Power talk: Seven speeches of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

Power is increasingly achieved through language. This is because much power in society is actually not physical, but mental. Instead of c0ntrolling others by bodily force, the powerful person controls their minds. their intentions and purposes; in fact, at times, s/he can make others act ass/he wants them simply by telling them to do so. What this means is, one of the crucial means to influence people’s minds so they will do what another wants is text or talk. The research proceeded by doing text analysis of seven speeches of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. However, due to constraints of space and time, the study focused only on speech acts. The speech acts considered were: representatives, directives, and commissives. The theoretical framework used in the study drew from the framework of Paul Chilton and Christina Schaffner, whici1 was to link political situations and processes to discourse types through an intermediate level, which they called strategic functions. These strategic functions are: coercion, dissimulation, legitimization and delegitimization. The research discovered that there does seem to be regular pattern of speech acts that may be considered mind-management in the speeches that were studied whether wittingly or unwittingly made. The recommendations are primarily to expand the study to include nonverbal elements in order to confirm the findings