نشریه مطالعات زبان و گویش های غرب ایران
سال ششم شماره 21 (تابستان 1397)

The present research is a comparative study on Central Kurdish (also known as Sorani), Persian, and English kinship terms based on the ideas put forward by universalist anthropologists who believe in the existence of an underlying uniform, universal structure under the apparent diversity in kinship systems and claim that all kinship relations, from the simplest to the most complicated, are based on the nuclear family which is extended through a linking relative who knits two families together. To describe and study all kinship systems, these anthropologists propose a universal set of criteria. Each language, according to its cultural features, uses some of these criteria. The aim of this study was to find, based on principles and methods of universal anthropology, an answer to the question of what criteria do Kurdish people use to categorize their kin? As a result, we found out that Kurdish uses the five criteria of consanguinity-affinity, gender, generation, side of the family and relative age while Farsi makes use of consanguinity-affinity, gender, generation and side of the family; and English utilizes consanguinity-affinity, gender, and generation. Additionally, although English belongs to the Eskimo kinship system, both Farsi and Kurdish are classified under the Sudanese system.

The present article deals with the description and explanation of some of the most important productive phonological processes in Sonqor kolyaee Kurdish dialect. Deletion, Insertion, Lenition, Metathesis, Compensatory Lengthening, Insertion and Convert /n to /ɫ/ are the processes analyzed using evidence from this dialect. For this purpose, interviews were carried out with ten native informants in different age groups. Moreover, one of the co-authors was the informant of this dialect. Data were transcribed based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Examined processes indicated the occurrence of several simultaneous phonetic processes in some of the words in this dialect. In addition, Deletion and Lenition were the most frequent processes and Metathesis was least frequent. Initial cluster of two consonants were common in this dialect which had w or y as the second consonant. In adition to Kurdish dialect of Mahabad (Karimidustan, 2002), the syllabic structure CVCCC is also common in Kurdish dialect of Sonqor kolyaee.

Motion is one of the most fundamental human,s experiences. So it seems to be expressed as a universal concept in all languages of the world. According to Talmy,s lexicalization patterns theory(1985, 2000), languages are divided into two types concerning motion expression: verb-framed and satellite-framed. In verb-framed languages the core component of motion event, path, is expressed in verb and the manner of motion in satellite but in satellite-framed languages the reverse of this happens. The aim of this paper is to study the position of the Hawrami language in Talmy,s two-category typology. For this purpose, 140 Hawrami motion verbs (simple and non-simple) have been collected through interview with 20 native speakers over 30 years old and analyzed. Data analysis indicates that the Hawrami language challenges Talmy,s two-category typology since the semantic elements of path and manner are lexicalized in the verb root nearly equally. In other words, Hawrami has the characteristic of both verb-framed and satellite-framed languages and so it cannot be placed exactly in one of Talmy,s two types. It is better that its behavior in expressing motion event be evaluated with regard to the continuum of manner salience (Slobin, 2004) and path salience (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2004). Thus Hawrami is placed in the middle parts of these two continuums. Moreover, as the pattern (motion path manner) is the third most frequent lexicalization pattern in Hawrami, this language also has the characteristic of equipollently-framed languages (Slobin, 2004).

From a cognitive perspective, the term “metaphor” is a method of understanding a mental and abstract concept in terms of another more concrete and simpler concept. This process includes both verbal and nonverbal metaphors. The present study is an attempt to study “sadness” and “happiness” conceptual metaphors as well as the degree of conformity between verbal and pictorial metaphors in the primary school poems and pictures in “reading” books. The data were collected from a number of 26 poems and their pictures from the first to third grades. The analysis of the data revealed that the metaphors of happiness were significantly more used than the opposite domain. Regarding conformity between verbal and nonverbal (pictorial) metaphors, 8 poems showed a high degree of conformity, 17 poems were partially compatible and one poem was completely incompatible. The findings were satisfactory due to the high frequency of happiness metaphors; however, due to the lack of complete compatibility between verbal and non-verbal metaphors, the modification of the pictures should be taken into account. Therefore, results can be useful for the book illustrators of the children literature books.

In this paper we investigated the semantic change of the word “dowlat” in the history of Persian prose from the 4th century (Hijri) until now. Though seemingly the meaning of this word has not changed dramatically, but it has been used with 21 different meanings in the Persian texts we investigated. We made an attempt to explain the semantic change of Dowlat using the prototype theory, Geeraerts’ (1997) approach. The prototype theory explains the meaning changes of the word well, in terms of three of four prototype hypotheses. We found that some senses play central role in the process of meaning change and meaning changes take place in the margins of clusters, in relation to central senses; some senses are peripheral and more impermanent; and some senses root simultaneously from more than one conceptual cluster (hypothesis 2). We found some evidence which show that modulation in the boundaries could cause one sense to occur twice in the history of the word in question, and each time independent from the other one; that is to say semantic polygenesis (hypothesis 3). Finally we learnt that encyclopedic information has a significant role in conceptual development of the words (hypothesis 4).

The present paper aims to analyze the imperatives in Persian form a formal semantics viewpoint. Basically, as well as the ‘directive’ meaning as their default reading, the imperatives express a variety of other illocutionary forces. Due to this effect, therefore, this paper attempts to explain the multiplicity of interpretations of this clause type in Persian in a systematic way. To this end, following Kratzer’s (1977, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1991, 2012) Possible-Worlds Semantics approach to modality and modelling Schwager’s (2005, 2006) comparison of imperatives on the basis of the modals, it is shown in this paper that the imperative clause in Persian has the ‘Command’ reading underlyingly, but it may express other illocutionary forces like ‘Prohibition’, ‘Request’, etc. under the influence of situational contexts where it is used. Indeed, the imperative clause has a ‘modal operator’ which resembles the modal verb ‘must’. This operator expresses ‘necessity’ as the ‘modal force’ regarding the ‘Common Ground’ between the speaker and the addressee as the ‘modal base’ and is limited by some ‘preference-related’ constraints as the ‘ordering source’. Such an approach means that accounting for the different interpretations of the imperatives implies a conflation of semantics with pragmatics at some level of analysis.