Philippine Children’s Stories as Protest: A Cognitive Stylistics Approach

Abstract

61.1 – 2023 | 3 Protest, as Cambridge Dictionary defines, is “a strong complaint expressing disagreement, disapproval, or opposition.” When protest is conveyed through children’s stories, how is the target reader made to recognize the complaint? What linguistic choices—structural patterns and deviations—make the protest content salient, accessible, and meaningful to the child reader? What other literary devices does the writer use to foreground the protest represented in the story? These are some questions addressed in this analysis of five Filipino children’s stories published in the Philippines from 2016 to 2022—the period when particular sociopolitical events, controversies, and issues gave rise to the publication of such stories. While the stories are published as picturebooks, this study opts to exclude the illustrations and focuses instead on the language of the original text (and not the translation). The reason is to discover how writers—not the translators—make the representation of protest accessible and comprehensible to the child, who may not have enough background knowledge on the matter. Four of the stories are written in Filipino and one is written in English. Being official languages in the Philippines, both English and Filipino are used as a medium of instruction in public and private schools. Both languages are taught as a subject at all educational levels. It is thus safe to assume that all five stories target Filipino children. With a focus on the language of the books—whether English or Filipino, cognitive stylistics is employed as the analytical tool of the study.