A Tale of Two Parties; Ideology and language Choice for Power and Persuasion

Language never appears in vacuum. It always appears as the representative of a system of linguistic terms, which themselves realize discursive and ideological systems. This ideological discourse is generally organized by a general strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation (derogation). This strategy may operate at all levels of language use, which is, of course, accomplished by the dynamicity of language through use of different linguistic representations. The aim of this presentation, then, is to show how Ideology imbricates within the structural representations of political figures discourse and news reports. To this end, using a cognitive linguistic approach and through the analysis of some related discourse extracted from some dailies covering the language of two leading fundamental right and reformist left parties on 2013 Presidential elections in Iran, it will be shown how same and different representations of language are both the source and conveyor of power and persuasion without too much variations and conceptualizations but with drastic contradictory social actions leading to success or failure of a party.