Multimodal Illocutionary Amplification in Local Indonesian Elections: A Case of Campaign Billboards in Sumbawa Regency
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Keywords:
multimodal discourse analysis, speech act theory, political billboards, electoral persuasion, critical discourse analysisAbstract
Political campaign billboards remain a prominent yet under-theorized medium of electoral communication, particularly in emerging democracies. This study investigates how legislative campaign billboards displayed during Indonesia's 2024 general election construct persuasive force through the interaction of speech acts, visual semiotics, and ideological coding. Drawing on speech act theory, social semiotics, visual grammar, and critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes 50 purposively sampled billboards from Sumbawa Regency. Findings reveal systematic cross-modal clustering patterns: directive speech acts align predominantly with religious imagery, commissive acts cluster with nationalist symbolism, and declarative positioning frequently co-occurs with elite proximity. These patterned alignments demonstrate that illocutionary force is not linguistically self-contained but amplified through visual and ideological scaffolding. The article proposes a conceptual framework, Multimodal Illocutionary Amplification (MIA), that models persuasion as a layered process involving an illocutionary core, a semiotic scaffold, compositional structuring, ideological naturalisation, and voter subject positioning. While the framework is analytically transferable, its applicability is bound by regional socio-cultural configurations where religious and community-based patronage remain salient. Grounded in this localized context, the model advances political pragmatics and multimodal discourse studies by explaining how authority is visually performed and normalized in contemporary electoral communication.
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