BEYOND ROMANCE: CORPUS-ASSISTED EVIDENCE ON THEMATIC STRUCTURE IN THE PANJI STORY CORPUS

Strany: 104 - 132

Jazyk: eng

The Panji story corpus, a classical Javanese literary work from the Majapahit period (13th–15th centuries), is renowned throughout the archipelago and in several Southeast Asian countries. Panji story serves as the foundation for numerous performing arts productions, paintings, folktales, tem ple reliefs, and modern literature. This corpus has garnered significant scholarly attention, with the primary conclusion categorising Panji narratives as love stories. This study re-examines the thema tic structure of Panji narratives through a corpus-based approach, challenging the long-standing characterisation of the tradition as primarily romance-oriented. Using a corpus of six Panji story texts, this study integrates frequency-based lexical investigation with Key Word in Context (KWIC) analysis using AntConc to identify recurring patterns and dominant thematic elements. Four se mantic domains – love, war, death, and wandering – are operationalised through sets of related lexical items, rather than single keywords. The findings indicate that war-related lexicon is the most dominant, followed by death. Love and wandering appear less frequently. More importantly, these domains exhibit different levels of semantic coherence and narrative function. War has high con textual stability and strong thematic centrality, while death operates with a dual semantic structu re combining literal and figurative meanings. On the other hand, love shows significant semantic dispersion, indicating that its frequency does not directly correspond to thematic dominance. Wan dering demonstrates functional coherence as a mechanism of narrative development. These results suggest that understanding the story’s central theme requires examining the interaction between frequency, contextual use, and semantic coherence. By bridging traditional philology and modern computational methods, this study highlights the potential of digital humanities in redefining our approach to literary studies.

ISO 690:

ANDALAS, E. F., PRAWIROATMODJO, S., SAKTIMULYA, S. R., WULANDARI, A. 2026. BEYOND ROMANCE: CORPUS-ASSISTED EVIDENCE ON THEMATIC STRUCTURE IN THE PANJI STORY CORPUS. In Asian and African Studies, vol. 35, no.1, pp. 104-132. 1335-1257. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/aassav.2026.35.1.06

APA:

ANDALAS, E. F., PRAWIROATMODJO, S., SAKTIMULYA, S. R., WULANDARI, A. (2026). BEYOND ROMANCE: CORPUS-ASSISTED EVIDENCE ON THEMATIC STRUCTURE IN THE PANJI STORY CORPUS. Asian and African Studies, 35(1), 104-132. 1335-1257. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/aassav.2026.35.1.06

Vydavateľ: Institute of Oriental Studies

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