Sport Venue Names in the Islamic Republic of Iran Compared with the Pre-Revolution Era: A Discourse-Based Approach

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Allameh Tabataba'i University

Abstract

A place name can give a legitimate account of history in addition to serving as a spatial reference. Accordingly, a corpus was created consisting of 420 sport venue names from the 1979 pre- and post-revolution eras collected randomly over a three-month period and was examined using van Dijk’s (2006) theoretical framework. The findings manifested that following the 1979 Revolution, religious concepts relating to the Islamic government replaced monarchy-related concepts and those relating to the ancient times, and the high number of ideological names (over 85%) implied a systematic way of naming. The findings also indicated that naming has been utilized as a legitimatization tool for the current government and has also been used to delegitimize and to obliterate the past. On the other hand, the findings implicated that the domain of sport can function as an indicator of religious pluralism and recognition of other religions in a diverse society.

Keywords

References

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