Representation of social actors in foreign policy discourse of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi via Van Leeuwenʹ socio-semantic model

Critical discourse analysis deals mostly with power and ideology. This approach attempts to detect unequal power relations and unravel the ideologies hidden behind texts. Accordingly, this article takes a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate how social actors are represented in the foreign policy discourse of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The analytical model used is Van Leeuwen′s socio-semantic framework (2008). The main objective of this paper is to explore how these representations are used to foreground favorite concepts and background least favorite ones. The findings of this study indicated a differential representation of social actors by Shah according to his aims and goals in that "self" identities are depicted as positive and active actors, while "other" identities are depicted negatively. Moreover, the results showed that from among the features suggested by this framework, "association" and "relational identification" are mostly used for referring to "self" identities, while "appraisement" is mostly used for referring to "other" identities.