Exploring Redefinitions of COVID-19: The Case of Philippine Leading Newspapers

With the massive impact of COVID-19 in the lives of many Filipinos, many different connotations about the pandemic emerged. Therefore, using the news discourses of COVID-19 in three Philippine leading newspapers, namely The Manila Bulletin, The Philippine Daily Inquirer and The Philippine Star, this descriptive-qualitative study explored the redefinitions of COVID-19 through paraphrase analysis. This study used a self-built corpus consist of national news articles published in the said newspapers. Results show that 10 paraphrases of COVID-19 used the formula COVID-19 is, 2 used COVID-19 has, while only 1 used … is the COVID-19. Based on the paraphrases of COVID-19, the following redefinitions were explored: COVID-19 is an enemy; COVID-19 is a threat to people’s lives; COVID-19 is less terrifying with the development of vaccines; COVID-is a virus that many people still do not understand; COVID-19 is worse than other illnesses and diseases; and COVID-19 is an eye-opener. The redefinitions drawn from this study could make a great contribution to people’s understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic and for the investigation of the language features of other discourse objects