Critical Discourse Analysis of naming strategy and representation of Iran in Time magazine from 1920s

Linguistic mechanisms of representation (Personalization/ Impersonalization ) of social actors in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), especially van Leeuwen’s approach to CDA has been longly in the center of attention. This prominence will be much higher when the subject of the study is naming strategy and representation of “Iran” as one of the most important actors of the Middle East and the socio-political and ideological rival of the United States of America. In this article, we studied the naming and representation (exclusion/inclusion) strategy of Time magazine toward Iran/the Islamic Republic of Iran within van Leeuwen socio-semantic framework. The data has been gathered from the archive of time magazine from 1920s to 2010 . The findings showed that both the frequency and the addressing method of Iran in Time magazine has been considerably divergent within decades and through the time. While the name of “Iran” has been mentioned for more than 5600 times in this corpus, the official title of “the Islamic Republic of Iran” has gone under an extremely exclusion process and repeated for only 8 times, all of these cases are oriented with clearly biased adjectives and modifiers. The findings of this research may be interesting for both scholars and public audience of the mass media.