Linguistic Legitimation Strategies Employed by Members of an Indonesian Political Party

This study aimed at exploring legitimation strategies used by two members of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (or Partai Solidaritas Indonesia, abbreviated as PSI) in justifying their party leader’s controversial statement on the abandonment of Sharia Law. To do so, it employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) with Leeuwen’s legitimation strategies (2007, 2008) as its analytical tool. The data were obtained from two separate interviews with PSI members aired on two different Indonesian TV channels. The interviews were transcribed and translated. From this process, a 1.170-word corpus, from which the data were derived, was generated. The findings showed that moral evaluation is the most dominant legitimation strategy, followed by rationalization and authorization. In moral evaluation, abstraction occurs most often, followed by evaluation and analogy. In rationalization, theoretical rationalization is used more often than instrumental rationalization. Finally, in authorization, PSI utilized impersonal authority to reject the Sharia Law by referring to academic studies and legal documents which assess the law as being negative. Meanwhile, expert authority was used to build legitimation by reference to experts who support the negative effects of the law. This study implies the power of language to legitimize a controversial activity by using different linguistics strategies.


INTRODUCTION
Language serves many purposes, one of which is to legitimate action or statement. Our daily uses of language are full of legitimation. When we propose an idea to a discussion forum, we often provide justifications on why such an idea needs to be implemented. When a conflict arises among friends, we may witness that many arguments thrown are backed up by reasons. In fact, we may find that parents need to give a logical argument when they tell their children to do something. Providing reasons and arguments to justify why something needs to be implemented to someone is called legitimation. This definition is in line with Said (2017) who mentions that "legitimation refers to the process by which speakers justify, endorse or sanction an action or a behavior to an audience".
Legitimation may become problematic when it is used to justify an idea or action which contradicts a value, culture, norm, or even regulation that has prevailed within a society. In this case, legitimation is usually done to serve a particular group of people, such as powerful people. For instance, Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) investigated legitimation strategies in the Austrian government's ban on the immigrant family reunion. The government built its legitimation on the ban not only based on legal grounds, but also its prejudices on the minority group of immigrants. This ban aimed at preventing immigrants from seeking asylum in Austria. Said (2017) also found how legitimation strategies were used by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, to serve his economic interests by transferring two Egyptian islands to Saudi Arabia and by cutting electricity bills. To convince Egyptians, El-Sisi attempted to legitimate his policies by reference to humanitarian and moral grounds.
In Indonesia, there are many controversial actions and ideas proposed by elite people such as politicians. For instance, on November 11 th , 2008, Indonesia solidarity party (PSI) members were busily providing legitimations on their general leader, Grace Natalies, who proposed the annulment of Sharia Law in Indonesia if her party cadres dominated parliamentary seats upon the 2019 national election. Such a statement was controversial and sparked a heated condemnation from the public, especially the Acehnese. Aceh is the only province that has implemented Sharia Law and this practice is protected under the Indonesian constitution, number 11, 2006 regarding the Aceh government (Basri, 2011). Being protested by many people, PSI cadres need to justify their leaders' statement to convince the societies that the leader's plan to abandon the Sharia Law was legitimate and important for the sake of Indonesians in general so that the party would get out of the possibilities to lose potential voters in 2019 elections. Therefore, it is worth investigating how the PSI party legitimized its leader's statement on the proposal to abandon Sharia Law.
Thus far, there have not been any studies which have been conducted to explore the strategies used by PSI members to legitimate their leader's statement on the plan of abandoning the Sharia Law if the party cadres dominated the parliamentary positions. Therefore, this study was conducted to explore this issue; specifically; it sought to provide the answer to the following questions: • What legitimation strategies were used by PSI members to justify their leader's statement to abandon the Sharia Law?
The result of this study is expected to make people realize the importance of critically examining the information they are exposed to since some information only has legitimate purposes to serve certain speakers' or writers' interests.

