A Corpus-based Investigation of the Words Used in the Representation of Offender, Victim, and Crime in Iranian Press based on Critical Stylistics Framework

The present study has investigated the ideological structure of the Iranian newspapers in terms of the words used in representing the offenders, the victims, and the crimes in the framework of critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010). To this end, based on a systematic random sampling, the crime-related texts were collected from six most widely published newspapers as Keyhan, Ettelaat, Resalat, Javan, Aftab, and Shargh from May 2016 to June 2017. Then, 50 issues of each newspaper were randomly selected and a one million-word corpus was developed and analyzed by AntConc software. The findings indicated that among 81 words used in crime representation, the crimes against individuals had the highest frequency with 33% and moral crimes with 1.5% were the least frequent. Also, the analyses of 108 extracted target words representing the offender and 76 extracted target words representing the victims showed that representing offenders and victims were based on age, gender, family relationships, occupation and social role, role in crime, as well as depersonalized representation. The representation of the offenders has been carried out most frequently in terms of the role in committing the crime with 62% and least frequently based on age with 4%. The representation of the victims has been done most frequently based on gender with 31.5% and least frequently in terms of occupation with 4%.