Abstract
This chapter employs Talmy's (2000) theory of attentional windowing and critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze 83 news reports of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan during the 2009 Iranian election protest. The study examines how systemic structures and properties of language play a role in the portrayal of the event. It utilizes the following cognitive tools: figure-ground organization, types of event-frames, and types of windowing. The discursive analysis showed that news reports of death primarily employed causal chain event-frame to report Neda's death, whereas (open) path eventframe was utilized within the causal chain event-frame to describe (and window) the details of her death and to report her death indirectly. In addition, figure-ground reversal was among the employed strategies to shift and direct attention through foregrounding, on one hand, and backgrounding, on the other hand. Furthermore, Neda's death as an 'agent (or author)-causation' was reduced to 'event-causation' for ideological purposes. In short, (cognitively) news reports of death can be a complicated discourse. The findings have wide application to the field of cognitive semantics and, in particular, to news discourse analysis. Theoretically speaking, foregrounding, gapping, windowing and backgrounding can form the cognitive ideological square.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Attention and Meaning |
| Subtitle of host publication | The Attentional Basis of Meaning |
| Editors | Giorgio Marchetti, Giulio Benedetti, Ahlam Alharbi |
| Place of Publication | New York |
| Publisher | Nova Science Publishers, Inc. |
| Chapter | 9 |
| Pages | 241-271 |
| Number of pages | 31 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781634639323 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781634639088 |
| Publication status | Published - 2015 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.