A Corpus-Based Study of Readers’ Comments on Online News on the Policies Adopted by the Jakarta Governor During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The study examined comments posted on political news articles that generated negative criticism driven primarily by the politically polarized views of the readers. The investigation employed lexical and pragmatic analyses to probe a corpus of 882 reader comments posted on the Detiknews website news articles regarding the policies adopted by the Jakarta governor to handle the recent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. Based on the corpus, we examined the linguistic expression of negative criticism from word frequency, the speech acts underlying the negative criticism, and the stances of the commenters. The results of the examination revealed that the most frequent words of the criticism comprised nouns, pronouns, and negation lexis. Overall, such terms were used by commenters to intensify the impact of their negative criticism. Meanwhile, the most dominant speech act underlying the criticism is evaluative. In this case, the commenters functioning as judges is also the most dominant role because of the one-to-one relationship between the speech act and the stance-taking role. Such commenters produced negative criticism on the Jakarta governor, driven primarily by their different political views.