Reading Between the Lines: Critical Discourse Analysis of Philippine News Coverage on China and the West Philippine Sea
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Abstract
This qualitative research explored the language use of Philippine media on China and the West Philippine Sea (WPS) conflict through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The 51 news reports that served as the corpus for this study were sourced from five major Philippine online news publications. Using CDA, the study identified dominant themes through Reisigl and Wodak’s (2017) discursive strategies, while Halliday’s transitivity system was employed to examine how processes and agency portray China, the Philippines, and the conflict. Furthermore, van Dijk’s Ideological Square was used to uncover the power relations and ideological positions embedded in the discourse. Results revealed that news reports employed strategies such as nomination, perspectivization, predication, argumentation, and intensification. In terms of linguistic features, material, verbal, mental, and relational processes were identified as central to the construction of representations of China, the Philippines and the WPS conflict. These patterns construct asymmetrical power relations, portraying China as militarily dominant yet normatively illegitimate through negative-other presentation, and the Philippines as legitimate and defensively justified through strategic positive-self presentation.
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