THE SOFT IRON FIST: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE SPEECHES OF PRESIDENT DUTERTE ON WOMEN

This descriptive qualitative study seeks to unravel the linguistic elements and ideology from the speech of President Rodrigo Duterte on women. The study examined the three (3) speeches from the archive of the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) and qualitatively analyzed using Chilton's theory of political discourse and van Dijk's Framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. Using van Dijk's (2004) framework, this study analyzes the micro, macro, and superstructure strategies used by President Duterte in delivering speeches that involve women and draw a discursive construct that emphasize whether or not the president is sexist. Hence, the hidden ideologies of the president will be unraveled. The data were linguistically classified according to the microstructure elements of the discourse and then classified thematically according to the macro and superstructure level. The findings showed that there are different microstructure elements used by the President according to the time and context that serve a function depending on his intention. The foremost result of this research evinces that by combining the classified micro implication and evoked themes, manifestation of ideology of power plays a role in maintaining representation in communication.