Abstract:
As a distinct socially constructed genre, wedding invitations (WIs) offer a fruitful site for investigating how two areas of genre knowledge (i.e., form and content) change over time under the influence of sociocultural forces. Through the examination of 100 Iranian WIs dating from 1970s to the present time, the study investigated the trajectories of change through time within the social semiotics framework. Findings revealed that although the generic structures of Iranian WIs have remained the same, their mode contents have undergone remarkable changes across time. These changes are discernable in the nonverbal features of color, size, design, and typography as well as the verbal features including text length, formality, reference terms, and mood. Findings suggest that in today’s sociocultural climate of Iran, creativity prevails over conventionalization, informality is favored over formality, and solidarity tends to replace power in the hierarchical dimensions of gender differentials and parental domination.
Machine summary:
In one study, Mirzaei and Eslami (2013) first identified the prototypical generic regularities in Iranian WIs and then, drawing on a critical discourse analysis, demonstrated that religious beliefs and socioculturalvalues such as ethnicity, education, socioeconomic status, profession, and age influence young couples’ preference and choice of WIs. In another study, Sharif and Yarmohammadi (2013) adopted Swales’ (1990) model of genre analysis to identify and characterize the move structures of WIs and established that the organizational details of Iranian WIs are embedded in the religious beliefs, cultural values, and social norms of the Iranian society.
In sum, these studies propose a number of textual moves for WIa genre which could be summarized as follows: · Opening by God’s name · Bride and groom’s names · Invitation text · Wedding host’s name · Date, time, reception type, and address Notwithstanding the informative findings of the previous studies, one very important point seems to have been overlooked.
3. Theoretical Framework The multimodal analysis of WIs in the current study is based on social semiotics which views meaning-making as a social practice and investigates interactional practices in specific social and cultural circumstances by integrating the use of verbal and nonverbal semiotic modes which result in semiotic products or events (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001).
Therefore, the basic tendency in the recent WIs toward the use of colloquial or humorous language in invitation texts is evidence of the second significant form of sociocultural change, that is, the shift from formality toward informality.