A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Identities in a Corpus of English and Persian News Interviews

Institutional identity as a concept in CDA is a field of study that deals with the identities that individuals in institutions obtain, one that merits deep research attention. News interviews as institutional instances can be analyzed based on the impersonal structures because interviewees see themselves as part of the institution and they may not take responsibility when they encounter problematic topics. In this study, Benwell and Stokoe’s (2006) concepts of institutional identities and impersonal structures (i.e., existential processes, nominalizations, passivizations, and relational processes) and Halliday’s (2004) transitivity system were used. Results indicated that relational processes and nominalizations have the highest and the lowest frequencies in English news interviews and in Persian news interviews; relational processes and existential processes have the highest and lowest frequencies, respectively.