Discourse

Abstract: This study explores emotive language in lyrical nature writing from the perspective of ecolinguistics in four nature textbooks. In fact, embodied mind style is explored by considering emotive language as a linguistic phenomenon that can inject into the readers' minds the sensorial, emotional, and psychological experiences of the lyricist. The interrogation of emotive language is based on Attitude subsystem of Appraisal Analysis, which consists of Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation (Martin & White, 2005). The analyses of the linguistic portrayal of Affect -based on the modified Affect system sub-categories, including Un/Happiness, Dis/Satisfaction, In/Security, Dis/Inclination, and Surprise -revealed the prevalence of Insecurity in the textbooks by contemporary nature writers and Happiness in the textbooks by their predecessors. Moreover, the Judgement and Appreciation analyses suggest that moral sentiment and aesthetic emotion are indispensable parts of lyrical nature writing that can awaken humility and sympathy in the minds and hearts of the readers.

Nineteenth-century Britain, also known as the Victorian Britain, was the age of prosperity, advancement, the dominance of the British Empire, liberality, and enhancements in diverse social grounds. Through the light of New Historicist approach, the present study comes to critically question the idealism of the Victorian era and particularly that of the 1880s. Through exploring George Bernard Shaw’s Widower’s House it is intended to provide an illuminating understanding of the different aspects of the Victorian England. Focusing on the works of literature, New Historicist critical stadnpoint brings about less subjective views towards the past and a clearer view of all incidents. The present study seeks to demonstrate that England, and more specifically London as the centre of the nineteenth-century world, was not the suggested paradise described in newspapers but rather a city in which poverty enslaved people and suffocated them in dreadful houses built around the city without having basic facilities. Sartorious in Widowers’ Houses , as a brutal slum landlord who keeps his tenants in such a dreadful condition, represents the owners of such indecent houses which have been rented to poor classes of society. This research lastly demonstrates the controversy of the state of the city suggested by authorities and the true state suggested by the author. 

Understanding the policy cycle, as well as scrutinizing the text of hidden and obvious policies and rules, requires a model of discourse analysis based on which discursive ap-proaches of policy makers are understood and estimated. However, when it comes to presenting a policy model, we have to use the views of policy theorists to see how a problem as a "public goods" can be found in the policy agenda setting. Regarding public policy-making procedures, quantitative or descriptive approaches, in studies the state, are often used to pathologizing policies or to obtaining policy advice models. However, this paper attempts to show that studies the state is a discourse that is described by the dominant discursive signifiers in the target society in which policy-makers make mean-ing to concepts. If we assume that the policy making cycle is something other than a several stages, such as defining a problem, finding a solution to it, decision making and implementing, then it is clear that the definition of a problem, whether the presentation of solutions and the process of decision making and its implementation, cannot be out-side the discourse. Therefore, public policy at the macro level and studies the state, as one of its examples and functions, is a discursive, which its understanding is possible only if the dominant discourse and its relation to the realities of the society in question are well understood.

This study tries to show that how viewpoint functions in discourse. As it will be clarified, it is highly related to the intention of the speaker/writer, and as a result, the orientation (s)he adopts in the discourse. Deictic markers function as discourse markers to fix and anchor time, place, agent, and other discursive elements. In this way, the viewpoint adopted by the enunciator/utterer is determined. Different types of viewpoint, then, are introduced and exemplified. Its relation with perspective is also examined.

This research paper is an investigation of Khaled Hosseini’s seminal fiction The Kite Runner from the perspective of New Historicist approach of reading a literary work. The concepts of history and discourse, recurrently employed by Foucault, Montrose, and Greenblatt, provide the theoretical background of the present research. The plot of the novel is devoted to presenting a vivid picture of the socio-cultural conditions of Afghanistan at the period of war and crisis. During the time, many wars and conflicts were imposed upon Afghanistan for the interests of foreign powers. Russia invaded Afghanistan, and it ended up in Taliban war, hunger, uncertainty in the subjects’ lives, and refugees question. Russian army had destroyed the village, school, and natural resources of Afghanistan while America indirectly dominated there to support the Taliban against Russia in the cold war period. The Kite Runner including historical facts about Afghanistan’s multi-layered conditions, let the readers face the true nature of war, terrorism, and Taliban in the country. Exploring the cultural crisis and ethnic conflict represented in the novel is conducted in a close association with the New Historicist’s concept of “textuality of history and historicity of text”.

