Vol. 6 (2016)

This volume of Langkit is intended to show the different researches that were
conducted in the different fields of social sciences and humanities specifically in linguistics, literature, language, and political science.

Calimbo’s article, entitled Deconstructing Myths via Humor: A Semiotic
Analysis of Philippine Political Internet Memes, for example, analyzes the role of political memes in exposing political ideological constructs which are naturalized or normalized in the Philippine society. Taking memes which focus on the “Daang Matuwid” (Straight Path) governance of the Aquino presidency as corpus of the study, and semiotics as tool for analysis, it claims that humor is basically aggressive and is effective in unmasking the dissatisfaction and resentment of the people towards the government. Semiotics, and its reading of signs within a system, is an effective analytical tool in reading the binary oppositions and contrasts of the “Daang Matuwid” concept with that of moral violations committed by the government. In a nutshell, the strength of the paper lies in its attempt to combine politics, ideology, popular culture and an emerging genre in media to convey a certain political message.

Quilab’s article entitled Libog Mo, Libog Ko: Ang Kalibugan at ang mga
Pagnanasa sa mga Akda ni Eros Atalia redefines and contextualizes the word “libog” which can mean “desire” in Tagalog, and “confusion” in Sebuano. Using the works of Eros Atalia, a Filipino contemporary writer as corpus of the study, and analyzing these from the psychoanalytic perspective, Quilab claims that although the first layer of meaning of the word is desire, as manifested in the erotic, sexual, and sensual scenes in Atalia’s work, it may also pertain to the political and social issues that are confronted by the characters which then lead to confusion. In the process, “libog” takes both meanings of desire and confusion. Quilab was able to draw out the subtlety and indirectness from the texts in order to capture the ambivalence of the meanings of the term. In the process, there is not only the merging of meanings, but of languages as well.

Pantaleta’s paper attempts to translate five poems by the Romantic poet John
Keats into Chabacano, a Spanish creole found in the Philippines and mostly spoken in the Zamboanga Peninsula. Pantaleta’s paper El Poesia Romantico: The Challenges of Translating John Keats to Chabacano probes into the process of translating English poetry into the creole and discusses three stages: Pre-Translation, During Translation, Post Translation. The researcher plunges into a discussion about form and meaning and how these fundamental variables are transformed, transferred, and distorted in the process of translation. Pantaleta discovers that the experimentation done in her study does not yield very successful results in terms of the transfer of meaning between two texts from different cultures. There are many roadblocks such as Keats’ literary lexicon constructing images that a translator such as Pantaleta cannot come to understand because she possesses only a limited understanding of the cultural idioms. This study, while probing into form to discuss the creation and transfer of meaning, opens up discussion about language revitalization of the mother tongues in the country.

Alejandrino’s paper is an attempt to put the Sebuano language and the Iligan
National Writer’s Workshop (INWW), the only writer’s workshop in Mindanao, and which aims to develop regional literatures of the country, in focus. The corpus of the paper are Sebuano poems found in the Poetry section of Volumes 1 to 20 (1994 to 2013) of the INNW proceedings. It is a preliminary study on the description of Sebuano figurative language and present emerging categories specifically available for Sebuano poetry’s figurative expressions which can be utilized to create a new material that focuses on figurative language expressed in Sebuano literature particularly in poetry. Using the Linguistic Deviation theory by Levin (1969) which enables to draw out the figurative expressions embedded in the poems, the study puts
forward new categories of figures of speech distinct to the Sebuano language allows the readers to imagine, observe, and feel experiences in new perspectives. Binti Alias’ paper looks into the language that is generated when people of the older generation interact with technology with reference to standard American English as used in Malaysia. The research looks into what happens to language when it is utilized through the medium of technology, especially text messaging by a specific group of people: those from the older demographic the researcher calls “senior generation.”

Binti Alias studies the difficulties the respondents encounter in language use and how they cope with these challenges in order to construct meaning they would like to convey. One of the mechanisms she discusses in her paper is the use of abbreviations. She also looks into the morphing of standardized language to fit into and goes through the communication channels we use today. The paper paints the nuances for language into the formal and informal registers and tries to find text messaging’s place in it.

The last paper by Enrique Batara is a descriptive analysis of two barangays’
risk reduction strategies against dengue, an infectious disease transmitted by
mosquitoes. These barangays, namely Barangay Kansungka and Barangay Gacat, Baybay, located in Leyte, an island in the Visayas region, have high incidences of dengue and therefore needs to be studied and analyzed. The paper primarily aims to 1) determine the informants’ access and exposure to information on dengue, 2) to ascertain informants’ understanding of dengue, 3) to find out the strategies the informants currently use to reduce risks of dengue, and 4) to determine the informants’ risk reduction strategies for dengue based on seasonal climate forecasts. Using focus group discussion as methodology for data gathering, the paper’s contribution to the growing literatures on strategies on disease outbreaks and risk reduction management is the necessity and significance of the recognition of the relationship between climate such as rainfall patterns and dengue outbreak. The local officials must be equipped with this ability.

The six articles in this volume speak of the richness of the scholarly endeavors and the vibrancy of the fields of the social sciences and how they yield different perspectives on how we look at concepts and ideas that are usually assumed to be given but actually reveal the complexity of the society where we thrive and live in.

Nelia G. Balgoa, DHS
Editor-in-Chief