This study advances a more positive understanding and appreciation of culture by exploring how the Filipino value system ("pamantayan") manifest itself from an interpretive stylistic analysis of five award-winning Filipino short stories. Utilizing a three-step approach, the study first employed a linguistic feature analysis (formalist stylistics) of dialogues and narrations, followed by a textual-conceptual analysis (critical stylistics), and finally a value-system analysis using Jocano’s (1992) framework. The findings showed that diverse linguistic features such as synonyms, antonyms, collocations, symbolism, parallelism, repetition, and foregrounding are prevalent across the texts. Consequently, they play a pivotal role in expressing characters’ worldviews and attitudes toward key themes, including alienation, patriotism, and nostalgia. Through critical stylistics, the study further revealed how worldview, power relations, and ideologies are subtly enacted through language choices and narrative structures. A key insight concerns the Filipino protagonists’ struggles with alienation while dealing with foreign cultural orientations, norms, and traditions. Their experiences, gleaned from dialogues and narration, demonstrate how the texts encode and construct Filipino values situating them within broader socio-cultural contexts. These insights, culled from stylistic analysis, contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between language and culture. They also underscore the value of stylistic inquiry in illuminating cultural meanings embedded in literary texts. Theoretically, it offers a methodical framework and a critical approach to cultural studies through applied linguistics. Pedagogically, this study provides language teachers a novel perspective on integrating stylistics into instruction, enabling learners to deepen their understanding of the interconnections among language, culture, and literature.

Authors:
Richard Oandasan, University of Santo Tomas, Philippines

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Richard L. Oandasan is a full-time faculty at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Letters, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines. Currently, he is engaged in a service learning project called "GenZyntax."

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