Discourse Concept
So far, the notion of discourse does not have a unified definition, yet this section discusses Mills' (1997) concept of discourse. First, discourse encompasses both spoken and written. Thus, the analysis of discourse can be performed on such sources (Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999). Examples of written discourses are books, newspapers, posters, billboards, and the like. Meanwhile, spoken discourses include speech, debates, press conferences, sign language, interviews, and so forth. However, this study deals merely with spoken discourse, which is the interviews of two PSI members.
Second, the way we use language also relies on the mode through which a particular discourse is produced. We tend to be more formal in writing a research paper or a letter to our employer than in casual conversation. Moreover, we choose to elaborate ideas in greater detail in written discourse than in spoken discourse because our writing will be read by unanimous people. Meanwhile, over the conversation, speakers can directly clarify something unclear for his or her interlocutors. This study involves the interviews of PSI members which occurred in a formal setting in which they legitimized their leader's proposal to annul Sharia Law in general if the parliament was dominated by PSI members upon the 2019 national election.
Third, discourse production and comprehension are largely dependent on the context in which the discourse takes place. In fact, Paltridge (2012) mentions that discourse and context are inseparable as the latter enables discourse recipients able to fully understand the meaning of utterances. However, the context has been conceptualized differently among discourse experts. van Dijk (2003), for example, defines context as the subjective mental representation of the current communicative event as well as the social situation which can possibly constrain the current discourse. In the other words, context is the ongoing communicative and social situations subjectively perceived by people involved in the discourse. In the case of PSI members' interviews that were analyzed in this study, PSI members tried to justify their leader's controversial statement on the abandonment of Sharia Law, causing a nationwide condemnation among societies. If it was not fixed soon, it impacted the electoral rate of PSI in the upcoming election at the time. Therefore, PSI members were required to do justification on their leader's statement to alleviate the societies' reactions, hoping to fix the tarnished image of PSI and improve the electoral votes in the coming election.
Moreover, for functional linguists (Butt et al., 2003;Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), contexts are defined as the outer and inner context in which the latter is always present within the former. The outer context of the discourse is the cultural context. For instance, people originating from high-context cultures such as Asian cultures, African-American cultures, and Native-American cultures tend to speak indirectly (Hall, 1976), especially when a speech act used potentially threatens the face of their interlocutors (Brown & Levinson, 1987) such as criticism and requests. In contrast, people from low-context cultures, for instance, American, German, and Scandinavian cultures (Samovar et al., 2003) are inclined to speak directly what is on their mind. Thus, such cultural context needs to be paid close attention to when people from both of these cultures are involved in a conversation. Moreover, even within one culture, discourse or language use may vary from one situation to another. Butt et al. (2003) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) develop three aspects of the context of situations, that is field, tenor, and mode. The field is defined as the topic being talked or written about and the short-and long-term goals of the discourse. Tenor is conceptualized as the relationship between the speaker and the hearer and the writer and the reader. Finally, a mode is a sort of text being produced, written or spoken texts. Changing one of these aspects may influence the way we produce a text. For example, imagine a person is writing a scholarship letter and a letter to his friend about his expectation to get the scholarship. All of these texts are written on the same topic (field) and through the same discourse channel (mode), yet he has readers who have a different relationship with him (tenor). In this case, he surely tends to write more formally to the scholarship committee than to his friend.
Fourth, discourse can be used to produce, spread, and comprehend ideology. The relationship between ideology, a set of beliefs and knowledge of a societal group, and discourse has been extensively discussed by van Dijk (1995van Dijk ( , 2001van Dijk ( , 2003van Dijk ( , 2005van Dijk ( , 2006van Dijk ( , 2011van Dijk ( , 2015. He mentions that people learn, produce, and reproduce discourse largely by texts and talks. Much of our ideologies are acquired by listening to our parents, colleagues, teachers, role models, leaders, and so forth. Moreover, learning ideology through discourse is mediated by our cognition, a concept which he calls the sociocognitive approach (van Dijk, 2015). According to this theory, whatever we experience such situations, acts, or events in the world either through spoken or written modes is stored in our mental memory or episodic memory and when we produce or comprehend a discourse, we try to retrieve such memory ( van Dijk, 1995) in which our ideology is stored. Similarly, by justifying their leader's proposal on the rejection of Sharia Law, PSI members actually intended to spread their liberal ideology which suggests the separation of religion and state. They expect that their belief can be accepted by the Indonesian societies, most of whom are religious.
Moreover, the discourse concept is not complete without a discussion of the discourse as social practices. Fairclough and Wodak (1997) acknowledge that social practice can be done through discourse and this implication is the dialectical relationship between a certain discursive event and the situations, institutions, and social structures. This is in line with Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) that as social practice, discourse involves several elements involved such as activities (e.g., what is done by discourse participants when using the language), participants, performance indicators (e.g., how activities are done), times, places, tools, and materials (e.g., means of communication such as YouTube), dress, and grooming (e.g., what and how discourse participants dress), and eligibility conditions (e.g., to be a politician, someone needs to fulfill age and other qualification requirements). One of the social practices that take place through discourse is legitimation as such discourse has all of these elements.

Legitimation Concept
Language is an effective means to create legitimation. Its function is to justify an idea and action so that it can be accepted by the public. Vaara and Tienary (2008) and Said (2017) define legitimation as a way to justify an idea and action by means of argumentation (Reyes, 2011). Doskaya (2002, p. 73) argues that legitimation works well in gaining public acceptance because through it, we can create a generalized perception or assumption that an idea or action which is legitimized is represented as being desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions. Thus, legitimation serves as a symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1991) to gain and maintain power so that it becomes an important concept and practice in political discourse.

