Exploring Monosemy in Political Editorial Articles from a Student Publication Through Critical Discourse Analysis

The study of monosemy has gained scholarly attention for its role in enhancing precision and reducing ambiguity in political and editorial discourse. Student publications often address governance, education reforms, youth involvement, and community welfare, reflecting students’ critical engagement with societal issues. However, previous research on editorial language has primarily examined rhetorical strategies, with limited focus on the use of monosemy in student publications. This qualitative research, grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), investigates the occurrence of English monosemy in political editorial articles written by students at Davao de Oro State College. A total of thirteen (13) articles, randomly collected from the Facebook pages of student publications between September 2022 and September 2024, served as the corpus for analysis. The study categorizes the types of monosemy employed, including contextual, diachronic, synchronic, functional, lexical, pragmatic, and semantic, and explores their communicative functions. Data were analyzed using CDA and validated through expert review. Findings reveal that student publications frequently employ monosemic terms, with semantic monosemy emerging as the most dominant type. The study also shows that monosemy fulfills multiple functions, with the ideational metafunction being the most prominent, followed by interpersonal and textual functions. Future research is encouraged to examine monosemy across diverse writing genres such as academic reports, business documents, and creative nonfiction. Exploring its contributions to clarity, precision, and efficiency in professional and literary communication would provide valuable insights. Moreover, adopting mixed method approaches, including linguistic analysis, surveys, and case studies, could further illuminate how monosemy enhances understanding across different fields. Its significance in legal, scientific, and instructional writing should also be investigated to refine specialized discourse, ensuring effective knowledge dissemination and interpretation across disciplines.