A Filipino-American Contrastive Study on Newspaper Genre: A Response to Post Pandemic Period

Abstract

The study attempted to contrastively compare editorial headlines of two writing cultures, Filipino and American. The objectives of the study were identifying the types of editorial headlines employed in the Manila Bulletin (henceforth MB) and Washington Post (henceforth WP), determining the particular presupposition triggers evident in the two writing cultures, and providing pedagogical implications in light of the findings of the study. Sixty-two editorial headlines from MB and WP were utilized during the surge of the Omicron Variant, extracted from December 1, 2021 to January 31, 2022. The findings of the study revealed that American editorialists favored producing verbal headlines because of the low-culture attribution, directness and explicitness of American editorialists compared to its counterpart with its high-culture attribution, indirectness and implicitness of Filipino editorialists. As far as the usage of presupposition triggers are concerned in writing headlines, Filipino editorialists preferred to write existential presupposition triggers than what American editorialists did because Filipinos are perceived as reader-responsible, whereas Anglo-Americans are known as writer-responsible. Pedagogical implications and research directions were provided.