الفهرس 
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Abstract
For many decades, Iran’s nuclear program has represented a source of threat to many world countries. The International community has long suspected Iran of hiding secret non-peaceful enrichment activities. First, the West used language of threat to force Iran stop any high-level enrichment activities. After that, the West surprises the world by a shift in its relations with Iran. It replaces this language of threat with a peaceful diplomatic way represented in signing agreements with Iran that aim at committing Iran to reduce its non-peaceful nuclear activities in return for lifting the Western sanctions imposed on it.
This thesis aims at analyzing the language of English and Arabic articles that tackle the five agreements signed by Iran and the P5+1 group, which are the package of incentives agreement, the roadmap agreement, the Geneva interim agreement, the framework agreement and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement. It falls within the field of analyzing media discourse. It applies the Cognitive theory of Image Schema (Johnson, 1987) and (Lakoff, 1987) on sixty newspapers articles drawn from American, British, Egyptian and Saudi newspapers, with fifteen articles in each of the four sets. It then applies Krzeszowki’s (1993) parameter to test the connotations of the Image Schemas extracted whether they are positive or negative. This study presents the results of the analysis within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, more specifically van Dijk’s (2001) ideological square and Attia’s (2002) modification of it to show how the Self and the Other are represented in the American, British, Egyptian and Saudi articles on each of the five agreements.
This thesis lies in an introduction and four chapters. The Introduction highlights the importance of the study, and states the objectives and the research questions of the thesis. It also includes the methodology, sources of data and the literature review. The first chapter consists of the theoretical framework. It consists of two main parts. The first part tackles the framework of the thesis which is represented in Critical Discourse Analysis. It reviews its history and its main approaches and scholars. It then states that van Dijk’s ideological square (2001) of positive Self presentation and negative Other presentation and Atta’s (2002) medication of a possible negative Self-presentation and a negative Other presentation are going to be used as the framework to uncover the underlying ideologies of the foreign and Arab writers concerning the Iranian nuclear agreements in the period from 2006 until 2016.
As for the second part of Chapter One, it tackles the background of cognitive linguistics and the Image Schema theory in detail. It also reviews different taxonomic models of Image Schemas put forward by linguists and presents the eclectic model used by the researcher in this thesis that consists of Evans and Green’s (2006) model and other Image Schemas added by the researcher from the inventory to help the researcher extract more Image Schemas from the data analyzed in this thesis. Krzeszowki’s (1993) parameter is also defined in this part of Chapter One as a tool that is going to be used in analyzing the data selected.
Chapter Two incorporates the analysis of the English data. The English data consists of the American and the British articles on the five nuclear agreements tackled in this study. Using the eclectic model of the Image Schema theory, the researcher identifies the In-groups and the Out-groups representing the Self and the Other in the articles by extracting the Image Schemas from the American and the British articles, testing their connotations with respect to the contexts in which they occur and linking the results with van Dijk’s (2001) ideological square and Attia’s (2002) modifications. Chapter Three includes the analysis of the Arabic data. The Arabic data consists of the Egyptian and the Saudi articles on the five nuclear agreements. The same procedures of analysis followed in Chapter two are also followed in chapter three.
Chapter Four is entitled ‘Findings and Conclusion’. The findings consist of two comparative studies followed by a contrastive one. The first comparative study compares the findings of analyzing the American data with those of analyzing the British data. The second comparative study compares the findings of analyzing the Egyptian data to those of analyzing the Saudi data. As for the contrastive study, it compares the findings of all the English data with those of all the Arabic data. Regarding the Conclusion, it clarifies that the study has successfully attained all its objectives and answers all the research questions by summing up the findings and the results presented in each chapter.