Film Director Asghar Farhadi Speaks About Violence

🌍 Talking about the Past

In this story, we see words that tell us something happened before now. To reach A2, you need to recognize these "past" words.

The Pattern: Most of these words end in -ed. This is a signal that the action is finished.

• spoke (Special word for 'speak')
• talked → happened before
• died → happened before
• killed → happened before
• left (Special word for 'leave')

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🛠️ Simple Word Changes

Look at how we change a word to show a person does not do something:

Farhadi live in Iran $\rightarrow$ Farhadi DOES NOT live in Iran

When we use does not, the action word (live) stays simple. We don't add an 's'.

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📌 Useful A2 Vocabulary from the text

Word	Simple Meaning
Innocent	Not guilty / Not doing something bad
Crimes	Things that are against the law
Protests	When people shout together to change things
Controlling	Telling someone exactly what to do

🚀 The "Opinion Power-Up": Moving from Say to Assert

At the A2 level, students usually use the word "say" for everything. To reach B2, you need to describe how someone is speaking and what their intention is. This is called Reporting Verbs.

Look at these shifts from the text:

• Basic (A2): Farhadi said that killing is a crime.
• B2 Upgrade: Farhadi asserted that any unauthorized killing... is a criminal act.

Why this matters: "Asserted" doesn't just mean "said." It means saying something with strong confidence and authority. When you use these verbs, you paint a picture of the speaker's emotion without needing extra adjectives.

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🛠️ The "Nuance Scale"

Depending on the text, we can replace "say" with these targeted B2 verbs:

1. Condemn $\rightarrow$ To say that something is completely wrong or evil. (Example: Farhadi condemns state violence.)
2. Emphasize $\rightarrow$ To give special importance to a point. (Example: He emphasized that he opposes two types of violence.)
3. Argue $\rightarrow$ To give reasons to support an idea, often in a debate. (Example: He argued that any killing is a criminal act.)

💡 Pro-Tip for Fluency

Stop using "He says that..." in your essays or presentations. Instead, ask yourself: Is the person complaining, claiming, warning, or asserting?

Quick Comparison:

• "The government claims..." $\rightarrow$ (B2 hint: The writer might not believe them!)
• "The monitors estimate..." $\rightarrow$ (B2 hint: This is based on data/calculation, not just a guess.)

The Architecture of 'Detached Authority': Nominalization and the C2 Shift

To move from B2 to C2, a student must transition from narrating actions to analyzing phenomena. This article exemplifies a linguistic strategy called Heavy Nominalization, where verbs (actions) are transformed into nouns (concepts) to create a tone of objective, academic distance.

⚡ The Linguistic Pivot

Observe how the text avoids simple subject-verb-object sentences. Instead of saying "Farhadi condemned the state for killing civilians," the author writes:

*"...denounce the loss of innocent life resulting from both international military conflict and domestic state repression..."

The Mechanism:

• Loss (instead of lost)
• Conflict (instead of conflicting)
• Repression (instead of repressing)

By converting these actions into nouns, the writer shifts the focus from the actor to the abstract concept. This is the hallmark of high-level diplomatic and scholarly English: it removes emotional volatility and replaces it with Analytical Weight.

🔍 Sophisticated Collocations for the C2 Arsenal

Beyond the structure, notice the precise pairing of adjectives and nouns that signal a mastery of nuance:

• Tenuous ceasefire: Not just 'weak,' but fragile and likely to break.
• Salient intersection: Not just 'important,' but prominently noticeable and relevant.
• Professional exile: A paradoxical pairing that elevates the status of the subject's isolation from a tragedy to a principled stance.

🛠️ Application: The 'Abstractive' Rewrite

To synthesize this, consider the transformation of a B2 sentence into a C2 architectural equivalent:

B2 (Functional): The government says terrorists killed people, but human rights groups say the police did it.

C2 (Abstracted): While the government attributed fatalities to foreign-orchestrated terrorism, external monitors estimate the deaths to be a result of security force interventions.

Key C2 markers used here:

1. Attributed... to: Replacing 'says'.
2. Foreign-orchestrated: Compound adjective for precision.
3. Interventions: A euphemism for violence that maintains a clinical, professional distance.