Material Processes in Philippine Department of Health’s English Press Releases on COVID-19: A Transitivity Concordancing Analysis
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic might be considered as a disruptive moment in history. This small-scale study was motivated by the preponderance of this pandemic. It attempted to determine the roles and goals of the Philippine DOH as reflected in its complete set of 30 official press releases published during the peak of the pandemic from February 2020 to March 2020. The relatively short and early period of the COVID-19 pandemic could largely speak about crisis management of the Philippine’s Department of Health (DOH). The study employed the theoretical and analytical grounding of Material Processes and transitivity concordancing under Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. With the aid of AntConc and UAM Corpus Tool, results showed that the Philippine DOH painted itself as the Ensurer, the Monitorer and the Receiver. Its goals focused on the ‘Strategic Moves’ in combatting the pandemic. The foreground of these ‘Strategic Moves’ and the ‘Person/Public-Related’ goals might mean that it intentionally painted and privileged itself as a pro-people department. Such linguistic choices might have significantly mitigated public anxiety during the height of the crisis. I offer recommendations in terms of comparative studies of crisis management within the different spheres of world Englishes. The paper hopes to provide readers with the insights into how a government uses its linguistic resources in crisis management.
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References
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