A Contrastive Corpus-Based Approach to the Expression of Adversarialness across English and Persian: A Case Study of Political Press Conferences

Abstract

With the point of departure in discourse analysis (DA), this corpus comparative study concentrated on sequences with adversarial questions in political press conferences to investigate the differences in the use of adversarial questioning between two contexts, namely, English and Persian political press conferences, and particularly highlight the strategies which were used by journalists in such sequences of talk journalists and politicians so as to show the importance of improving linguistic proficiency in EFL context. For this reason, this study analyzed a corpus of data from some political press conferences with American and Iranian Government which is randomly selected from appropriate websites between 2007 and 2021. The study applied Clayman, Heritage, and McDonald (2006) for quantifying adversarial questions as exhibited by the press to the questions addressed the Presidents of Iran and the United States. Questions from selected conferences were coded according to adversarialness. Frequency and chi-square tests were used for analysis. The results showed significant difference across the 2 corpora in some journalists’ questions. In terms of question design, accountability questions in Iranian journalists’ questions as Persian corpus indicated higher frequency. In addition, in referencing frames, higher frequency was observed in declarative questions in Persian corpus. However, English corpus displayed higher frequency in other-referencing frames. Finally, in content adversarialness, global adversarialness indicated higher frequency in Persian corpus. Consequently, the results showed that adversarial questions were used in Persian corpus more significantly than English corpus. The results of the study not only will help the students gain linguistic competence, but it will also improve their overall language proficiency.