Language Studies

Abstract The narrative discourse is one of the major parameters and capabilities of verbal interactions in various aspects of human's social life. Narration as the spoken or written description or report of relevant events is a multidimensional skill indicating the level of linguistic and cognitive knowledge.  In the present survey, with the aim of examining compound verbs among healthy Persian-speaking 5-to-7-year-old children,  889 compound verbs from 107 samples of spontaneous speeches based on Dabirmoghaddam's approach (1997), have been analysed.  All the productions included 17427 words. Regarding the outcomes of this research,  it has been shown that the frequency of " compositional compound verbs" compared to " incorporating compound verbs " is higher among the 5-to-7-year-olds. Furthermore, along with the growth in children's age, among the 6-year-olds compared to the 5-year-olds , a wider gap between the elements of the  compound verbs and the use of transitive compound verbs as a parameter indicating the linguistic aptitude development is noticed.

Abstract Historical analysis of social phenomena can help identify social institutions and structure changes to perceive social problems' historical roots. Despite studying women's status in any Iranian history period can represent various social life aspects. Considering the paradigm shifts in the Iranian legal and social system after the fall of the Sassanid Empire, the study of women's status in the Sassanid period is of particular importance since it reveals the following determinant laws are based on what legal traditions and custom. Therefore, the study of the women's status in that period has become a shared area of study for scholars of Iranian studies and Islamic studies; However, different approaches and Intellectual backgrounds in these studies have made this issue one of the controversial arguments. This study aims to explain women's status concerning the marriage and divorce law, considering the previous findings, and to answer the question of whether these laws considered women as "legal subject" or "legal object." To answer this question, the legal cases related to the laws of marriage, divorce, which are reflected in Mādayān ī Hazār Dādestān, considering.

Abstract This paper is an attempt to determine relative clause formation in three Iranian languages  including Naini, Delvari, and Talyshi based on the " noun phrase accessibility hierarchy " and universals constraints on relative clause formation proposed by Keenan and Comrie(1977), as well as strategies in marking the relativized position introduced in Keenan(1985), and also Koteva and Comrie(2005). Considering the relativized grammatical relations, these Iranian languages exhibit relativizability of all NP positions on the accessibility hierarchy and concerning the expression mode of the relativized noun phrases, these languages use two different strategies with respect to the relativized syntactic role: gap strategy and pronoun retention strategy. The gap strategy corresponds to subject, direct object, indirect object, and oblique relativization, except that in Talyshi, the pronoun retention strategy corresponds to oblique relativization. In addition, the pronoun retention is used  in direct object, indirect object, oblique, and genitive relativization, except that in Naini, direct object is relativized just by means of a gap. The data from these Iranian languages suggest that relativization is in accordance with Keenan and Comrieʼs proposal in  the sense that both the subject of intransitive verb(S) and the subject of transitive verb(A) are treated alike. In fact, the subject of transitive verb(A) is not less relativizable than the subject of intransitive verb and the object of transitive verb (P).

Abstract The purpose of the current study is to achieve discursive-metaphoric functions of the media language from cognitive perspective and based on Fauconnier and Turner's Conceptual Blending Theory (1994, 1998, 2002) to illustrate how the media uses metaphor in their speech and expresses what they want. The methodological nature of this qualitative research is descriptive-analytic and the data has been selected and collected from widely circulated newspaper in recent years, and for this purpose, 18 samples of metaphors used in these texts were analyzed and evaluated. The findings showed that media discourse conceptualizes language by blending two domains of source and target, and emerging the forth new emergent source to provide the possibility of the mapping of abstract concepts such as, the "wave of Islamic awakening", "throwing the ball to the opponent", etc. into tangible and concrete concepts, and attract audience, and lighten public opinion; in such a way that the common features of these two mental spaces correspond to each other one by one.

Abstract This article describes the typological status of verbal inflection, based on Agglutination Hypothesis, in the Larestani Language. According to this approach, although the well-known morphological typology of languages ( Isolating, Inflectional, Agglutinating) have been criticized as empty, the old idea that there are (predominantly) agglutinating and (predominantly) fusional languages in fact makes two implicit predictions. First agglutination/fusion is a characteristic of whole languages rather than individual constructions; second, the various components of agglutination/ fusion correlate with each other. To explore this hypothesis, at first a descriptive analysis of verbal categories of verb (tense, person, number, mood, aspect, infinitive, negation  and imperative markers ) in Larestani is provided and then the accuracy of this hypothesis is tested. The overall result of this study are mostly negative. The evidence that different types of verbal inflections tend to behave alike, which would have been expected if the correlation one existed, is not overwhelming and also no significant correlation among different indexes of agglutination and fusion are  attested.

