A Critical Discourse Analysis of Socio-Psychological Factors in Taufiq Rafat’s “Wedding in the Flood”

Abstract

People use language for different social practices in different contexts and perspectives, and discourse analysts examine these social practices for better understanding of the discourse. The language used by a poet is different from the language used by common people; the poetic diction helps to understand a poet’s literary style, his ideology, and the use of descriptive language. This article focuses on exposing the socio-psychological factors through examining the use of language in a free verse poem ‘Wedding in the Flood’ by Taufiq Rafat who tried to present different aspects of Pakistani culture in the poem. The socio-psychological factors combine the social (family, society, wealth, religion) and the psychological factors (feelings, thoughts, actions, beliefs) that play an important role in shaping the personality of an individual, and the characters in the poem are the best examples of it. This analysis is based on Fairclough’s conceptions in CDA that claims of an inter-link between ideologies and texts, and this link cannot be separated because there are many ways to interpret texts, and the Socio-Psychological Theory (20121) also combines many social and psychological factors of human life. Many researchers did the stylistic analysis of the poem, but nothing has been done to highlight its socio-psychological factors through CDA.