A Model for Studying Socio-political Key Concepts in the History of Contemporary Iran

The Iranian time and the Persian language concepts have been condensed and accumulated by the plurality and accelerated events of the last hundred years. The semantic chaos is manifested in a lexical field of a concept where apparently synonymous words compete. Understanding these semantic ambiguities and latent relationships of power and ideology in discourses generating these words require analyzing different semantic layers accumulated in various temporal layers of contemporary history of socio-political concepts of Persian language. As such, the present study aims to develop a theoretical model to show how a particular concept in a particular historical period is signified by different words and how these words experience semantic changes and how situations accelerate the emergence, spread and wane of a word or concept. Additionally, the theoretical model attempts to understand the struggle and convergences of words in a field and their intertextual relationships in order to reach those conflicting moments in the contemporary history in which a discourse wins and in the light of that victory, makes a particular situation hegemonic. In the present paper, we propose an analytical model in which Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis plays the main role but two complementary approaches from semantics and history, i.e. lexical field by Jost Trier and conceptual history by Reinhart Koselleck, are applied as well to explore contemporary socio-political concepts. We believe that applying this model could clarify the ideologies behind each concept and word and make the “present” more understandable.