Survivor Narratives of the 2014 Kelantan “Yellow Flood†: A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis

This study examines survivor narratives from the 2014 Kelantan “Yellow Flood†through corpus-based discourse analysis. Interview transcripts were compiled into a small corpus and analysed for recurring lexical patterns. Five words dominated the narratives: tak (no/did not/never), air (water), rumah (house), banjir (flood), and naik (rise). These words encapsulated both beliefs and experiences, revealing how survivors framed the disaster through negation, force, loss, categorization, and escalation. The findings show that tak highlighted disbelief and deprivation, air shifted from life-giving to destructive, rumah symbolized both shelter and uprooted identity, banjir contrasted ordinary and catastrophic floods, and naik marked the urgency of rising waters. Together, these words demonstrate how ordinary language captured extraordinary realities, intertwining cognitive frames, cultural meanings, and lived trauma. The study contributes to disaster communication by showing that effective warnings and recovery efforts must resonate with the linguistic and cultural repertoires of affected communities. While limited to immediate post-disaster accounts, the analysis highlights the value of survivor discourse for designing more empathetic and context-sensitive policies.