Critical Discourse Analysis of President Marcos Jr.'s SONA Speeches: 'Bagong Pilipinas' in Focus

This study examined how personal, temporal, and spatial deictic expressions construct and legitimize the “Bagong Pilipinas” narrative in President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s State of the Nation Addresses from 2022 to 2025. It employed a qualitative, corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis anchored in Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, Deixis Theory, and Chilton’s Critical Discourse Space Theory. Official SONA transcripts were verified against audiovisual recordings, translated where necessary, cleaned, and processed using AntConc. Frequency and collocational patterns were used descriptively to guide the interpretation of linguistic choices at textual, discursive, and social levels. Findings revealed that personal deixis was the most dominant category, particularly the inclusive pronouns we and our, which constructed collective identity, distributed responsibility, and aligned the administration with the Filipino people. Temporal markers, especially now and today, framed governance as urgent and ongoing, while past and future references organized reform as a continuing trajectory of progress. Spatial expressions such as here, there, nationwide, and in our country anchored the discourse within national territory while distinguishing internal and external spaces. Collectively, these deictic strategies positioned the president as both a member of the national collective and an authoritative leader, reinforced national belonging, and presented political reform as shared, immediate, and territorially grounded. The study concludes that deixis functions beyond grammatical reference as an ideological resource for constructing unity, progress, nationalism, and political legitimacy. These findings demonstrate how linguistic patterns shape public perceptions of authority, citizenship, and governance. It contributes a longitudinal and replicable framework for analyzing Philippine presidential discourse and highlights the importance of critical language awareness in evaluating political communication.