Abedeh Mirzaee
Abstract
With the spread of coronavirus in Iran, the government cancelled public events and declared the necessity of closing crowded centers, including religious places. Following this announcement, some people in Mashhad and Qom protested by entering the holy shrines. These actions were quickly reflected in ...
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With the spread of coronavirus in Iran, the government cancelled public events and declared the necessity of closing crowded centers, including religious places. Following this announcement, some people in Mashhad and Qom protested by entering the holy shrines. These actions were quickly reflected in cyberspace. On twitter- a social networking Web site- which is possible for the users to debate, A group of users considered the opposition to health orders contrary to religious law. Another group contrasted religion with science. The present study aims to study these debates and the main question is that what strategies each group used to express its beliefs and viewpoints? For this purpose, 170 Persian tweets containing the keywords "religion" and "corona" were selected and examined using the Van Dijk Model. Data analysis showed that the most common linguistic tools used by users to represent their beliefs and ideologies are the two strategies of "distancing" and "cursing". Since the role and the influence of social networks, e.g., Twitter, are undeniable and tweets can shape social actions, the conflict observed in this space can also extend to the community and cause tensions. The results of this study and doing similar studies can help to identify the cause of these conflicts and provide the basis for empathy and the possibility of beneficial dialogue between different ideologies and thus ensure social stability.
Ebrahim Rezapour; Shiva Ahmadi
Abstract
Nominalization is one of the metaphors introduced by Halliday, which is a part of ideational meta-function. The present research study is an attempt to investigate the role of nominalization in political Persian and English discourses from Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective. ...
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Nominalization is one of the metaphors introduced by Halliday, which is a part of ideational meta-function. The present research study is an attempt to investigate the role of nominalization in political Persian and English discourses from Van Dijk’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) perspective. In so doing, it attempts to answer the following research questions: (1) Does nominalizations have any role in cohesion and coherence as well as in marginalization and highlighting in the text? (2) What’s ideological role of nominalization in Persian and English political discourse? (3) In which discourse (Persian or English) more nominalizations are used? By studying 22/5 pages of English newspapers (Guardian, USA Today, Telegraph and New York Times) and 22/5 pages of Persian newspapers (Keyhan, Qods and Shargh) focused principally on Iran’s nuclear program negotiations, it was discovered that nominalization can cause marginalization and highlighting by changing information construction of the sentence (theme and rheme), referring to presuppositions, using entailment, omitting the agent and changing the mental models. Nominalization helps the author to make reference to the background knowledge of the reader without giving any repetitive information (coherence). It also helps the writer to use nouns (next to each other) which have the same conceptual meaning (cohesion). Furthermore, it can be concluded that this metaphor is used more frequently in Persian newspapers than in English ones.