Leeuwen's Model of Legitimation
Legitimation can be realized within discourse in several ways. Firstly, legitimation can be done through spoken and written discourses. We may legitimate our actions or ideas during a press conference or in a newspaper article. Secondly, legitimation may occur in a formal or informal context. A president may justify his controversial action through a presidential speech, whereas a schoolboy legitimates his wrongdoings not accepted by his group in a conversation while having lunch in a school canteen. Thirdly, for legitimation to be accepted, it must be based on values, principles, and cultures which are adopted in a society where such legitimation occurs. Fourth, legitimation may aim at spreading an ideology. Legitimation done by liberalists will be based on liberal ideologies; similarly, conservatives legitimate their actions or ideas by reference to conservative ideologies.
To investigate how legitimation is constructed, Leeuwen (2007Leeuwen ( , 2008 has established the framework of legitimation. Based on his framework, legitimation may be built by reference to authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis. He further divides sub-categories for each category of the legitimation. It should later be noticed that these legitimation categories can occur separately or together within an utterance.

Authorization
Authorization is a legitimation developed by reference to personal authority, expert authority, role model authority, impersonal authority, tradition authority, and conformity authority. Personal authority is considered legitimate if he or she has a role and status in a particular situation. Thus, an answer to why something is done is mere because 'I say so' where 'I' is someone to whom some sort of authority is given. Typically, personal authority consists of a verbal process clause such as 'say'. Furthermore, legitimation can be achieved through reference to expert authority by explicitly or implicitly mentioning the credentials so that an answer to why something is done 'because Dr. X or some experts say(s) or believe(s) so', also uses the verbal process. Moreover, legitimation can be attained by reference to role models (e.g., colleagues or media celebrities). Legitimation through role models can be established only by referring to a particular type of behavior or belief and using typical adjective words with positive connotations such as 'wise'. The theoretical basis of role models is derived from symbolic interactionism theory developed in 1934 by Mead (Aksan et al., 2009), which primarily deals with people's tendency to accept an attitude of a social group they belong to. Impersonal authority is usually used with verbal process and adjectives (e.g., 'compulsory', 'mandatory', 'obligatory' is another sub-category of authorization where the answer to the question 'why something is done is because the laws (etc. rules, policies, or guideline) says so'). Moreover, the legitimation is developed by reference to the traditional authority in which the legitimation is R. Ananda & N. Sari, Linguistic constructions of legitimation strategies employed by members of an Indonesian political party | 1253 developed by reference to the tradition, customs, habit, and practice (e.g., this is what we always do). The final category is the conformity authority by referring to what they always do, using explicit comparison conjunction (e.g., like), and using high frequency of modality (e.g., the majority of…).

Moral Evaluation
The second category is moral evaluation built based on values that prevail in particular social communities. Moral evaluation is occasionally used with authority, for instance 'the teacher says studying in a group can improve students' cooperative ability' where moral cooperation is built by using the teacher as the legitimate pedagogic authority. Leeuwen (2007Leeuwen ( , 2008 divides moral evaluation into three subcategories, evaluation, abstraction, and analogies. Evaluation is performed by means of adjectives which function as the head of a group of nouns such as in 'skeptical citizen' or as the subject in relational clauses (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) as in 'we are skeptical' or by referring to the naturalization discourse (e.g. 'normal', 'natural' and reference to time and change concept) (Leeuwen, 2007). The second sub-category of moral evaluation is abstraction through which legitimation is developed by distilling moral values from an utterance being legitimized. In the other words, abstraction is more implicit than evaluation. For instance, to derive the value of independence, someone should say 'the child takes up independence' rather than 'the child goes to school for the first time' (Leeuwen, 2008). The last sub-category is analogies whose foundational function is to compare one activity with another. The discourse markers influence how meaning is constructed in part by indicating speaker turns, connecting concepts, displaying attitude, and, finally, controlling communication (Amalia et al., 2021). Therefore, to legitimate a social action, legitimation discourse markers can attach the positively connoted metaphor of other actions to a justified action, use similarity conjunction (e.g., like, as…as), recounted comparison, and stretch of discourse.

