Hopefulness and hopelessness rate in Iranian society: a cognitive view

Abstract

Abstract This paper seeks to demonstrate the rate and cognitive model of hopelessness and hopefulness in the Iranian society over a period of five decades spanning from the 1970s up until the 2010s, in response to the perspective that Iranians are currently experiencing more hopelessness than in the past. The prevailing emotions within a society, including but not limited to hopelessness and hopefulness, could be reflected through language. In fact, these two, alongside others, are encoded in language using cognitive mechanisms such as the conceptual metaphor and linguistic construction. Based on the written and spoken corpus encompassing movies, novels, news broadcasts, official speeches and the models employed, namely Kövecses (2020) and the findings of Construction Grammar, it can be observed that hopefulness and hopelessness have exhibited a fluctuating pattern in every subset of the corpus over the mentioned five decades. The rationale for selecting these five decades is associated with pivotal political and social events, such as the Islamic revolution of Iran, the Iran-Iraq war, the reconstruction period, the reformation decade, and the post-reformation era. The results illustrate that the emotion of hopelessness has significantly and consistently increased in the Iranian society over the fifty-year period. Moreover, regarding the cognitive model of hope, it is worth mentioning that Iranians consider "hopelessness" as ‘inability’ and contrast it with "hopefulness" which is conceptualized by ‘object’ and ‘reliance on another entity’.