Abstract Saussure’s view of conventional/arbitrary relationship between the signifier (sound patterns/words) and the signified (meanings) has governed the mainstream of modern linguistics and been represented as a linguistic premise. However, by giving counterexamples from a large variety of world languages, numerous studies have questioned the Saussurean view since the late 1920s. The studies have demonstrated that the relationships between the sound patterns and the meanings in these counterexamples are “iconic” rather than conventional/arbitrary. By reviewing a number of the major studies, the present paper aims to evaluate the Saussurean view and, finally, to note in passing a very likely new approach to cognitive phonology in terms of the concept of “phonetic iconicity

Abstract The study of metaphors through cognitive approach illustrates mental images would lead to abstract concepts. Turkish speakers compare humans and some environmental factors with nature phenomena such as animals, plants, and so on, and present metaphoric uses of those phenomena. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the frequency and percentage of the most significant word structures of nature metaphors in Turkish. Another aim was to evaluate the names of nature in word formation processes and their gender. Research data were collected through field study and interviews with 70 Turkish speakers that 677 words were collected. First, the frequency and percentage of morphological concepts were investigated. Then nature word structures role and share of gender in word formation processes of these words were dealt with. The findings revealed that nature has influence over speaker´s speech and they utilize names of nature in their speech metaphorically. In Turkish metaphoric nature words compounding, derivation, compound and derivation, onomatopoeia, and borrowings have the highest rate of use respectively. Furthermore, the names attributing to animals, birds, and insects have the highest rate of metaphoric use. The results have significant benefits to poets, teachers, authors, and linguists to reach a better understanding of metaphors.

Abstract In non-religious legal systems, crime and guilt are two separate categories, and there is no direct relation between them. Crime seen in relation to other people in society; But in legal systems based on religion, it is difficult to separate the concept of crime and sin; Because the origin of them is the same and laws of God forbids them. The nature of these laws in these systems, is the same, and there is no distinction between crime them (crime and sin) except in the ​​enforcement. How ever, Mazdisna's law, it seems more difficult to understand this distinction than other religious systems. That with committing any of the taboos carries a penalty; big part of Dinkard's eighth book allocated to sins and punishments in Zoroastrianism. In these sections, we confront to sins that are not mentioned in other Zoroastrian texts. In addition to flogging and fines, which are mentioned in other texts, in this book also see a kind of punishment that the guilty for his guilt punished by forcing him to work-farming and shepherding.

Abstract Recent attitude towards studying a language and a linguistic phenomenon is based upon the existence of a collection of data; therefore it is required to develop a linguistic corpus that is naturally occurred and it is not collected from the one’s intuition. This research methodology is highly important to study linguistic historical data, which is dead and has no speaker.
The current research puts an effort to develop a linguistic corpus of middle Persian and to organize the data in a data-base. To this end, six information levels are determined in the annotation process, including transliteration of the Pahlavi texts, transcription of the words along with their Persian translation, defining fine-grained syntactic category of the words, lemmatizing the words, and identifying whether the word is huzwāreš or not. To define fine-grained syntactic categories, the tag set for contemporary Persian developed by Bijankhan et al (2011) and organized by Ghayoomi (2004) are modified and adapted to the Pahlavi language according to the requirements. The new tag set is used to label Pahlavi words. After annotating words and organizing the information, extracting the statistical information is possible to deepen the insight over the text’s content.

Abstract   The present study aims at making a critical assessment of Chris Lear’s and Soheila Sahabi’s English translation (2000) of Houshang Moradi Kermani’s Carpet Weaving Factory Children (1980/2000). This article will specifically consider the translation of the terms "curse" as one of the examples of cultural-linguistic forms. To the task, Khanjan’s Critical Translation Analysis (CTA) Model (2012, 2013), which is primarily based on Halliday’s Systemic-Functional linguistics (1994, 2004) has been selected as the research analytical framework. This study aims to show how the use of cultural filtering by translators has been commensurate with the contextual characteristics of the destination system. After identifying these phrases and sentences, we examined the function of translators in translating this speech action. The calculation of the frequency and the percentage of the use of these quadruple strategies suggests that translators of the story have the most use of “Equivalent Finding", "transference," and elimination, respectively, in the conversion of curse. Moreover, the "Equivalence Making" strategy has not been implemented.
 

Abstract One of the challengeable grammatical subjects in New Persian language grammar is, to determine criteria for defining compound and incorporate verbs. Given that in New Persian, combination and incorporation process are productive, it makes so much sense to survey the historical courses of the verbs which are cooperated in making compound and incorporate verbs, in order to find out their semantic and structural development in the evolution of Persian language. Unfortunately, A few scholars pay attention to it. Among Persian verbs, kar- has the most potential in association with non-verbal elements. Emphasizing on verb valence, this paper attempts to answer these questions: has kar- converted to the light verb in association with non-verbal elements in ancient languages (Aveatan and Old Persian)? Thus, has it have a role in constructing incorporate and compound verbs?

Abstract Adverbs in language isone of the important issues that linguists have considered. Russian as one of the branches of the Indo-European languages is no exception. A special interest in this category, in Russian language, was prompted after Shviedova's article on determinant, which caused a lot of disagreements and controversies.
In this paper, using a library resource analysis method and matching samples taken from resources, a new categorization of determinant is proposed emphasizing on whether the adverb binds up the verb or the sentence. To this end, we first refer to Shviedova's view on the division of the internal elements of sentence and, using Shviedova’s definitions in distinguishing verb adverb and determinant in Russian, some semantic and syntactic criteria are introduced. The examination of the samples taken from the sources show that the determinant is semantically divided into two categories of subject-object determinant and adverb complement determinant. Moreover lexical forms, subordinate clauses that are identified as analyzable sentences, can play the role of determinant since they do not depend on the main clauses.