• Elaheh Rafatbakhsh

  Author

News media, as an influential source of information and language production, has
gained the attention of applied and sociolinguists in today’s world since its discourse has
cultural, social, and political impacts. Various contrastive studies have been carried out on the
political news discourse in the past few years. This study intends to contrast English and Persian
news reports with regards to mode and representing verbs particularly on the issue of Iran's
nuclear program and tries to investigate the similarities and differences between these two
corpora of political news reports discourse representations. The corpora consist of 24 Iranian
newspaper reports (10,909 words) from The Hamshahri online and 24 American newspaper
reports (18,087 words) from The New York Times online. The results suggest that the total use of
the representing verbs, except manner-of-speaking verbs, in two modes of direct and indirect
discourse differed in English and Persian reports. Moreover, the Persian reporters are
anonymous and seem to have more influence on represented discourse in comparison with the
English reports that appear to be less controlled.

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