This study tries to critically unravel the way Islam is represented in western discourse through establishing the relationship between language and ideology, the forms it takes and its potential effect. To that end, headlines from widely circulated print media of the west including the Independent, the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and The Times from January 1, 2008 to December 30, 2012 were selected and Islam and Muslim reproductions were studied therein. This study was carried out using a synthesis of Edward Said's notion of "Orientalism" and Van Dijk's notion of "ideological square", characterized by "positive self-presentation" and a simultaneous "negative other presentation". The analysis demonstrated that Islam is repetitively stereotyped and Muslims are negatively represented, both through various types of linguistic choices selected and via special construction of the headlines.  The educational implications of critical discourse analysis in general and the present study in particular are discussed in relation to teaching, learning and translating the English language.

This study aimed to investigate the effect of teaching discourse markers (DMs) on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ speaking achievement. In the first step, 60 homogeneous intermediate students out of 110 were chosen from a private English language institute and randomly divided into two equal groups, namely an experimental group and a control group. Then they were pretested through a researcher-made speaking test. During the treatment, the experimental group was taught DMs by conversations. Then, they found the DMs in transcriptions of conversations. Also, the researcher used a researcher-made booklet containing the instructional materials related to DMs to be taught to the learners. On the other hand, there was not any direct instruction to DMs to the students in the control group. They only narrated the assigned storybook, and performed conversations by role play. These posters were used based on the related topics of the learner’s textbooks. After the treatment which took 12 sessions, the researcher administered the modified version of the mentioned pre-test as the post-test to find out the effect of the treatment on the participants’ speaking achievement. When the data were collected, one-way ANCOVA was run to analyze them. The results showed that there was no significant difference between experimental and control group in the post-test. Indeed, the findings indicated that teaching discourse markers (DMs) did not have any effect on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ speaking achievement.

This qualitative study aimed at critically analyzing the curricular materials for the teaching of English in Iran. The objective was to evaluate the adequacy of the content and ideological assumptions of EFL textbooks, focusing on the conceptual metaphors related to the concept of success. The study was conducted within the frameworks of Critical Pedagogy and Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). The spirit of these two approaches lies in their rejection of all forms of domination, establishment of a theoretical discourse that enables social action, and detection of the hidden relationships between language, power and ideology through metaphorical encodings. To achieve the objective of the study, the analytical tools proposed by Chartres-Black were employed. The results of material analysis revealed that preparation and imposition of cultural materials may create situations in which identity conflict and violence are inevitable, and that the avoidance of such situations requires educators to intervene, with a mentality that education is liberating practice.  

Based on David Gauntlett’s Web 2.0 approach of media audiences, this article argues that while Islamophobic discourses may be hegemonic in the British media in general, and the online media in particular, counter-Islamophobic ones have real potentials to subvert the anti-Muslims hegemony in contemporary Britain. Online media users, both as producers and consumers of mass-mediated representations, are empowered to blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual spaces in the construction of different conceptions of their own identities as well as of those of the others. To this end, comparatively, the comments of the users of two YouTube videos are analyzed and critically appraised to identify how they prosumed the different representations of Muslim communities of/in Britain. It is suggested that YouTube users contribute, from their respective subject positions, to the construction of diverse conceptualizations of their own identities and those of others as well. Their prosumed representations both entrench and defy a hierarchy of Islamophobic and Islamophallic images of Islam and Muslims in contemporary multicultural Britain.

This study examines conceptions of outsiders to the polity, focusing on the lexical items migrant(s), refugee(s), and exile(s) in both internet- and print-based sources. Drawing primarily on a subsection of the Genealogies Internet Corpus consisting of left-wing sources, I argue that left-wing politics is currently caught up in the rhetoric of the right and of mainstream institutions in society, largely reproducing the same discursive patterns even as it sets out to challenge them. Dominant patterns in left-wing Internet sources reveal, for example, that the economic migrant vs. political refugee distinction enforced by mainstream institutions remains largely intact, that the assumption of a “refugee crisis” unfolding in Europe is accepted at face value, and that the left is entangled in the same politics of labeling imposed by the right, reproducing designations such as “undocumented migrants” uncritically. Refugees and migrants, moreover, are represented as victims with no agency, are discussed in legal terms that serve to dehumanize them, and are repeatedly “quantified” as a homogenous and potentially problematic category. Acknowledging the contagious nature of dominant discourses and the difficulty of finding an alternative language with which to argue against established institutional rhetoric, the study further explores historical models that appear more consistent with the values espoused by left-wing politics today. It examines a subcorpus of modern English translations of ancient Greek texts such as Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War and Herodotus’s Histories to demonstrate the viability of adopting a different conceptualization of refugees and other outsiders to the polity that may be drawn from classical antiquity—and/or from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century receptions of texts originating in classical antiquity—and the possibility of developing an alternative discourse with which to speak about migrants in the present.

