Adjectival Collocations of The Word Bali in The Western Movies: Evidence from Three Corpora

Abstract

Adjectival collocation could depict the representation of things, such as place and individuals, i.e., a particular group, ethnicity, or community. While extensive studies on adjectival collocation and representation have been conducted in the Western context, only a few studies exist to explore a specific place in Southeast Asia. Consequently, this study aims to explore the adjectival collocation and representation of the word Bali from the Western perspective through its movies. To achieve the study’s objectives, a corpus linguistics approach was applied by utilizing three English corpora: The TV Corpus (TV), The Movie Corpus (Movies), and the Corpus of American Soap Opera (Soap), where the highest adjectival collocations from each corpus were collected to scrutinize context and representation. The findings of this study revealed that the adjectival collocations of the three corpora demonstrated five critical representations of the word Bali in Western movies: tourism, religion, history, terrorism, and crime. Further, the adjectival collocation of the word Bali represented the island as an exotic tourist destination with unique local beliefs and a long history. The word Bali was also represented to experience terrorist attacks and drug smuggling cases that made headlines nationally and internationally. The representations of the word Bali in Western movies adhered to events that significantly affected the island.

Keywords

• corpus linguistics; english corpora; the representation of bali; western movies; linguistik korpus; korpora bahasa inggris; representasi bali; film barat