| Abstract |
This paper examines the patterns and commonalities as well as the folk elements in the personal narratives of some college students who are Sendong survivors from Iligan City. It employs the narratological approach which studies narratives芒聙聶 structural components to understand how repetitive elements, themes and patterns yield a set of universals that determine the makeup of a story (Pradl, 1984). Ten (10) written personal narratives of students who have had first-hand experiences of typhoon Sendong were selected based on the word count of at least 300 words. The various terms and phrases used to refer to the December 16, 2011 incident were identified and the presence of some folk elements was investigated. After that, the frequently employed common nouns and adjectives in the paragraphs discussing the events before, during, and after the flood were identified to determine the commonalities and patterns in these personal narratives.
Findings reveal that aside from the local term Sendong to refer to that December 16 incident, students also frequently employ terms like typhoon, tragedy, catastrophe and others. Most of these are accompanied with negative descriptive adjectives such as tragic, unforgettable, horrible, and unexpected. Out of the ten, four narratives contain folk elements, where three talk about animals and one about ominous sky suggesting upcoming calamities. More importantly, the topmost frequently used nouns include water (59 occurrences), house/s (55 occurrences), time (27 occurrences), rain (26 occurrences), and father (20 occurrences). In terms of the dominant descriptive adjectives, it is found out that strong/er is the most dominant (17 occurrences), then high/er (8 occurrences) and heavy as well as safe/r (7 occurrences, respectively). Overall, the common theme of the survivors芒聙聶 personal narratives on typhoon Sendong is the strong/er water or in short, the flood, which means that the stories in the narratives dominantly revolves around the discussion about the strong water they encountered during the typhoon. |
Mindanao State
University - Iligan Institute of Technology