This study aimed to assess the quality of English translations of Imam Khamenei’s (D. Ẓ. A.) letters addressing the youth in the West based on House’s revised (1997) model of translation quality assessment. Such texts are considered political and/ or religious, and their translations require meticulous quality assessment. Yet, rarely did the researchers find any study addressing this important area of translation. Therefore, the current study, which employed a qualitative type of research, focused on the translation of such type of texts. The assessment revealed dimensional mismatches between the original and the translated versions in the areas of field, tenor, and mode. The findings of the current study can help improve the quality of the translation of the speech.

Understanding how discourse is spatialized needs a conceptual ground for the discussion, and this study believes that the Foucauldian view is the right one. With a non-cartesian attitude, Michel Foucault considered the body as space and used archaeological and genealogical analysis to study its productive conditions. In his archaeological study, Foucault sought to analyze changes in knowledge or discourse through historical periods. In the genealogical one, he revealed discourse emergence conditions via mechanisms of power. Taking Foucault's epistemic framework, power and knowledge have a mutual relationship, and spaces represent power/knowledge. This paper explores spatial discourses in Naghsh-e-Jahan Square of Isfahan (1591-1941 A.D.) as the last public-government square from the Safavid era. Ultimately, the spatial discourses of the Naghsh-e-Jahan square can be traced by techniques of domination in different periods of history; the discourse of Islamization through sovereign power in the Safavid era, the discourse of modernization through disciplinary power in the Ghajar era, and the modernization, civilization, and nationalism through disciplinary power and biopower in the late Ghajar era and during the first Pahlavi era.

Neglecting and ignorance of citizenship rights by the socio-political system is one of the soft war manifestations against the Islamic Revolution of Iran in recent decades. Accordingly, to defend and introduce the original Islamic thought in the field of citizenship rights, the present study aimed to explain the position of this concept and its derived components by examining the principles and perspectives related to citizenship rights in the Islamic Revolution foundations. To this aim, used library and descriptive method and discourse analysis of Laclau and Mouffe using Quranic verses and critical legal documents of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Then, the symbols of Islamic discourse on citizenship rights were extracted, and objective examples were studied in important legal documents of the republic. Citizenship rights in Islamic discourse are based on the semantic system from the central symbol of purified life and the signs of the principles of dignity, security, freedom and the executive guarantee of citizenship rights. Evaluating the status of citizenship rights in the social and political context of post-revolutionary Iran indicates that the Islamic Revolution discourse has a strong potential for fulfilling citizenship rights. The constitution addresses citizenship rights in various dimensions, including public-private security, judicial law, liberty rights in multiple sizes, participant rights in the administration of national affairs, economic, social and cultural rights, and the rights of vulnerable groups. The implementing citizenship rights specified in this law are guaranteed in parts of the Islamic Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code. 

This study set out to examine how stereotypes as social psychological phenomena are enacted in everyday discourse. Besides discussing how ingroups and outgroups are formed in mundane talk, it is argued that stereotypes are ideological constructs that are jointly achieved in social contexts. Moreover, it is assumed that the ways in which stereotypes are constructed and discussed in discourse are informed by a number of underlying moral conceptualizations which might justify the potential face-threatening acts and the impoliteness inherent in prejudiced talk targeted to a third party. The study is an ethnographic case study informed by an eclectic approach to the analysis of data so as to shed light on how the expression of thoughts and feelings are constructed as talk in ordinary social interactions unfolds and what these expressions achieve. The analyses revealed that the construction of outgroup stereotypes is a mutual accomplishment and possibly a face-threatening act moderated by mitigating discourse features

