نشریه زبان و زبان شناسی
پیاپی 14 (پاییز و زمستان 1390)

This article addresses the phonological variability in Persian trill production through an experimental approach. In a production experiment, the phonetic diversity in /r/ production was examined through spectral measurements of FFT spectra and spectrograms of the desired regions of the target signals. Results show that the trill and approximant variants are the most dominant /r/ allophones, while the distribution of other varieties largely depends on the prosodic context (utterance initial, medial, or final), as well as vocalic (vowel quality) and consonantal (voice) contexts.

In computer science and artificial intelligence, an ontology is a computational system which collects entities of a specific domain such as terminology of a scientific field and displays their semantic-conceptual relations. This paper reports on a project for building a domain ontology for Persian morphological terms, seeking to answer three questions: (1) how can we design an ontology for Persian morphology? (2) How much mapping is there between our developed ontology and GOLD ontology? (3) What novel perspective is achieved through designing Persian morphological terms’ ontology? To answer these questions, the linguistics ontology, GOLD, was first introduced. Then, morphology as well as the semantic-conceptual relations held among morphological terms were defined. Morphological terms were then extracted from a vast number of resources and implemented in the ontology. The findings of the study provide a novel picture of Persian morphology as well as a promising perspective for future studies on domain ontology.

This study attempts to reveal the social functions and application of Persian language and Tonekaboni dialect (one of the dialects of West Mazandarani language) on the basis of age, gender, occupation, education and spouse’s mother tongue in six social domains in Tonekabon which are: family, friends, neighborhood, business, educational and official circles. The research sample includes 250 randomly chosen participants from different regions in the town. The participants were grouped on the basis of age, level of education, gender, occupation and spouse’s mother tongue. A questionnaire based on Parasher’s model (1980) was used. It consisted of 36 questions ranging from informal to formal. The data were processed by computer after collection and classification. Independent samples t-test, paired samples t-test and one-way ANOVA were the statistical procedures applied to the data. In general, the findings indicate that Persian is the dominant language in all the domains, and that the social variables of age, gender, occupation, education and spouse’s mother tongue impact the use of Tonekaboni and Persian language. The implication is that the use of Tonekaboni is gradually decreasing, which means that Persian may in future replace it in all social domains.

The present study is an attempt to apply the instruments of Critical Discourse Analysis to translation criticism. CDA considers the text as social action and seeks to reveal the ideological dimensions of discourse which have been “naturalized” through time. It explores the power relations between text, language, and discourse; and thus provides proper grounds for the analysis of translations, which constitute a site for the struggle between different discourses. The study used a bilingual parallel corpus of the book of kite runner and two translations of it. The results demonstrated that at the textual level the translators’ lexical, syntactic, and semantic choices and their choice of translation strategies bear ideological implications.

The present research aimed at studying the fundamental frequency of voiced phonemes in Persian-Mazandarani bilinguals in 2007. The hypothesis was that the differences between the average of FO of voiced phonemes in bilinguals in Mazanadarani and Persian are significant. The descriptive-analytic approach was applied and no intervention was administered. The informants were 3 men and 2 women aged between 25 and 35. A test was developed by the researchers. Its content Validity was accredited by professionals in the field. The informants were asked to pronounce 57 words in Mazandarani and 57 words in Persian three times. So the voiced phonemes were studied in the beginning, final and middle positions of different words. The average of FO for each phoneme was measured using Dr. Speech software. After estimating the average of FOs for each voiced phoneme, and each informant, T-test was used to assess the significance of the differences of FOs. The difference between FOs of voiced phonemes in Persian and Mazandarani was not significant (p>0/05). However,the differences between the average of FOs between men and women were found to be significant (p<0/05 in Mazandarani and p<0/01 in Persian). The null hypothesis (Ho) of the study was proved. In other words, in Persian-Mazandarani bilinguals the differences between averages of FOs in voiced phonemes are not significant, but in male and female informants the differences proved to be significant in both languages.

The present paper is an attempt to show the behavior of 176 body-based compound verbs in Persian, using a cognitive semantics framework, derived from formal linguistics in the 1970s. It focuses on ‘the image schema’. The findings show that the semantic core of a compound verb has the main role in forming the image schema of that verb. However, cognitive linguistics seems to lack absolute efficiency in explaining compound verbs semantically.

The aim of this study is to investigate the naming process of Isfahan's trade centers and shops. Dyer (1982) believes that one of the most important characteristics of commercial advertisements is to attract the addressees’ attention. Geis (1982) also assumes that an appropriate and relevant trade name may behave as a small advertisement to attract the customer's attention. Regarding these ideas, two questions are addressed here: first, whether the properties of commercial advertisements can be seen among the names of trade centers and shops or not; and second, if the answer is positive, what characteristics they have in common. The results of the study show that some of the linguistic properties of commercial advertisements, such as the use of metaphor, metonymy, foreign words, pun, repetition, etc. exist in the names of Isfahan’s trade centers and shops as well.