نشریه پژوهش های زبانی
سال هشتم شماره 1 (بهار و تابستان 1396)

The syntactic expression of sentential negation has given rise to a lot of research in most linguistic frameworks. During the last few decades of research in generative grammar, studies on negation focus on a range of topics, including the position of Negation Phrase. Indeed, not only do languages vary with respect to the form of negative elements, but the underlying position of these functional elements is also subject to cross-linguistic variation. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1994), the present study investigates the position of NegP in Farsi. Contrary to the claim in the literature, it will be argued - both on theoretical and empirical grounds - that in this language NegP immediately dominates TP and verbal elements absorb the functional head of Negation Phrase via a post-syntactic process, called morphological merger. Moreover, the syntax of negation is connected to the phenomenon of negative polarity, i.e. items whose distribution is limited to a number of negative contexts. So, this article examines the conditions which license the occurrence of N-phrases (N-words) in indicative structures. Clearly, studying N-phrases provides more insight not only into the nature of such context-sensitive elements, but also into the syntactic nature and position of sentential negation itself.

The present research explores the semantics of two prepositions in Gurani Kurdish, i.e. “læ” and “wæ”. Our approach is cognitive semantics and we particularly use the principled polysemy model (Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2003; Evans and Tyler, 2004a, 2004b; Evans, 2004, 2005, 2006) that suggests clear criteria for determining both distinct senses and primary (or prototype) sense of spatial prepositions. The findings of the research show that the primary sense of læ is “beginning, source or origin” while that of wæ is “receiver or target”. The semantic network of læ has three clusters of senses – i.e. metaphorical, inclusion and comparison- with sixteen distinct senses. The semantic network of wæ includes five distinct senses without any cluster. The findings also confirm the efficiency of this model’s criteria for determining and classifying the distinct and primary senses of prepositions.

In this paper, we will study the lexical aspect in Persian deadjectival complex predicates. Hence, we firstly review different kinds of aspect. Then, we will succinctly review three common viewpoints in the study of aspect in Persian complex predicates. According to the first viewpoint, light verbs play the major role in the telicity of the complex verbs; the second considers preverb to be determinant and regards all of the deadjectival complex predicates to be telic; and finally, the third viewpoint, although pointing out to the non-homogeneity of Persian complex predicates, does not provide us with an explanation behind such inconsistency. It is argued in this paper that approaches based on the scalar structure of the verb, in which the lexical properties of the base adjective is considered to be of great importance, stand in a better position in accounting for the aspectual properties of Persian deadjectival complex predicates.

The main purpose of this paper is to study the truncated impersonal constructions in Persian within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. This type is made up of a modal and a truncated infinitive. In Cognitive Grammar it is believed that there are two kinds of modals: root modals and epistemic modals. In this study, it was shown that modals used in this kind of impersonal constructions are root modals which don’t have any specific speaker and addressee. Since the subject position in these constructions is empty, the subject is considered as setting-subject representing a generalized and ambient setting which is defocused and the prominence is assigned to the process occurred in the setting. It was also evinced that the occurrence of third person singular agreement in this construction is meaningful, it agrees with setting-subject and it gives prominence to setting as the subject; so the setting is construed as trajectory.

Since the verbs are the most important grammatical category in a language and actions, activities and states are denoted with the help of them, the goal of this project is to study the different meanings of verb "gereftan" and show the relations between its meanings based on Filmore Frame Semantics (1979). This study has been done by examining the syntactic and semantic distribution of arguments of the selected concepts of Persian verb "gereftan" which has obtained from social networks like Twitter and Youtube text. Results from this work showed that "gereftan" has different meanings such as "receiving", "buying" and "understanding" which are the sub-branches of the "commercial transaction" frame. The study has proved that the verbs "receiving", "buying" and "understanding" with different concepts have some core elements that these elements are common and trigger create semantic relation between verbs "receiving", "buying" and "understanding".

This study provides a semantic analysis of the present perfect of Persian expressing immediate and definite futurity. This phenomenon will be tackled in terms of deictic projection. To this end, after a brief introduction of some of the related concepts, the paper examines the ways in which a Persian speaker employs the present perfect to actualize a future situation for his/her communicative ends. In a sense, the lexical, grammatical and pragmatic elements contributing to this specific use will be analyzed by the exemplification of deictic projection. The results obtained from this study reveals that the certainty of a given event is the speaker’s main motivation to use the present perfect tense designating futurity. Moreover, in order to have such a pragmatic use, the sentence in present perfect needs to be affirmative in most of the cases on the one hand, and the presence of an adverb of time referring to a limited period of time and pointing to a definite end point in future, is necessary, on the other. The semantic and contextual analysis of this kind of usage shows that an inchoative aspect for the verbs in these types of sentences are deemed operational. Although it is possible to project present perfect to express futurity in the case of verbs referring to an action and dynamic situations, such a use is not possible for state verbs, except for some limited cases in a specific context. Furthermore, in this particular kind of projection, a meaning of epistemic modality is generally observable.

This paper addresses the different repair strategies applied in the Surani Kurdish language for the correction of vowel hiatus, cross-linguistically known as a phonologically marked structure. Data related to vowel hiatus were collected, classified and treated by Optimality Theory. Examination of the data revealed that Surani Kurdish uses three different phonological strategies to repair vowel hiatus which arises during word formation processes. These strategies are epenthesis, deletion and glide formation. The most common phonological pattern applied to prevent V sequences from being realized in surface form is glide ([w] and [j]) epenthesis. However, glide epenthesis is not applied in two conditions: (1) when the vowels are both [隌], in which case the second vowel (V2), i.e., the vowel belonging to the suffix, is deleted from the input form; (2) when the vowel in the suffix is /i/, in which case the vowel is turned into the glide [w] through the glide formation process. In an OT account of the phonological data concerned, we introduced a new set of Faithfullness constraints which are sensitive to the morphological information of the input form. Using these constraints, we are able to explain how each strategy turns to be the most optimal pattern in the morpho-phonemic condition in which it applies.