Nomination and Categorization in the Social-Political Poems of Farrokhi Yazdi Based on the Model of Van Leeuwen's Social Agents

The literature of the constitutional era is a mixture of socio-political conditions of the society. Poets and writers present their poems or writings to the audience based on the events of the day, either as critic, advocate or opponent. The literature study of this era is of paramount importance aligned with social and political changes to get basic texture reading, and is an excellent source for analysis and investigation in the field of sociological-semantic studies. Farrokhi Yazdi is one of the poets of turbulent times of constitutional era who dedicated his poetic talent to the service of social goals and concerns and his poems are full of social and folky themes. Diversity of social and national concepts in Farrokhi Yazdi’s poems require an analysis of its discourse with a society-oriented perspective. Discourse criticism according to Van Leeuwen’s model is helpful in better understanding the ideology and value system governing the poems’ text, as well as understanding Farrokhi Yazdi’s intellectual and social views in the constitutional era. The result of this research is not only the linguistic interpretation of Farrokhi Yazdi’s poems, but also the interpretation of the society in which this freedom-loving poet lived and struggled with its crises and difficulties. In this research, it is assumed that social-political poems of Farrokhi Yazdi contain discourse-oriented components that can be analyzed and examined by Van Leeuwen’s model. This study is done in order to discover the position of social agents and how they are depicted in the poems of Farrokhi Yazdi.In Van Leeuwen’s model, the text is not examined from the perspective of formalism, but rather the impact of social issues on the text. In this model, each text expresses the social intellectual views or the specific class of the writer or poet. The degree of utilization of power sources has a direct effect on the openness and concealment of the text in such a way that the greater access to power sources, the franker and more transparent the text and the social agents are displayed in an active manner, and the lower access to power sources, the image of social agents is more covered Although, in Van Leeuwen’s approach, sociological components are preferred over linguistic, but the analyst is still bound to use linguistic components. This is because the foundations of social functions are in language and words are linked with meaning. The current research has taken advantages of the application of nomination and categorization in the discourse approach of Van Leeuwen’s social agents. This research seeks to show the result of using these two components in Farrokhi Yazdi’s poems and rereading them in his social-political thought system. Based on this, in the first step, verses that have social-political contexts were selected. In the following, discussed components were marked in every verse and the application rate and statistic of the components were determined. The result of the study show that Farrokhi has paid much attention to deliver social matters indirectly and in a hidden way due to the asphyxiation and mutes of the era. Highest frequency based on the numbers of occurrences respectively, is assigned to the components of negative appraisement, classification, nomination and functionalization.