Introduction: Philosophers consider justice to be the moral virtue of society; That is, just as honesty, truthfulness and trustworthiness can be considered the virtues of individual ethics, justice is also the virtue of a society; Therefore, both morality and justice can be considered as the characteristics of an individual or society, especially justice has a special and distinct social aspect and is considered the society's morality. Justice is one of the concepts about which various theories have been proposed and people have presented various programs to realize it. Liberal democracy, which after the renaissance, religious reformism, and the enlightenment era, gradually opened its foothold in the theories of human sciences and historical developments, is the source of a kind of intellectual tradition known as humanism, and with this approach, it promotes a special discourse of justice. Considering this, the article was formed with the aim of investigating the concept of justice as a moral virtue of societies in the discourse of liberal democracy. Material & Methods: In this research, data collection was done in document-library form and data analysis was done with the "discourse analysis" method and based on the theoretical framework of " Laclau and Mouffe's discourse analysis". Conclusion: Theorizing about justice in the discourse of liberal democracy is influenced by the approach that places individual freedom, private property and humanism as the basis. The concept of justice in this discourse is based on ontological and epistemological foundations. Liberal democracy believes in instrumental rationality, absolute profit, individualism, welfare, individual inequality.

The importance of the historical study of the Russian and Ottoman neighborhood policy lies in the fact that, in addition to the importance of these two countries in geographical, social, cultural, political and economic dimensions, a large number of Iran's neighboring countries were somehow under the control of these two empires before independence. In this research, the historical process of Iran's relations with these two important neighboring countries has been studied using the descriptive method and discourse analysis of Lacla and Moufe with the approach of historical institutionalism. The results show that during the lifetime of the Ottoman Empire until the disintegration of this empire, coinciding with the Safavid to Qajar governments, we witness two neighboring discourses. The discourse of the first period, the discourse of structural divergence, later with the change of political, economic and social geography and the requirements of the world system, this discourse turns into the discourse of minimal convergence. The discourse of "structural divergence" was formed on the centrality of the neighborhood policy based on the tyranny of the kingdom. The discourse signs of structural divergence included geographical dominance, expansion of religious ideology, political divergence, economic divergence, and world trade. The minimal convergence discourse is based on the centrality of the political signifier based on the court's understanding of global realities. The semantic system of this discourse is based on the main signs of acknowledging the existence of the neighboring country, the unbalanced weight of different aspects of the relations between the two countries, and the continuation of divergence alongside convergence. However, in comparison, the central sign of the discourse of the neighborhood with Russia is tsarist imprudence and court tyranny, and the main signs are passivity against Russia's expansionism, "military weakness in exercising territorial sovereignty, weakness in attracting the Iranian peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, and giving in to disgraceful agreements." they give. With the formation of the Soviet Union and the beginning of a new discourse, Russian expansionism in Iran in its territorial form ended and the chapter of ideological confrontations between communism and capitalism began. The discourse of Iran's neighborhood policy with the Ottomans and Russia is like two pieces of a puzzle that are both complementary and effective on each other's growth. If Iran's neighborhood policy regarding Russia and Ottomans had the same importance for Iran's ruling body, it is possible that a different historical path would have been established for the region and Iran.

The translation of discourse markers in English versions of the Holy Qur’ān can significantly impact the quality of the translated text. Translators face the challenge of ensuring the accuracy and effectiveness of discourse markers when converting the original text into the target language. This study employed a qualitative research methodology to investigate the usage of English and Persian discourse markers in three translated versions of the Holy Qur’ān by Arberry, Shakir, and Yusuf Ali. Focusing on the renowned Surah Al-Baqarah, 286 verses were meticulously analyzed. Descriptive statistics, following Fraser’s (2005) framework, were applied to categorize discourse markers. The study identified various discourse markers falling into four distinct categories: elaborative, contrastive, inferential, and temporal markers. The results underscored the pivotal role of discourse markers in shaping the translation and structure of the Holy Qur’ān. These markers establish a cohesive link between content words and contribute to the overall coherence of Qur’ānic passages. The study recommends that translators exercise careful consideration in selecting and translating discourse markers to maintain the integrity and meaning of the text.

The Islamic Revolution, which is a breakthrough in the history of Iran, introduced some new concepts in the arena of national debate. Founded on Shi’ite political thought, this Revolution has in recent years followed a particular theory of justice that has its roots in Shi’ite doctrines, and this is evident in the ideas of Imam Khomeini (r) and the current Supreme Leader. While preserving its originality, the Shi’ite concept of justice has been subject to new readings befitting the requirements of each government. In spite of [continued] developments in the discourse on Shi’ite justice under various governments, Shi’ite principles of the concept of justice have nonetheless been kept intact in the system of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and this shows the presence of a complete theory in the field of political thought in the system of the Islamic Republic of Iran.