The Comparative Study of the Linguistic Representation of Iranian and Western Actors of Iranâs Nuclear Program in International Media (Van Leeuwenâs Model (2008))

Aghagolzade, Ferdows; Kheirabadi, Reza; Golfam, Arsalan; Golfam, Arsalan

The Comparative Study of the Linguistic Representation of Iranian and Western Actors of Iranâs Nuclear Program in International Media (Van Leeuwenâs Model (2008))

Authors

Ferdows Aghagolzade ¹

Reza Kheirabadi ²

Arsalan Golfam ¹

¹ Associate Professor, Department of General Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

² Ph.D. Student, Department of General Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Revealing the unequal relations of power, which lead to hegemony in media and make audiences aware of it, has been in the center of attention for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for a long period of time. Van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic network of social actors is considered as a competent framework for linguists and discourse analysts to do so. In this article, we study 50 hard news and articles published in leading international news agencies and newspapers about Iran’s nuclear program during November and December 2010 to analyze the way the social actors of both sides of the quarrel have been represented in the media. The results showed that although the international news agencies and newspapers claim to stay neutral in representing the events, some linguistic mechanisms to represent Iranian social actors differently from the western ones are obvious and Iranian social actors playing role in this case are shown as irrational hardliners while western counterparts are introduced as logical peace seeker ones.

Keywords

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

International media

Iran’s nuclear program

Van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic network of social actors