Social actor representation in mining discourse in the Philippines: A critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This paper addresses the need to investigate media’s representation of mining issues in the Philippines, an unexplored linguistic field within Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It focuses on referential strategies used in naming the social actors (SAs) involved in mining issues from 2012 to 2017 by three national broadsheets. A sample of 224 news reports was analyzed at the sentence level, and was validated by software and two inter-coders. The study found that SAs were commonly named by their unique identities mainly through nomination and categorization strategies. The valuing of the “elites” in the mining discourse is also traceable in the prominent use of nomination strategies, particularly formalization and honorification. While these strategies reflect the conventional linguistic features of the news genre which reinforces specificity, formality, and brevity, it is evident that they were seldom used to refer to the mine workers, disenfranchising them in the process. The tendency of the media to influence public perception through its construction of societal issues demands readers to be skeptical of what they read and to be aware of the machination which underlies the process of discourse production.