Discourse Analysis of Qesmat in Iranian Culture and Language

Culturology of language along with a historical analysis of it can lead to a better understanding of a culture, and may provide the opportunity to change or cultivate the wrong beliefs systems of a society. In fact, any culture can be cultivated by a deep understanding of its contexts, speech events, and social conventions. The reason for this is that language and culture cannot be entirely separated and they are interwoven. One of the commonly used concepts in Iranian culture is “qesmat” and its related collocations which needs detailed investigation of its roots and origin as well as its utilization. The article thus aimed at having a linguistic-historic look toward fatalism and analyzes it based on aspect hypothesis. In doing so, a total of 280 contexts were recorded in natural situations, transcribed, and later analyzed. The data reflected the attitude of people in different age groups, levels of education, and occupations toward fatalism. Hymes’ model of SPEAKING was then applied to scrutinize the aforementioned attitude. Moreover, the concept of "qesmat" and its related collocations were discussed. Through culturology of “qesmat”, a new notion under the title of "fatalism cultuling" was introduced, and “qesmat” was found to be a common feature of both "fatalism cultuling" and "indirectness cultuling". The results also reported the fact that there was a positive relationship between age and fatalism; however, this relationship became negative when it came to level of education.