An Analysis of Mental Spaces in News Stories of Iranian Newspapers

Abstract

The present study scrutinized news stories of Persian-language newspapers within Mental Spaces theory. The concept of ‘Mental spaces’ was initially introduced by Fauconnier (1985). It was consequently developed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) into a model entitled ‘Conceptual Integration Theory’. Mental Spaces theory assumes that meaning is not simply pre-existing stored knowledge encoded by language; rather, it is a consequence of its usage in the context; as a result, it is possible to trace mental spaces created by authors based on linguistic features and relations among particles. In the present descriptive-analytical study, six news stories excerpted from two Persian daily newspapers, which reflected the same theme and event from different perspectives, were analyzed. The findings showed that news editors utilize different mental spaces to impose their opinions and beliefs on their audiences and to lead the news flow to a direction on which the base space, namely newspaper headline, has been based. The findings of this study can be applied to newspaper discourse analyses.

Keywords

• cognitive semantics
• mental spaces theory
• space builders
• presupposition
• news