PILIPINAS: CONVERSATIONAL DOMINANCE ON THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE

Dominance in conversation captures the attention of the viewers and listeners that affects how people view the participants. Drawing on how language wields power, this analysis views dominance in conversation during debates and its effect on the political perception of the populace. With this hypothesis in mind, it answered two problems, who holds the dominance on the 2016 Presidential Debate and what conversational strategies have they employed on their utterances interruptions, questions, and amount of talk, and how does the dominance affect the candidates' bid for presidency. It utilized the Dominance Model propositioned by Zimmerman and West (1975) adopted by Alafifi (2021). It analyzed the transcribed debate produced by inquirer.net through quantitative method, which accounts the distribution of the conversational strategies used by the participants and qualitative to analyze the impact of the dominance during the debate on the candidates' political bid. The findings revealed that Poe dominated the debate with maintained high percentages on the three features: interruptions, questions, and amount of talk. However, Poe's dominance on the debate does not affect the bid of the candidates for presidency as Duterte and Roxas led the surveys and trends. By the result of this study, it is inferred that conversational dominance does not affect the candidates' political bid.