Rationalization
The third category of legitimation is rationalization. Rationalization is legitimation built by telling the purposes or uses of social activity. However, not all activities with their purposes justified are rationalization, except those which have moralized purposes or what Habermas (1976, p. 22) calls "strategic-utilitarian morality". Rationalization is divided into two categories, instrumental rationalization, and theoretical rationalization.
Instrumental rationalization is built by referring to the moralized goals, uses, and effects of social practice. Moreover, instrumental rationalization can also be formed by telling the purpose of an action being legitimized, yet only purposes which contain moralization are categorized as an instrumental rationalization as in 'we are fighting against the policy to realize equity for all' with 'fighting against' as purposeful action, 'to' as purpose link, and 'to realize equity for all' as moralized purpose. However, the sentences such as 'it's useful' and 'it's effective' are self-legitimating because they are based on the philosophical foundations of utilitarianism and pragmatism which posit that 'purposefulness, usefulness, and effectiveness' serve as 'criteria of truth' and foundations for norm-conformative, ethical behavior (Leeuwen, 2008).
Instrumental rationalization can be based on goal orientation, means orientation, and effect orientation. Goal orientation embeds the purpose in the main actor and takes two pre-requisites: (a) the actor of the action must be explicitly stated and (b) the actor of purposeful action and purpose must be the same. Meanwhile, means orientation embeds the action in action which serves as means to an end. Therefore, two formulas of means orientation are either "I achieve doing (or being, or having) y by x-ing" (e.g., we are united by standing together) or "x-ing serves to achieve being (or doing, or having) y" (e.g., family time is a strong way for belongingness) (Leeuwen, 2008, p. 114). Besides, means-orientation can be realized by objectivating the purposeful action (e.g., opposition) or use facilitating processes such as 'allows', 'helps', 'promote', 'teach', 'build', and 'facilitate'. Finally, effects orientation stresses the outcomes of actions achieved by using different subjects in purposeful action clause and effect clause (e.g., we must do this, so that our children can feel that) or by using purposeful action as a subject gerund (e.g., building democracy aims at providing justice for everyone).
Meanwhile, theoretical rationalization builds legitimation based on how the world naturally works (Leeuwen, 2008, p. 116) and is divided into three categories: definition, explanation, prediction. Definition represents an activity by means of another moralized activity, both of which are objectivated, generalized, and connected by means of attributive (e.g., 'is', 'constitute') and significative (e.g., 'means', 'signals', 'symbolize') (Leeuwen, 2008) (e.g., law amendment is a vital process in a democracy). Moreover, explanation defines discourse participants which are recontextualized (e.g., people need equality law). The last category of instrumental rationalization is a prediction in which the legitimation is constructed based on experts' advice, for instance: 'Don't worry if you or your child cries. It won't last long.' (Leeuwen, 2008, p. 116).

Mythopoesis
Legitimation can also be simply formed through storytelling or narrative text. It can be performed in two ways, namely moral tales, and cautionary tales, both of which can inverse the animate discourse subjects into inanimate actors (e.g., inverse politicians into animals that imaginatively hold political power, such as character metaphors in George Orwell's Animal Farm by Fajrina, 2016). In moral tales, discourse participants are told what prizes they will get if they conduct a particular practice. However, cautionary tales build a legitimation in a converse way in which the participant discourse is informed of bad effects which they will bear if they do not conduct a social practice.

Political Discourse
Our life is always surrounded by language use. In other words, the infiltration of discourses in every aspect of our life is taken for granted, including in the political realm. The use of language in politics is called political discourse, although the word 'politics' itself is not easy to define. However, to categorize a discourse as being political, van Dijk (1997) has included some characteristics.
Firstly, political discourse is characterized by its actors or authors, i.e., politicians. Therefore, a political discourse study involves the analysis of discourses of prime ministers, presidents, representative members, political party members, and even civil societies and organizations who are involved in the political process (Verba et al., 1993), such as voting and criticizing political topics in social media. Secondly, a discourse can be said to be political if it is related to activities or practices which has political nature, such as governing, ruling, legislating, protesting, dissenting, or voting ( van Dijk, 1997). Therefore, a discourse concerning the personal life of a politician which has no relations with the political field at all is not a political discourse although the discourse participant is a politician.
Thirdly, the most obvious way in determining political discourse is the context which can further be analyzed through the political and communicative events and encounters with their own settings (time, place, circumstances), occasions, intentions, functions, goals, and legal or political implications (van Dijk, 1997), for instance, an interview by news media about passing new possible regulation to fight against discrimination (Fitriani et al., 2021). However, we should notice that not all discourses which have a political implication that influences the lives of many citizens are political, such as feminist text and talk performed by a feminist group. Otherwise, there is an overlap between political and public discourses.
This study is categorized as political discourse analysis as it suffices van Dijk's scope of politics. In terms of the author, the subject of this study includes the politicians of PSI members. Besides, the activities done by these politicians are political practices in which they publicly opposed the status quo of Sharia Law recognized in the Indonesian constitution. Finally, the setting in which the legitimation discourse investigated in this present study is political in nature as it was done months prior to the national election so that PSI can gather potential electoral votes to get legislative power.
Power can be achieved through legitimation discourse. In fact, politics is very close to legitimation. Almost every utterance of politicians is to legitimize their social practices (e.g., passing law) or delegitimize others. All these are done by employing particular linguistics structures which are packaged in SFG. Therefore, political discourse provides ample interesting data of legitimation and its microstructures to discourse analysts to investigate.

