Philippine Children’s Stories as Protest: A Cognitive Stylistics Approach

Abstract

Philippine Children’s Stories as Protest: A Cognitive Stylistics Approach Lalaine F. Yanilla Aquino (bio) Protest, as Cambridge Dictionary defines, is “a strong complaint expressing disagreement, disapproval, or opposition.” When protest is conveyed through children’s stories, how is the target reader made to recognize the complaint? What linguistic choices—structural patterns and deviations—make the protest content salient, accessible, and meaningful to the child reader? What other literary devices does the writer use to foreground the protest represented in the story? These are some questions addressed in this analysis of five Filipino children’s stories published in the Philippines from 2016 to 2022—the period when particular sociopolitical events, controversies, and issues gave rise to the publication of such stories. While the stories are published as picturebooks, this study opts to exclude the illustrations and focuses instead on the language of the original text (and not the translation). The reason is to discover how writers—not the translators—make the representation of protest accessible and comprehensible to the child, who may not have enough background knowledge on the matter. Four of the stories are written in Filipino and one is written in English. Being official languages in the Philippines, both English and Filipino are used as a medium of instruction in public and private schools. Both languages are taught as a subject at all educational levels. It is thus safe to assume that all five stories target Filipino children. With a focus on the language of the books—whether English or Filipino, cognitive stylistics is employed as the analytical tool of the study. Cognitive Stylistics The development of stylistics as a field of study has gradually turned toward contextualization; research in the field has shown that meaning is not fixed and stable (as the formalists claimed) but can be considered as a “potential which is actualized in a (real) reader’s mind, the product of a dialogic interaction between the author, the author’s context of production, the text, the reader and the reader’s context of reception—where context includes all sorts of sociohistorical, cultural and intertextual factors” (Weber 3). The reader’s initial engagement with the text is always on a linguistic level—a reader “is responding to the language choices and patterns as an integral part of how [s/he] make[s] meaning” (Giovanelli and Harrison 2). This is the reason for the focus on the original textual language of the stories in this study. [End Page 3] While several frameworks can be used in cognitive stylistics analysis, this study mainly uses cognitive grammar. Cognitive grammar asserts that “all language is embodied” and a stylistic analysis can “draw connections between textual patterns on the one hand and the interpretative and experiential responses of readers on the other” (Giovanelli and Harrison 6). This grammar is also guided by the central idea that “all uses of language are made up of symbolic units of form and meaning, called constructions” (7). In a way, the analysis of the writer’s constructions in the stories is also meant to discover the “construed reader” (Jakoola et al. qtd. in Giovanelli 184) of the narrative: the reader identified through the text analysis. The Stories as Protest: Sociopolitical Contexts In analyzing the texts, context is of utmost importance. As Verdonk asserts, “a text can be realized by any piece of language as long as it is found to record a meaningful discourse when it is related to a suitable context of use”; this context is both “an internal linguistic context built by the language patterns inside the text” and “an external non-linguistic context drawing [readers] to ideas and experiences in the world outside the text” (18). Thus, cognitive stylistics (like other stylistic approaches) requires that both the internal and external contexts of the text be considered for a more holistic analysis. What follows is a brief description—the external context—of each story to better understand the cognitive stylistic analysis later. The five stories analyzed in this study are Si Kian (2017) by Weng D. Cahiles, Water Lilies for Marawi (2018) by Heidi Emily Eusebio-Abad, Si Laleng at ang Lakbay-Paaralan (2020) by Mon Sy, Kakatok-Katok sa Bahay ni...