A Multi-modal Approach to the Metaphor of Death in Balinese

Human’s experience of death is totally imperceptible and cannot be completely comprehended in literal terms. Accordingly, the metaphorical language is expected to clarify it. This paper describes the linguistic and non-linguistic manifestation of the metaphor of death in Balinese. It seeks to test the hypothesis about the multimodal nature of metaphoric thought. 

The data source is a collection of self-built Balinese corpus of 640,462 words and a self-recorded video of a cremation ceremony. The corpus was sourced from the Balinese-language texts on the Bali Orti online, and it represents language about news, literature, religion, myths, legends, and others. The linguistic data are obtained using Antconc 3.2.4w with a keyword mati ‘death’ to generate a concordance. The video was recorded in 2005 during the mass-cremation ceremony. Metaphorical linguistic expressions of death are extracted from the usage citations of mati ‘death’ in the concordance based on the Conceptual Metaphorical Theory.

The research aims to find converging evidence between metaphoric concepts evoked by the metaphorical expressions and their non-linguistic manifestation in the cremation video.