METHOD
This study employed critical discourse analysis (henceforth, CDA) as this approach is suitable for this study to critically study how legitimation discourse was built. Moreover, CDA allowed the analyst to deconstruct linguistics resources of legitimation discourse ( van Dijk, 2015). van Dijk (2015) further details that CDA is a critical discourse study that investigates the ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimize, reproduce, or challenge power abuse (dominance) relations in social and political contexts. Moreover, Fairclough (1992) mentions that CDA is an organized investigation to find the relationship between the discursive practices of texts and social structure such as power. This approach is, therefore, suitable to be used in this study as it analyzed discursive practices (i.e., the linguistics legitimation to annul Sharia Law) to gain electoral votes in the national election from the opponents of Sharia Law.
To obtain data, the keywords related to Sharia Law and PSI were typed on YouTube. After that, out of many videos appearing, two were chosen to be analyzed as they featured two influential PSI members and had long durations. Both videos were in the form of dialogues held by two different TV channels. The names of the politicians in this study remain anonymous. The first video lasted for 20 minutes and 55 seconds was held by tvOneNews on November 13 th , 2018, and two guests were invited, Politician A (PA), a PSI member, and Politician B (PB, the general leader of the national awakening party (PKB). The title of the dialogue is 'The Polemic of Regional Regulation Based on religion'. The second video lasting for 31 minutes and 26 seconds was held by CNN Indonesia on November 21 st , 2018 also with two guests invited, Politician C (PC), a local representative council member from Aceh, and Politician D (PD), a PSI member. The title of the dialogue is 'The Hearsay of Sharia Law'.
Furthermore, the interviews were transcribed verbatim, yielding a corpus of 1.170 words. Upon transcription, the data were analyzed to find out the legitimation strategies and their distribution in percentage. The data were also analyzed by relating the patterns of legitimation strategies to the wider contexts.

RESULT AND DISCUSSION
This study in principle sought to answer what types of legitimation strategies were used by PSI to support their objections toward Sharia Law and what microstructures constituted those strategies. The data analysis found that in the analyzed corpus, there were 70 examples of legitimation utilized by PSI to legitimize their opposition toward Sharia Law and they were generally divided into three types of legitimations, namely authorization, moral evaluation, and rationalization. In general, authorization is used nine times or 12.8%, moral evaluation 48 times or (68.5%), and rationalization 13 times or 18.5%. In the other words, moral evaluation is the most dominant legitimation strategy utilized by the PSI members to justify their rejections toward Sharia Law. The findings of each strategy, from the most used to the least, are elaborated and exampled in detail in the next sub-sections.

Moral Evaluation
Moral evaluation constructs legitimation by referring to moral values. This strategy is found the most dominant legitimation used. Likewise, the political discourse study conducted by Said (2017) also discovered that moral evaluation is the most frequent legitimation. It means that this study and Said's disclosed political actors' tendency to legitimize their political activities is by reference to moral grounding. In detail, moral evaluation is formed through three sub-categories, namely evaluation, abstraction, and analogy. This study found 30 abstractions, 16 evaluations, and two analogies so that there are 48 moral evaluations or 68.5% of all legitimation strategies utilized by the PSI members to legitimize their objection toward Sharia Law.
Abstraction legitimizes a social act by extracting moral values from an utterance. Thus, this is the least obvious construction of legitimation. Out of three sub-strategies of moral evaluation, abstraction was used the most often, confirming what was found by Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) in their study.
The second most frequent sub-strategy of moral evaluation is evaluation. This strategy is built by using adjectival words either as the head of a nominal group or as an attribute in a relational clause. Many examples of evaluation in this study attach negative moral evaluation toward Sharia Law as social action by using such particular adjectives as 'discriminative' and 'dangerous' as shown in the following excerpts. E1 shows that based on the PSI member, district regulation or Sharia Law is discriminative toward women as it reduces women's rights in various aspects. It means that Sharia Law contradicts the value of equality. Meanwhile, E2 shows that the member saw Sharia Law as a representation of a dangerous entity that threatens diversity in Indonesia. Thus, representation of Sharia Law as having contradicted with the value of equality and being dangerous legitimized PSI's objection toward Sharia Law.
Moreover, moral evaluation attaches negative value toward the effect of Sharia Law. The effects that arise from Sharia Law include serious problems, different interpretations, and real radicalism as found in the following excerpts by the PSI members.

