An Analytical Study of Social Justice Discourse in Viewpoint of Imam Khomeini, Based on van Leeuwen's Semantic-Sociological Approach

Social justice is the main philosophy behind the holy mission of the Divine prophets and the utmost goal of a religious government. It is also one of the major principles in Imam Khomeini’s political school of thought. In view of Imam Khomeini, social justice, elimination of social gaps and economic inequality, as well as supporting the poor and underprivileged walks of life must be duly paid attention in all government programs by all legislative, executive and judiciary forces. Thus he introduced a well-balanced approach in connection with distributive justice in economic field by strictly observing the principle of social equity and rejecting any form of discrimination and injustice. Resorting to linguistic analysis of discourse, this paper reviews the issue of social justice in the speeches of Imam Khomeini, published in Sahifeh Imam (An Anthology of Imam Khomeini’s speeches, messages, interviews, decrees, religious permissions, and letters). The main question in this paper is the following: What linguistic solutions have been applied in Imam Khomeini’s speeches to support the social justice discourse? To provide appropriate response to this question, we have used discourse analysis based on van Leeuwen's Social Semantic Approach and applied sociological and semantic components such as rejection and attraction that include such areas as determining the role, determining the type of reference and determining the nature of the discourse. The findings show that in Imam Khomeini’s words, linguistic elements for determining the type of reference and determining the type of the nature of discourse have the highest frequency. Also, from the components of rejection and attraction, the latter has the highest frequency. Moreover, the most typical denotation in human representation is the element of association.