Reflection of the discourse of power in speech: A case study of the Iranian Foreign Minister, M.J. Zarif

This paper examined the power in speech in political discourse and how power was constructed and presented via selected words by politicians. Selected words were the weapons politicians drew upon whenever they wanted todefeat an adversary, persuaded their viewers, disguised disagreements, reconciled points of view, evaded a directanswer, mitigated responsibility, garnered the electoral support and, generally, manipulated reality. The study attempted to reveal the reflection of power and power relations in the discourse of politics within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). A collection of speeches given (in Persian and English) by the Iranian Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, in Iran and other countries were randomly selected and analyzed forthe intended categories. Hyland model (2005) was drawn upon in the analysis of metadiscourse categories. Theresults of the analysis of the data, including lexical item, syntactic structures, hedges and boosters employed by the speaker in Persian and English speeches, revealed no significant differences in booster markers but have significance difference in hedge markers employed in the assertion of power the two languages.

Keywords:

Political discourse , power relations , M.J. Zarif , CDA , Hyland model of metadiscourse