A Genre Analysis on Philippine University Brochures

MA Thesis in Progress

Cris D. Barabas

University of San Carlos, Philippines

My thesis is a corpus linguistics approach in analyzing the discourse structure of

the promotional materials published by selected Philippine higher education

institutions. Drawing on thirteen (13) promotional materials produced by ten

(10) selected universities in the country between the years 2013-2015, I

analyze these materials using some frameworks in discourse analysis. First, I

am interested in identifying the rhetorical features and functions of these

promotional materials and will attempt to elaborate on the cognitive strategies

employed by the universities. I refer to the previous works of Hui (2009),

Askehave (2007), and Hajibah (2006) to facilitate a deeper discussion that can

be elicited from the linguistic content of the present materials. My aim is to

develop a framework from the local promotional materials. The second aspect

which I am investigating is the transitivity and verb processes patterns in each

rhetorical move. This is an aspect of Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional

Linguistics. I will also include Fairclough’s (1993) approach in textual analysis of

prospectuses which is located within the critical discourse analysis framework.

As with the previous work of Fairclough (1993), I am interested in investigating

the representations of actors and their social roles in the corpus, particularly

the universities and the prospective students. Lastly, keywords/lexical bundles

in the corpus will be extracted using Wordsmith in an attempt to identify the

word combination approaches such as collocations and free combinations. It is

the hope of this project to give some practical applications in the language of

advertising arts from the linguistic perspective.