"There is nothing better than the name of God." The Generic Analysis of Religiously Motivated Speech Introductions in Persian-Speaking Media

Acknowledging that there is a dearth of the systemic investigation of religiously motivated language, this endeavor attempts a qualitative examination of the religiously motivated discourse applied to the opening segments of broadcasts aired on Farsi-speaking media outlets. Based on a corpus of 450 randomly gathered programs from multiple Iranian state-run radio and television channels and according to the theoretical foundation considered for this endeavor, I first illustrate the procedure through which the data was collected, followed by the generic analysis of the opening religious speech segments employed at the beginning of the material under investigation. I also aim to show how religious-thought-evoking introductory insertions thematize the discourse and how they influence the mind of society. The findings are reported concerning the Persian or Arabic expressions applied religiously in the preludes, how these expressions are positioned with regards to the discourse that follows, their functions and the goals they are to fulfil.