A Corpus-Based Critical Analysis of the Representation of US Sanctions against Iran in the Western Media: the Case of NOW Corpus

With the 1979 Iran revolution, there has been an evolution in the logic of self and other in the foreign policy discourses of the Islamic republic of Iran and the USA, and these former two strategic allies, turned to the present antagonistic forces. From this historical point onwards, Iran-the USA relations and consequently, Iran and the West, was represented in a circle of agonism to antagonism. This issue has been considerable in both objective and subjective levels and Iran sanctions is one of its focuses. This study aims to investigate the hidden discourse in NOW, a web-based newspaper and magazine corpus, and to examine which signs and concepts were and forgrounded or backgrounded. The data were collected from NOW corpus from 2010 to 2019, and then analyzed in two micro and macro levels. In the micro level, with a focus on Iran sanctions items, the corpus was analyzed for the use of semantic categories. In the macro level, the representation of this issue was represented was investigated based on the approach of critical discourse analysis focusing on the hidden discourse of Fairclough, Laclau and Mouffe and van Dijk. Results show that some issues such as the reimposition of sanctions, their upcoming, violation, lifting sanctions, legislation and the names of different countries are foregrounded in this corpus. The most frequent topics in this corpus denote a one-sided view from the USA’s attitude, neglecting Iran’s reactions.