نشریه زبان پژوهی
پیاپی 18 (بهار 1395)

The aim of this article is the study of vowel reduction in Kermanian accent, and comparing it with the standard accent. Vowel reduction is a phenomenon in which an unstressed vowel undergoes changes and tends to be close to the other vowels and it happens in unstressed syllables. In order to investigate vowel reduction in Kermanian accent, six male speakers of Persain language with an average age of twenty three and standard deviation of 3.08 were chosen to participate in this study. Three of the speakers were of Kermanian accent and the other three were of standard accent. The research data consists of twelve words which were placed in interrogative and declarative sentenceS, in stressed and unstressed syllables and in the form of Kermanian and standard accent. The speakers were recorded in the acoustic room of Linguistic Department of Sharif University, using a Shure microphone and PRAAT software. Then, the amount of duration, and first, second and third formants, fundamental frequency and center of gravity were measured for each studying vowel. The results show that duration, energy and fundamental frequency of these vowels in Kermanian accent is less than that in standard accent. Also, the results of analyzing first and second formants confirm the claim that the vowels[æ,i,o] in Kermanian accent tend to the center. This kind of vowel reduction in Kermanian accent is called centripetal reduction.

Analyzing the Case of PRO has always been a challenge to the theory of language since the onset of generative tradition. Based on the PRO Theorem, the GB grammarians considered this empty category to lack Case totally. However, this conception, together with the use of the theory of government made PRO different from all other nominal elements. In order to avoid this, the Null Case Hypothesis at the beginning of the Minimalist Program, considered PRO to have Case to be checked against the T head of the embedded clause in control constructions. Nonetheless, the lack of content to this conception of Case made it the subject of criticism both from theoretical and empirical viewpoints. Finally, it was argued that, if PRO can receive Case, then it has a standard Case similar to other overt nominal elements. This study, therefore, analyses the previous conceptions about PRO in Persian and shows that this empty category has a standard structural Case, checked against the T head within the finite subjunctive clauses.

People's speech shows their beliefs, values and views which run over their tongue unconsciously, in other words people say whatever they think. Using this property of language makes it possible for viewers to discover a film producer's ideology by dealing with the language of a film. In this research we have analyzed the scripts of the movie "The Glass Agency" by Ebrahim Hatamikia. In this research we have used the ideational metafunction (of Systematic Functional Grammar of Halliday) and the polarity of self and the other -on the basis of the ideological square of Van Dijk - . After grouping the characters of the scripts, we found that in the script of "The Glass Agency", group one (the first character and his companions) has emphasized the "foregrounding of the positive points of self" more than the other sides of the ideological square and has shown this emphasis by the use of the material process. But the opposite group has emphasized the "foregrounding of the negative points of the other" and it has made use of relational process for doing this.

The present study was an attempt to compare the types and frequencies of the Metadiscourse Markers (MMs) used in research articles published in international and Iranian local journals across the sub-disciplines of Applied Linguistics. In so doing, 512 RAs totaling 3,051,168 words, selected from sixteen international and Iranian local journals across the sub-disciplines of Applied Linguistics were compared and contrasted regarding the use of MMs applying the Frequency Program (Nation & Heatley, 2007). The study drew upon Hyland's (2005) model of MMs. The findings of the study demonstrated some similar and distinct trends in the way the two corpora employed MMs. It is suggested that the observed differences call for raising Iranian local RA writers’ awareness of the principles regarding the conventional application of MMs.

As a suffix of location of high frequency, “-gah” is attached to different nouns to create a kind of radial semantic structure. Drawing upon data from contemporary Persian, this paper tries to determine the prototypical meaning, semantic network, and structure of this suffix modeled as a radial category within the framework of cognitive semantics, and to determine what semantic structure this linguistic category has, and what aspect/aspects of reality it encodes with regard to location. The findings show that while it holds the prototypical meaning of location of action, affected by its nominal base frame this suffix entails the foregrounding of parts of the meaning expressed by the base word in different linguistic contexts and in combination with different nouns. In this analysis, the role of metaphor and metonymy, as well as pragmatic and cultural elements, in creating a peculiar semantic aspect using this suffix, and also in selecting this suffix and preferring it over other suffixes of location in Persian are of great importance.

Khorasani Kurmanji is one of the northwestern Iranian dialects that despite its proximity to many neighboring languages including Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, and Armenian and loss of some morphological and syntactic features, has maintained one of the most distinguishing morphological and syntactic characteristics called ergative- absolutive case marking system .The initial state of this system includes the features that still remain in some Iranian dialects (such as Kurmanji, Talyshi, Tati ,Baluchi, etc.) while in others (such as the contemporary Persian, Central and South Kurdish, Lory, Mazandarani, Gilaki, etc.), they have disappeared completely and have been replaced by other types of case-marking systems, including nominative-accusative. In this study, different case marking systems, particularly ergative-absolutive in Khorasani Kurmanji dialect, are studied at first, then its decay and conversion to other systems especially the horizontal one are also explored. Finally it is shown that this dialect has a split ergative case system.

As for its vast territory and long history, Iran has a wide number of dialects and linguistic varieties. These dialects that have long been common in Iran, have also affected some of the old Persian texts. Such impacts are more significant in pre-Mongol texts (The Formative Period) than texts from other periods of Persian. For instance, there are some features in the structure of verbs of the Formative Period which have certainly been transferred to the Persian from the available dialects. Some of these features, that have been examined in this paper include: the verb prefix “hāž/huž” and its varieties, the Tajik suffix “-gy”, use of a special type of auxiliary verb, the verb prefix “-bw”, non-standard use of the suffix “–īst” , analogical transitive structures and the spoken variety of the suffix “ –ān”. Most of these features are still seen in Iranian dialects in isolation.