E3 (Peraturan daerah berbasis agama) merupakan masalah yang serius bagi bangsa ini. [(The district regulation based on religion) is a serious problem for this country.] E4 Begitu (peraturan daerah berbasis agama) keluar di tingkat kabupaten/kota, tafsirnya bisa berbeda. [Once (the district regulation based on religion is) issued in municipalities or cities, its interpretation will be different.] E5 Radikalisme adalah bentuk nyata di Indonesia. (Radicalism is real in Indonesia)
Likewise, the actors which implement the Sharia Law were also morally evaluated by the PSI members. Those actors include state schools and society as shown in the following excerpts. Evaluations on Sharia Law by the PSI members as a social action, effect, and actors attempted to represent the Sharia Law against the moral values that have existed in the state philosophy of Indonesia's well-known Pancasila. Pancasila can be said as a way of life adopted by the multi-ethnic Indonesian people even before the country gained independence. Having been discussed months before the independence by the founding fathers of Indonesia, Pancasila was legitimized as the base of the state/country a day upon the independence declaration of Indonesia, August 18, 1945. Since then, all positive laws, regulations, traditions, customs, beliefs, and ideology in Indonesia have been according to the five points of Pancasila, comprising (1) belief in the one and only God, (2) just and civilized humanity, (3) the unity of Indonesia, (4) democracy guided by inner guidance in the unanimity arising out of deliberations amongst representatives, and (5) social justice for the whole Indonesian people. The morals of discrimination, radicalism, inconsistency, injustice, and bias which were attributed to the actor, Sharia Law, and its effect by the PSI members went against all of the Pancasila points and thus giving a very strong legitimation of its rejection toward Sharia Law. This finding acknowledges Leeuwen's statement (2007, p. 98) that moral values distilled from discourses can be 'recognized' through the lens of cultural backgrounds where such discourses take place. In the other words, discourse analysts are those who are trained in multiple fields, including linguistics, history, anthropology, sociology, laws, and other social sciences.
Finally, legitimation through evaluation can be formed through legitimation of naturalization. Discourse makers who use this legitimation will make their social practices naturally happen and thereby cannot be avoided. Leeuwen (2007) contends that forming legitimation through naturalization can be attained by basing on the concept of time and change. This study found one example of naturalization by reference to the concept of time as follows. Interestingly, naturalization legitimation is built based on not only time concept but also place concept, a finding not disclosed in previous studies. The only example of the use of the place concept to form naturalization legitimation can be seen in E10. Almost all moral values based on the PSI members were explicitly formed, except those of naturalization evaluation, yet most moral values were formed less evidently through abstraction, and hence requiring to look at sociocultural contexts where legitimation discourses happen (Leeuwen, 2007). This study recorded 30 texts from which particular moral values were extracted implicitly, some of which have indeed been uncovered through moral evaluation. This study recorded that Sharia Law was attached to negative moral values by the PSI, whereas PSI itself had positive moral values. Here are some negative moral values by the PSI members attached to Sharia Law to legitimize its objection toward the Sharia Law implementation. Based on the excerpts above, it seems that in countries where Islamophobia occurs, the values of discrimination and intolerance are often attached to Islam due to its Sharia Law. Such values have increasingly been used since the 9/11 attack in the USA (Gessier, 2010), and since then, Islamophobia discourses have gained a particular level of legitimation either in the western and eastern countries. The interviewed PSI members also employed only two moral values to strengthen their legitimation to reject the Sharia Law implementation. In other words, PSI tends to legitimize their objection toward the Sharia Law by showing negative values that lie behind it rather than showing their own positive values.

(i) Values of discrimination and intolerance.
Finally, legitimation based on morality may be evoked through analogy. One of the ways to utilize analogy is by using conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008), a process in which a discourse participant uses another concept in the discourse being discussed; hence, there is a transfer of meaning, for example using the concept of war in the argument discourse (e.g., I attack every point of his arguments). This study discovered the use of glass breaking metaphor in the Sharia Law discourse as in 'ini [Syariat Islam] bisa meretakkan persatuan kita' [this [Sharia Law] can crack our diversity]. In this circumstance, the PSI members equated diversity with the glass and Sharia Law with anything that breaks the glass, and thus, the Sharia Law must be avoided to save our unity. In the other words, the interviewed PSI members evoked their legitimation toward the rejection of Sharia Law by transferring the concepts of 'glass breaking' to the aw. In his study, Leeuwen (2008) also found this meaning transfer in Illich's critique discourse of schooling in which the concepts from military and prison are used in the educational contexts. Thus, metaphor is inevitable in most discourses as we experience the world through metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008).

