Change Is Coming: A Critical Discourse Analysis of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s State of the Nation Addresses

The Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a growing discipline under Critical Linguistics that examines political discourses. Premised on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, the paper aims to critically analyze the 2016 and 2017 State of the Nation Addresses of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte to elucidate their meanings in terms of experiential, interpersonal and textual functions. The paper implements hermeneutic CDA method combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Results show that in terms of experiential function, Duterte dominantly uses mental processes than any other processes type in his addresses to demonstrate his accomplishments and government agenda. For interpersonal function, he purposely uses modal verbs, tenses and personal pronouns to establish his attitudes towards an opinion about the truth of a proposition expressed in the speeches. Likewise, the textual function reveals that Duterte’s whole addresses are coherent, accurate and logical. Thus, CDA provides a more comprehensive method to analyze public addresses.