Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Political Campaign Advertisements in the Philippines

This study was centralized on explicating how the meanings of the identified political television advertisements are constructed and communicated through different modes such as verbal, visual and audio. The researcher used a qualitative method employing multimodal discourse analysis in the conduct of the study. A total of 31 political television advertisements from the 2022 Philippine elections were extracted from YouTube as the study's corpus. The findings revealed that, in the verbal mode, politicians strategically used language to strengthen their campaign messages and influence voter perception. This form of communication involves informative function, aesthetic function, directive function, phatic function, and expressive function to convey meaning and intentions, impacting social interaction and communication. In the visual mode, politicians established interactive meaning by fostering a sense of connection and engagement with viewers. This was achieved through techniques such as incorporating text and slogans, displaying national symbols, and utilizing political body language during their presentations. Lastly, in the audio mode, politicians utilized elements such as background music, sound effects and ambient noises, and voiceover to enhance emotion and atmosphere in their political campaign videos. Overall, it was revealed that politicians employ verbal, visual and audio elements to effectively convey their message.