Rationalization
Rationalization forms legitimation by referring to the usefulness of the social activities or the reality of life. The former is termed instrumental rationalization, whereas the latter is referred to theoretical rationalization. Rationalization and moral evaluation sometimes go together. In the case of moral evaluation, rationalization is obliquely present, and pertaining to rationalization, moral evaluation remains implicit. In fact, no rationalizations develop legitimation without morality.
Instrumental rationalization is realized by constructing moralized purposes in actors (goal orientation) and actions (means orientation) or by stressing the actionoutcome (effect orientation). It means that instrumental rationalization constructs legitimation by emphasizing the moralized purposefulness and utility of a certain social activity, following what Habermas (1976, p. 22) calls a philosophical view of "strategic-utilitarian morality" as a strategy "to ensure mass loyalty" (p. 30). This study found three-goal orientations, two of which evoked positively moralized activities conducted by PSI as in 'dia (negara) memberikan kebebasan kepada masyarakat untuk mempraktekkan ajaran agama' [it (the country) gives freedom to society to practice their religion], 'kita menghibahkan diri kita lawan diskriminasi, lawan intoleransi' [we devote ourselves to fighting against discrimination, against intolerance]. The last goal orientation is used to foreground negatively moralized activity done by politicians initiating and passing the Sharia Law as in '(politisi) lari ke isu-isu moral untuk digunakan untuk komoditas politik' [(politicians) turn to moral issues to be used for a political commodity]. This example shows that Sharia Law has a relationship with morality and it is initiated by local parliament candidates whose electoral area is resided by the majority of Muslims. Thus, to get the votes in the election, these candidates create and pass the Sharia Law. In other words, the Sharia Law, according to PSI, does not reflect the real need of society; instead, it is only for the sake of the majority's votes in the election.
Apart from goal orientation, this study found one means of orientation as in 'tetapi perda-perda berbasis agama itu lebih mengarah kepada formalisasi syariat dan kemudian kepada simbolisasi agama' [but the district regulations based on religion mainly leads to religious symbolization]. In this circumstance, we can see that the district regulation based on religion, such as Sharia Law, is a means to achieve merely religious symbolization, not to fulfill public needs and interests. Consequently, Sharia Law is rationalized as a legal product which, according to PSI, contains political motives that are utilized by politicians to attain their own interests and hence should be abolished.
Furthermore, this study found one case each for explanation and prediction. In the case of explanation, it is the actor instead of the activity defined. Here, the answer to "why something is done" is "because this thing is appropriate to the nature of these actors" Leeuwen (2007, p. 104). The only example found in this study is 'PSI…sudah menyatakan bahwa DNA dirinya adalah anti-korupsi dan anti-intoleransi' [PSI…has stated that its DNA is anti-corruption and anti-intolerance]. We can see that PSI defined itself as the anti-corruption and intolerance party and for it, Sharia Law is intolerant. Thus, the answer to why PSI rejects Sharia Law is because it is what it is. The final theoretical rationalization is prediction as in '(hukum syariah) bisa mendiskriminasikan pengikut agama lain' [(Sharia Law) may discriminate followers of other religions]. Here, the modality word 'may' evokes the prediction of discrimination against other religious followers that would happen if Sharia Law continued to be applied.

