A Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis of Iran’s Three Presidents toward Palestine-Israel Conflict: A Case Study of the Statements Made in the United Nations General Assembly from 1998 to 2019

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, School of Literature and Humanities, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

Abstract

This study is based on Hart's approach (2010) which combines the tools of cognitive linguistics with critical discourse analysis. Accordingly, conceptual metonymy (Radden & Kövecses, 1999) along with the concept of antagonism (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001) is used to answer the question “how cognitive linguistics can be applied in critical discourse analysis and present a micro to macro analysis”. To this end, a corpus made of the Iranian presidents' (Mohammad Khatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad & Hassan Rouhani) statements in the United Nations General Assembly from 1998 to 2019 was studied with a focus on Israel-Palestine conflict to discover the nature of each president's discourse toward the conflict, using a three-level analysis. The micro level includes analyzing the metonymic relationships. At the meso level, a discursive interpretation is presented based on those relationships, and the macro one is a critical-cognitive explanation of the antagonistic concepts of the competing discourses. The findings approve the efficiency of such a combination and demonstrate that the three discourses use metonymy to foreground the identity-related dimensions of their common other (Israel) in order to highlight its negative traits. Also the metonymic relationships are used by each of the three discourses to make a cliché of the actions of that other.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Iranian Dialects & Linguistics
Volume 10, Issue 1
June 2025
Pages 1-22

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History

  • Receive Date: 16 December 2024
  • Revise Date: 05 May 2025
  • Accept Date: 20 May 2025

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