How is the Environment Framed in the Philippines in the Two Quarters of 2024?: A Corpus-Assisted Study on Public Online Articles

Abstract

Discussions on environment are unending stories as long as the human existence is concerned. This study investigated articles that framing the environmental condition in the Philippines. Roughly eighty-two online articles as corpus. Descriptive method is employed and used corpus analysis. AntConc application was utilized to produce corpora which summed to 50, 495-token. The findings revealed that environment as perceived by most Filipinos are the actual meaning of environment which refers to nature and surroundings. Though scholars believed the definition is not fixed because it would depend on the context. Linguistically, environment appeared as a physical space and concrete. There are derived terms also from the environment that semantically rooted from it, namely: environmental, environmentalist, environmentalists, and environmetally. The associated terms to environment and frequently used in the articles are waste, climate, government, water, city, energy, local, change, management, sustainable, plastic, resources, natural, development, communities, mining, pollution, efforts, people, and global. These words are found in the top 100 frequent terms in the corpus. The environment is also framed into eight frames according to Gamson and Modigliani wherein these frames were presented in the statements from the articles. These frames as mentioned are social progress, economic development, morality, scientific uncertainty, runaway science, public accountability, alternative paths, and conflict. While environmental knowledge is seen in the articles, it is noticeably that the environmental deep issues are not evident in these frames.