Authorization
Using authorization, a speaker legitimates his or her activities by referring to personal authority, expert authority, role model, impersonal authority, such as laws, regulations, and rules, tradition authority, and conformity authority. This study found that the PSI members employed four examples of expert authority and five examples of impersonal authority and thus the total number of authorizations is nine examples or 12.8% out of the total percentage of the legitimation strategies used. The expert authority in this study refers to legal institutions whose commissioners have built expertise in particular fields. Therefore, the expert authority in this study does not refer to an individual such as a doctor and professor (Leeuwen, 2007(Leeuwen, , 2008. This study found that the PSI members refer to credible and autonomous institutions such as National Commission on Human Rights (or Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia (National Commission on Human Rights, abbreviated as Komnas HAM), Wahid Institute, SETARA Institute, National Commission on Women, and non-government organizations on Women. However, this supports the finding of Rojo and van Dijk (1997) and Said (2017, p. 80), in which expert authority is built based on what Said calls "official entities" instead of "personal names" or "official position". The following is an example of an excerpt that shows the use of expert authority. The expert who is referred to by PD is the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM) who warned the district government of Bireun, a district in Aceh, that issued a regulation based on Sharia Law that restricted women's curfew. Komnas HAM is a legal institution to handle human rights cases so that it is vested an authority by people to judge whether an action is against humans right or not. Moreover, in this example, just like other examples of expert authority, Komnas HAM is foregrounded as this is placed in the subject position to show that Komnas HAM is responsible for issuing this warning (Dreyfus, 2017), and thus it has strong credibility. In the other words, PD justifies his objection toward Sharia Law based on his subjective mental representation (van Dijk, 2003) that the negative assessment of Komnas HAM on the implementation of Sharia Law in Bireun district of Aceh could provide him a strong ground to support his justification on the annulment of Sharia Law proposed by his party leader. Apart from the expert authority, impersonal authority is also used (five times). Such authority includes academic studies, a report from the National Commission on Women, resolutions of the People's Representative Council (TAP MPR), Home Ministry Regulation, and the Indonesian constitution. The following example represents how impersonal authority is used by PD. The impersonal authority referred to in this excerpt is TAP MPR. Based on Law number 15, 2019 on the hierarchy of the Indonesian constitution, TAP MPR rests on the second rank after the Indonesian Constitution 1945. In other words, all laws below TAP MPR in the hierarchy, including district regulation of Sharia Law must comply with TAP MPR. TAP MPR, number 3, 2010 mentions that all district regulation must be applied generally in a district where it is implemented. Thus, Sharia Law in Aceh which holds a lower status than TAP MPR is deemed illegal by PD as this is implemented only to Muslims in Aceh although the province has several other religions. PD implicitly refers to Sharia Law to segmented district regulation and thus it goes against TAP MPR and had to be abandoned. Moreover, TAP MPR was used as the subject of the sentence so that it became salient to hearers/readers. Moreover, authorization legitimation can be used to morally legitimate or delegitimate a social practice. Leeuwen (2008) mentions that authority legitimation can be simultaneously employed with moral evaluation. This study found one example in which authority was used to morally de-legitimate Sharia Law.
[In fact, one of the reports from national commission on Women stated that there has been an institutionalized discrimination in the forms of the existing district law in particular districts.] One of the reports is used to invoke impersonal authorization legitimation in this excerpt. This report found that Sharia Law has served as institutionalized discrimination for a particular group of people. In other words, the use of the phrase 'institutionalized discrimination' encoded the moral of structural discrimination posed by Sharia Law. Basically, this implicit moral has to be accepted by the people at least unconsciously because it was reported by the PSI member that by a study done by a credible institution that although pro-Sharia groups can still challenge this finding by another finding, thus, the law has no place in Indonesia and needs to be abandoned.
Interestingly, this study found that authority legitimation is used least often. This contradicts previous findings (Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999;Said, 2017) in which authorization becomes the second most frequent strategy although the context of all these studies is in the realm of politics. A contemporary answer for this gap is that the low frequency of authorization rests on a strong legal standing that backs up the birth of Sharia Law such as article 18B of the Indonesian Constitution 1945Constitution , regulation number 44, 1999Constitution , regulation number 18, 2001, and regulation of the Aceh Government, number 11, 2006 article 7, clause 1 and 2. However, this needs to be researched further why authorization forms a small number of legitimation strategies in this study.

CONCLUSION
This study investigates the legitimation discourse used by PSI to reject Sharia Law and its micro-linguistics construction from an SFG perspective. The study found that moral evaluation was the most dominant legitimation strategy, followed by rationalization and authorization. In the case of moral evaluation, abstraction occurred most often, followed by evaluation and analogy. Through abstraction, PSI built its legitimation based on negative values attributed to the Sharia Law and its supporters such as those of discrimination and intolerance, division and exclusivism, inadvertency, illegality, and bias, and to PSI itself such as values of unity and shared concern. These values were substantiated through the use of negative adjectival words to evaluate Sharia Law and its activities. Interestingly, using an analogy, PSI borrowed the concept of 'glass breaking' into the Sharia Law concept to encode its divisive nature.
In terms of rationalization, theoretical rationalization was used more often than instrumental rationalization. Regarding theoretical rationalization, PSI legitimized its rejection toward Sharia Law implementation by showing and predicting negative effects of Sharia Law that can be caused either by its supporter or by Sharia Law itself was inherent. Besides, legitimation was built by evoking Sharia Law as the means to obtain negatively moralized goals done by its supporters, whereas PSI was represented as having done positively moralized activities to prevent evil purposes.
Regarding authorization, PSI utilized impersonal and expert authority in which using the former, PSI legitimized its rejection of Sharia Law by referring to academic studies and legal documents which assessed the Sharia Law as being negative, whereas using the latter, PSI built legitimation by reference to experts which support the negative effects of Sharia Law. Hence, further research is needed to study why authorization forms a small number of legitimation strategies in this study.
This study implicates that language is one of the best means of legitimizing a controversial activity by referring to personal or impersonal authority considered having the power to legitimize that activity, to moral values, and to moralized purposes and utility of that activity. To do so, someone needs to understand the typical microstructures of each legitimation strategy. However, this study does not take a further step to understand whether there are utterances that are inherently legitimate or all legitimations are human creations and can merely be considered as legitimation within particular sociocultural contexts.