Semiotic analysis of the Facebook postings of grade 11 learners via syntax and semantics

Abstract

This paper attempts to analyze the January Facebook postings of Grade 11 Students of Bunguiao National School. The analyses carried out in the paper covered the textual contents of the postings via the interplay of syntax and semantics—that is, the subject of the post, a grammatical function vis-à-vis the semantic role. This paper claims that the forgoing interplay analysis corroborates the findings in the themes (the semantics) of the different contents of the posts, the non-textual postings: photos, smileys/emoticons, and videos. The analyses of the semantic contents of the postings were analyzed via coding, categorizing and theorizing. As this paper is in part qualitative in nature, the participants, whose FB posts have been subjected to analyses, have been chosen purposively. A small facet of the paper involves a quantitative analysis, i.e. the frequency counts of the interpenetration of syntactic and semantic constituents of the textual postings of the participants. At some extent, this paper draws upon the mixed methods approach in its attempt to put the data under scholarly lucubration.