The Iconic Representation of Social Actors in Discourse of News (A Critical Discourse Analysis)

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as one of the dominant branches of linguistics concerns discovering the hidden aspects of the language structure through clarifying the underlying levels of text and speech. CDA also indicates how to represent different types of truth through linguistic elements (micro-structures) and discursive structures (macrostructures). This study is an attempt to define and explain the ways of representing social actors in Persian news discourse to make it clear if the analysis of the critical discourse can reflect ideology and power of the underlying structure of this type of discourse and how much the structures can cause clarity or mystification of the message of news. To fulfill the objectives, benefiting from the socio-semantic features in Van Leeuween's model (1996), the news on channels 1 and 3 of the Islamic Republic of Iran TV was analyzed. The results show that in Persian news, socio-semantic features such as Exclusion, Inclusion, Passivation, Personalization,Indetermination,Association, Differentiation, Nomination and Generalization are utilized to a great extent. Moreover, the results show Persian news on channel 1 benefit more from the Van Leeuween's socio-semantic model in contrast with channel 2.