Linguistic Analysis on the Philippine Crime News Broadcasts

This study determined the linguistic devices manifested in the corpus of crime news broadcasts and investigated the strategies employed by the Filipino Journalists in constructing the crime news broadcasts. This study is descriptive - qualitative in nature employing Linguistic Analysis framework, which brought the analysis to two (2) levels: analysis of the devices and on the strategies. The study gathered and transcripted twenty-five (25) mainstream crime news broadcasts from the different television channels in the Philippines from January to May 2015. These corpora were analyzed using the lens of IR Galperin and van Dijk’s Socio-Cognitive Model.

Findings revealed that phonetic devices such as alliteration, cacophony, assonance, rhyme and onomatopoeia were present in the corpus; lexical devices like epithet, metonymy, epigram, pleonasm, personification, proverbs and zeugma; and, syntactical devices such as enumeration, gap-sentence-link, asyndeton, rhetorical questions, antithesis, repetition and represented speech were mostly demonstrated and manifested in the sentences of the crime news broadcasts. Moreover, strategies such as use of figures and statistics strategy, metaphorization strategy, authoritarianism strategy, blame transfer strategy, dysphemism, positive-self and negative other strategies and source avoidance strategies were adopted in the construction of crime news broadcasts. These devices and strategies made most of the statements and details contextual and implied. In addition, these have also assisted audiences to better appreciate, comprehend and discover the truth in news