UNVEILING POWER STRATEGIES IN THE INDONESIAN PRESIDENT’S POLITICAL SPEECHES: A POLITICAL PRAGMATICS AND SPEECH ACT APPROACH

Abstract

The speech of a political leader goes beyond the literal meaning of the words, encompassing the underlying dialog and power dynamics that influence their language use. This study compares the political speech acts of Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto from a pragmatic perspective. This study uses the speeches of these two figures as a tool for analysis, which is tracked algorithmically through transcripts. The Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study (CADS) method is used to identify linguistic patterns representing discourse strategies. The constructed corpus dataset contains 419,492 tokens, including 135 transcripts of Prabowo’s speeches collected between October 2024 and August 2025, totaling 119,220 tokens, and 388 transcripts of Jokowi’s speeches collected between October 2019 and August 2020, totaling 300,272 tokens. An inductive approach was used by observing corpus data that led to the context in speech acts. Micro-linguistic analysis focused on the semantic patterns of personal pronouns, persuasive elements, and metaphors to examine modality in illocution and leadership discourse. The results of the study show that Jokowi’s speech acts are directive-instructional, emphasizing consistency, obligations, and the roles of state and public officials. Prabowo’s speech acts are commissive-projective, with promises of strategic national achievements that spark the collective imagination.