A Comparative Study of Proximity in English and Persian: The Case of Political Speeches

Hyland (2010) defines the new concept of proximity as the application of a variety of linguistic features to represent both the authority and personal position in a text. It consists of a range of linguistic features in order to convince and persuade the audience, breech the speaker/hearer barriers, and have a better interaction with the audience. This study aimed to investigate how American English and Persian political figures apply proximity features (Organization, Argument structure, Credibility, Stance, and Engagement) in order to have a better interaction with their audience and to make themselves more understandable for a variety of people in the community. To this end, 44 speeches by the US and Iran’s presidents were considered as the corpus for the analysis. A pilot study was conducted in order to check the feasibility of the study prior to the analysis. Afterward, the frequencies of proximity features were calculated in both corpora. Final step was comparing the obtained frequencies through chi-square. The results disclosed that more proximity elements are employed by American political orators than Persian ones. Organization, Argument Structures, and Credibility are those features which are used more by Persian orators, while Stance and Engagement were applied more by American orators. This can be attributed to the cultural and social differences of the two countries and also the nation’s needs or the audiences’ favor in what they want to hear. The results of the study have implications for linguists, political discourse in media, students and teachers of English political sciences.