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Revealing the unequal relations of power, which lead to hegemony in media and make audiences aware of it, has been in the center of attention for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for a long period of time. Van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic network of social actors is considered as a competent framework for linguists and discourse analysts to do so. In this article, we study 50 hard news and articles published in leading international news agencies and newspapers about Iran’s nuclear program during November and December 2010 to analyze the way the social actors of both sides of the quarrel have been represented in the media. The results showed that although the international news agencies and newspapers claim to stay neutral in representing the events, some linguistic mechanisms to represent Iranian social actors differently from the western ones are obvious and Iranian social actors playing role in this case are shown as irrational hardliners while western counterparts are introduced as logical peace seeker ones.

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Proverbs are the mirror of the culture of a community. The examination of proverbs on women can, therefore, help us better understand beliefs and attitudes of the speakers of a community towards women and the socio-cultural values of the same community. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze the representation of women in Gilaki (Eshkevarat variety) proverbs. The data have been collected via a structured interview with sixty native speakers (both men and women) who were over forty five years old and barely influenced by standard Persian. Since the method of this research is descriptive-analytic, the collected data were, first, categorized and described. It is worth nothing that the proverbs were semantically classified into eighteen categories encompassed by three different representations of women which are as follows in order of frequency: a. negative representation, b. positive representation, and c. neutral representation. The distribution of theses representations were analyzed within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Feminist studies. One of the important findings is that in Gilaki (Eshkevarat variety) speaking community, gender is perceived as an ideological structure. According to the rigid hierarchical relationships of dominance and inferiority, the social group of women is considered inferior and disadvantageous that counts for nothing.

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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.

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The concept of determinism has been studied in Hafiz poetry by many scholars. Some considered determinism, like many other concepts, as a means for literary creation, some viewed it as a justification for astute utterances, while others regarded it as the outcome of Hafiz’ own deterministic views. Though the first two accounts seem accurate, the third one seems imprecise. His literary creation style and worldview, indicative of his free will and open-mindedness, which was manifested in his poems, coupled with the inherent paradox between determinism and reformism, makes it hard to presuppose a relation between determinism and Hafiz’ worldview.
By employing an academic and methodological approach, while recognizing different interpretations, one can gain an understanding, which is closely related to Hafiz’ worldview, of deterministic propositions in his poetry. Following this approach, one should refrain from forming arguments on the basis of single verses. Therefore, the current paper has attempted to analyze deterministic propositions in Hafiz poems by applying Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe theory. Moreover, based on CDA’s presuppositions, language plays a major role in forming understandings and its means is not always clear. Hence, the paper was aimed at indicating that Hafiz’ use of deterministic propositions can be interpreted not as an indication of his worldview but as a method and medium to expand the discourse of astuteness and, at the same time, to undermine the hegemony of ascetic discourse, which had dominated the cultural atmosphere of Iran for centuries.
 

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The concept of determinism has been studied in Hafiz poetry by many scholars. Some considered determinism, like many other concepts, as a means for literary creation, some viewed it as a justification for astute utterances, while others regarded it as the outcome of Hafiz’ own deterministic views. Though the first two accounts seem accurate, the third one seems imprecise. His literary creation style and worldview, indicative of his free will and open-mindedness, which was manifested in his poems, coupled with the inherent paradox between determinism and reformism, makes it hard to presuppose a relation between determinism and Hafiz’ worldview.
By employing an academic and methodological approach, while recognizing different interpretations, one can gain an understanding, which is closely related to Hafiz’ worldview, of deterministic propositions in his poetry. Following this approach, one should refrain from forming arguments on the basis of single verses. Therefore, the current paper has attempted to analyze deterministic propositions in Hafiz poems by applying Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe theory. Moreover, based on CDA’s presuppositions, language plays a major role in forming understandings and its means is not always clear. Hence, the paper was aimed at indicating that Hafiz’ use of deterministic propositions can be interpreted not as an indication of his worldview but as a method and medium to expand the discourse of astuteness and, at the same time, to undermine the hegemony of ascetic discourse, which had dominated the cultural atmosphere of Iran for centuries.