Grammatical Positioning in Mediated Campus Opinion Discourse: A CDA-Informed Analysis of Student Publications at a Philippine State University

Abstract

This study examines how selected grammatical resources contribute to participant positioning, agency, and temporal framing in opinion articles published by four student publications at Mindanao State University–Marawi, Philippines. The study adopts a qualitative, descriptive-interpretive textual analysis informed by Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA), with the textual dimension serving as the principal analytical framework. The analysis focuses on personal pronouns, active and passive voice, and tense and aspect. The corpus consists of opinion articles from Ember, Daluyong, Scientia, and Ranon, the university's official student publications. The findings show recurring first-person plural forms, especially we, our, and us, which can construct collective participant identities while positioning the writer in relation to other social actors. Third-person forms such as they and their create textual distinctions between the writer’s represented collective and other groups, although their exact referents remain context-dependent. Active constructions make grammatical agents comparatively visible, whereas the agentless passive constructions in the sample foreground affected participants or events while reducing the grammatical prominence of agents. Present-tense constructions repeatedly represent conditions, evaluations, and institutional circumstances as current or relevant to the discourse situation. The discussion situates these patterns within research on mediated discourse, journalistic stance, identity construction, and representation. Rather than treating grammatical choices as transparent evidence of authorial intention or ideological manipulation, the study argues that they are resources through which campus opinion discourse makes social actors, relationships, responsibility, and temporality linguistically available. The article contributes a text-grounded account of student journalism as a form of mediated institutional discourse.