Mary Ann P. Malimas, Julie Ann D. Carreon, Natt Wesley Peña
Politics, especially in the Philippines, is a widely-known topic discussed by people and appears continuously in social media sites (e.g. Facebook and YouTube) as well as in the media (e.g. Television, radio programs, and newspapers). People engage themselves to listen to political speeches on election campaigns, press conferences, live broadcasts, or direct interviews delivered by their most favored politicians.Hence, this study investigated how Filipino women politicians, within the 2010-2016 campaign periods, constructed their campaign speeches in order to gain public support. Moreover, the investigation centered on Sharndama's (2015) parts of the speech outline and the linguistic features of women's speech styles by Lakoff (1975). The data involved ten campaign speeches of selected Filipino women politicians. There was one (1) campaign speech each by Nancy Binay, Pia Cayetano, Tingting Cojuangco, Risa Hontiveros, Jamby Madrigal, Gwendolyn Pimentel, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Leni Robredo and two (2) campaign speeches by Grace Poe. The results of the study revealed that the women politicians utilized all the six parts of the speech outline in their campaign speeches namely appreciations, declaration of intentions, international relations and foreign policies, unveiling plans and ideologies, appeal for unity, and ending. Also, Super polite forms prevailed among all the linguistic features while question intonation on declaratives was used the least. This paper recommends that local officials may use the results of this study as a basis to construct their speeches for campaigns and/or other purposes to make citizens sympathize and interpret that their goals are for the good of the society. © 2018 Asian E F L Journal Press. All Rights Reserved.
Department of Communications, Linguistics and Literature, University of San Carlos, Cebu City, Philippines
