Moving in a Gyre: A Discourse Analysis of President Rouhani’s De Facto Inaugural Speech

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to critically analyze the discourse of the de facto inaugural speech presented by president Rouhani while receiving his presidential percept from the leader, to seek the ideology beyond his speech and to detect the point that to which of discourses, reformists' or principalists', Rouhani's discourse belong to. Based on Dijk's socio-cognitive model of critical discourse analysis the selected corpus' ideological and persuasive components are assessed. To this end and based on the model, the historical, political or social background of the election is discussed firstly. Then, the political groups and parties, specifically reformists and principalists, their ideologies and power relations are elaborated. Finally, based on the examination of all formal structure, lexical choice and syntactic structure, the presupposed and the implied notions are made explicit, to determine the ideology beyond the formal text. Comparing the extracted notions from the speech with the polarized viewpoints of two political parties, it was concluded that Rouhani tried to keep the golden middle path while presenting his ideas, trying to introduce himself a moderate person and base all his plans on moderation. His speech revealed the strategies to move in a gyre of ideas trying to avoid condemning any party or person of eminence in line to keep all parties in one line to make his move. Keywordsinaugural speech, socio-cognitive model, critical discourse analysis, reformists, prnicipalists IntroductionPolitics is the arena for contest in order to gain power to execute and for the ideology. The most versatile tool in the hands of politicians to put their political, economical and social ideas into practice is language. Language thus serves as the medium of delivering ideas. To scrutinize the hidden meaning and ideologies beyond texts different approaches have been introduced and taken into account. As Mozaffari (2009) stated, the impact of ideology on policy is generally acknowledged by scholars. That which is disputed concerns the modality and degree of ideological influence on the formulation and www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/selt Studies in English Language Teaching Vol. 3, No. 3, 2015 238 Published by SCHOLINK INC.execution of foreign policy. Worldviews are embedded in the symbolism of a culture and deeply affect modes of thought and discourse. Friedrich and Brzezinski (1965) and Walter (1987) suggest that ideology performs diverse functions.According to them it performs a cognitive function, serving as an analytical prism, and a normative function, providing specific policy prescriptions, a guide to action are distinguished. Mozaffari (2009) maintained that the general functions of ideology are legitimizing the political systems and justifying or rationalizing shifts in policy. More specifically, Barry Farrell draws a connection between the degrees of the impact of ideology on the nature of the political system.One of the areas pertaining to the analysis of texts to elaborate on the ideology beyond the te...

Word War: A critical discourse analysis of the UN general assembly’s annual debate, 2017

“…For instance, Sahragard and Moghadam (2015) analyzed President Rouhani's discourse with a case study of his inaugural speech. They utilized Van Dijk's socio-cognitive Model for their investigation and they claimed that Rouhani tried to reinforce his moderate nature in his discourse.…”