Philippine E-Journals

Global Structures of Press Statements

Maurie Liza M. Nivales

Discipline: Literature

 

Abstract:

To complete the picture of the writing learned in a culture (Dayag, 2005), researchers must also explore a variety of texts. The present study which focuses on the social media official press statements (OPS), a form of professional writing, is a response to this research gap. Thirty OPS on the Maguindanao massacre published on the Internet by representatives from various Filipino sectors of society were randomly selected from the Google search engine results webpage. The OPS were evaluated for organizational moves using Hoey’s (1983, in Dayag, 2009) Problem-Solution framework. Employing frequency count, the study showed that OPS writers of Philippine English (PE) most favored the “other” pattern, a pattern consisting of an organizational move which differs from Hoey’s (1983) problem-solution text. The result suggests that despite being an argumentative text and having been from a PE corpus, OPS has its own organizational move pattern, owing perhaps to its function in society as compared to other types of OPS. This difference in macrostructure seems to show that even among argumentative texts in the same variety of English, kinds may vary not only according to genre but according to function as well.