The Role of Keywords in Discourse AnalysisA Case Study of Jalal Al-Ahmad's ‘Khasi dar Mighat’ and ‘Gharbzadegi’

The projection and reflection of thoughts, beliefs and generally ideology in linguistic forms is one of the considerable foci in many areas of linguistics, including critical discourse analysis. Literary texts are adopted from authors' hidden ideology to direct addresser toward what they have in their mind. On the other hand, with the development of studies on corpus linguistics, the analysis of large volumes of linguistic data has already been provided. One of the important concepts in linguistics is keyness. Keywords do not mean the most frequent words in a corpus, but rather words that have a higher frequency in a particular text than is expected of a corpus. In this study, based on Baker's (2006) theoretical approach, we analyzed the keywords in two works of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, "Khasi dar Mighat" and "Gharbzadegi", investigating the social and political atmosphere of the works. To this end, after creating a reference corpus of Al-e Ahmad's other works, Word Smith tools was used for data analysis and 20 keywords were extracted and analyzed in the form of sample sentences.The results showed the reflection of Jalal al-e Ahmad's ideology such as criticizing the westoxification, caroxification, rooting failure causes, achieving Iranian society for freedom, and attempt to preserve cultural identity in these two works.