projection of the Colonizer/Colonized Binary through the Use of Adjectives in Selected Short Stories: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Postcolonial discourse has been a focus of research for the last two decades. Previous studies
attempted to investigate several themes and patterns underlying these discourses using
different methodologies (Chae, 2015; Budiyanto & Latifah, 2018; Laguarta Bueno, 2018;
Salami & Tabari, 2018). Unlike previous studies, this study utilizes corpus tools to
investigate the us versus them binary found in postcolonial texts. The study investigates how
prejudice is reflected against the colonized in the selected short stories through the use of
adjectives. It looks at the representation of prejudice in the short stories disseminating and
reinforcing the binary of us and them. For this purpose, a corpus of 53861 words from eleven
postcolonial short stories was formulated. Van Dijk‘s (1998) concept of the Ideological
Square served as the theoretical framework for this study whereas Corpus Linguistics was the
main methodological construct. The adjectives used in the corpus were analysed using
WordSmith Tools 5.0. (Scott, 2008). From the adjectives, 19 were chosen for analysis and in
those adjectives only 4 were positive while the remaining 15 were negative. The results show
that the collocations of the negative adjectives with the colonized are dominant as compared
to the positive adjectives which are more common with the colonizer. These results determine
that in-group and out-group polarization is created through the use of adjectives.