Code-switching in television-mediated political campaign ads in the Philippines

The present study examines code-switching in a political type of discourse, particularly the television-mediated political campaign advertisement (TPCA) in a multilingual society such as the Philippines. In a well-planned and carefully scripted TPCA, the mixing of two or more languages such as English and Tagalog is not accidental. Culture may sometimes dictate what is appropriate to use in varied situations. There may be different reasons for choosing or mixing one language with another in a multilingual society. In this study, the functions, occurrences, and patterns of code-switching in a TPCA are examined and analysed. The corpus is composed of TPCAs in the Philippine senatorial elections. Some TPCAs were recorded during „real time‟ or the actual time they were shown on television during the campaign period while the rest are acquired from the Internet. The occurrences of code-switching (CS) are traced and drawn from the three types of TPCA texts: the spoken, written, and sung. The structure of CS is generally described in terms of its location in a discourse, whether intersentential or intrasentential. The analysis of functions is based on Gumperz‟s (1982) framework for conversational functions of code-switching namely: quotation, addressee specification, interjection, reiteration, message qualification, and personalization versus objectivization. Despite the predominance of Tagalog, code-switching from Tagalog to English is manifested in the TPCA. Code-switching may have many functions in a discourse; some of them are „involvement in the message‟, reducing social distance, or providing objective information – functions that are vital in persuasion, the overall function of a TPCA. Aside from eliciting the uniqueness of a TPCA as a type of political discourse, the present study uncovers a political genre that is reflective of its socio- cultural context through an examination of code-switching and the purpose it serves in discourse