Handbook of Persian Discourse Studies

This book is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive engagement with Persian discourse analysis in the Western hemisphere, addressing the shadowy borders that exist between culture, language, linguistics, and historicity, which are often overlooked in cultural linguistics and pragmatics more broadly. The theoretical foundations of this book are deeply rooted in culture, mannerism, language (both official and idiomatic), and pragmatics of language use. The first section sets the theoretical foundation with a thorough overview of critical discourse analysis and the application of this theory in analyzing speech, text and emotions. The subsequent four sections conduct investigations into a wide array of genres, namely academic contexts, politics, media, literature and music, respectively and describe the relevant corpora with their specific components from the viewpoints of terminology and lexicography. The sixth section looks at discourse and translation, offering an in-depth excavation of discourse-analytical frameworks applicable to translation studies. The seventh demarcates discourse and educational settings unpacking what discourse analysis can do to inform teachers and students. The section on identity and globalization explores these concepts as defined by linguistic approaches. The second last section on discourse markers tackles language, meaning, and context, and employs ‘discourse marker’ as an umbrella term for linguistic devices that signal communicative intention, categorizing them and their functions in Persian conversational and language learning contexts. The final part of the work looks at discourse and its interface with pragmatics, grammar and/or intonation, defining grammatical and intonational constructions as a form-meaning pair so as to illustrate how they can be utilized to signal different functions. Relevant to cultural and theoretical linguistics, and specialists in Persian language studies, specifically, this one-stop text is a sweeping compendium to Persian discourse studies.