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Abstract
There is a mutual relationship between conventional ways of discoursal practice and social changes which create new ways of thinking or ideology in a particular society. Considering the changes that Iranian society has undergone throughout two different periods of time (1970–1990 and 1990 to present), the current study aimed to show how these changes in terms of reference and person deixis, as a discourse practice in wedding invitations (WIs), introduce a marked shift in parental hegemony and small beginning of shifts in gender roles in Iran’s society. To this end, 100 WIs were divided into two corpus, one dating from 1970 to 1990 and the other from 1990 to present. Then, a pilot study was arranged to identify the linguistic features which had predominantly changed and could have mirrored the sociopolitical changes. The results of the pilot study revealed that terms of reference and personal deixis in the WIs had changed remarkably across the two groups of WIs. To analyze the frequency and percentage of reference and personal deixis in the WIs, two small corpus (one containing 1970–1990 WIs and the other containing 1990 to present) were created using Sketch Engine website. Finally, Fairclough’s [2010. Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. London: Routledge] framework of critical discourse analysis as a form of critique of social change in terms of historical dynamics was used to account for the changes. The analysis of the data revealed that paternal, as well as gender hegemony, has been diluted in WIs published in recent times.