Abstract

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.