Unveiling the Microstructure Elements of President Rodrigo Duterte’s Interviews: A Political Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This descriptive qualitative study seeks to unravel the microstructure elements of the interviews of President Rodrigo Duterte and how he represents himself and his opponents using political discourse analysis. The corpora consisted of his 30 recent interviews at the time of writing this paper and were retrieved in an online archive of the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO). The findings indicated that Duterte’s discourse has these various linguistic features: modality, attributions, disclaimer, presuppositions, validity claims, pronoun use, transitivity, passivation, number of game, lexicon, idioms, metaphors, intertextuality, and profanity. The study revealed that Duterte manipulatively uses language to reflect a positive representation of himself and negative representation of others, legitimizing his authority and delegitimizing those in opposition.