Pragmatic Analysis on Political Text in Posters, Slogans and Jingles in Davao Del Norte, Philippines

Abstract

Elections in the Philippines covered with a lot of controversies. Among those recognized political parties, two were most coveted for a position. These are the Hugpong ng Pagbabago (HNP) and Partido Demokratiko Pilipino – Lakas ng Bayan (PDP – Laban). Meanwhile, due to the same interest of both parties, they fought one another for a position using striking, deceiving, and powerful words to convince the people. The purpose of this study is to identify the pragmatic acts on the political text in posters, slogans, and jingles. Employing a qualitative content analysis approach, the corpora were retrieved and purposively identified across Davao del Norte Philippines. Data were analyzed by identifying the pragmatic acts. Results revealed that the political paraphernalia used by the aspirant politicians that are based on the pragmeme consist of activity part or also known as interactants and textual part or context. In the context parts, it identified the pragmatic features such as Reference (REF), Inference (IR), Relevance (REL), Voice (VC), Shared Situation Knowledge (SSK), Metaphor (M), and Shared Cultural Knowledge (SCK). Also, the politician employed different contextual backgrounds to ‘pract’ declaring, comparing, emphasizing, offering, claiming, committing, and predicting. Thus, it is recommended to explore the features in the linguistics aspects to deepen the understanding of the language used by the political candidates for a specific position. Also, widen the scope of the study to pragmatize the language.