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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 7:1 (2008) ► pp.53–70

Language as social practice

Persian newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran

| Department of linguisticsUniversity of Isfahan

This paper aims to investigate the language used by newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran. More precisely, the paper sets out to analyze how such a language is deployed to represent relevant hegemonic ideologies. The approach adopted for this purpose draws inspiration mainly from critical linguistics, where it is hypothesized that, as far as the pertinent metadiscourse goes, media genres serve to activate and perpetuate social power relations. In keeping with this theoretical stance, the paper argues that socially constructed texts can be said to perform two complementary functions; on the one hand, they shed light on the realities experienced in social life; on the other, they reveal such aspects of those realities as are constructed through the use of language. It is thus in this context that the media language used in the post-revolutionary Iran lends itself to analytical investigation, where the available data reveal the co-existence of three competing discourse processes of ‘Islamization’, ‘Iranian Nationalism’ and ‘Western liberalism’, relating to the third stage development of post-revolutionary Iran.

Keywords: ideology, Islamization, economic reconstruction, political reforms, competing discourses, topicalization, semantic borrowing
Published online: 26 May 2008
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.7.1.03amo
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