نشریه زبان شناخت
سال ششم شماره 11 (بهار و تابستان 1394)

Much of poetry of Iran in middle period has been composed by Manicheans in middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian languages. These poems are praise and liturgical or mystic hymns that narrate the story of strangeness of light in the prison of Matter. In the latter, because of more connection with human, the emotion and imagination element are clearer, and the poetic art can be better observed in them. The figures of speech, both figures of word and figures of thought have been greatly used in these poems. Apart from existing the figures that are expected in every poem and are in the nature of poetry, the specimens can be seen that they are correspond even with the definitions of rhetorical books in Islamic period. The figures of speech in Manichaean poems can be divided in two groups; the sound music (figures of word), and spiritual music (figures of thought). It has been used in the figures of word field, the repetition (words, sentences and phonemes); and in the figures of thought field, the figures such as antithesis, amphiboly and apostrophe. It has been attempted in this article to show the quality of use of figures of speech in Manichaean poems surviving in Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian languages, along with citing the specimens.

Cognitive strategies, first introduced in Cognitive Semantics, are cognitive devices like conceptual metonymies, conceptual metaphors, image metaphors and schemas which structure abstract concepts in our minds and facilitate our understanding. This paper aims to study examples of these strategies in the language of Sahife Sajjadie. For this purpose, I have analyzed cases of structural, orientational, and ontological metaphors, as well as conceptual metonymies, image metaphors and image schemas in this religious text to find out two things. What is the role of these strategies in conceptualization and understanding of abstract concepts, and to find whether the analyzed language is a literary language or not. Analysis of the selected metaphorical data shows that religious abstract concepts are represented both literally and non-literally. Non-literal representations of concepts are structured by using cognitive strategies of metaphor, metonymy, image schemas and metaphors. In addition, language of Do’a in this book has used the same metaphors as ordinary conventional language, though it has used extending, elaboration, combining of metaphors, as well as personification and metaphorical images which assimilate it to a literary work.

The Impersonal verb is a verb which is always inflected in the third singular and its logical subject does not appear in the nominative case. These verbs often express physical or mental/cognitive experiences which the logical subject experiences without having any control on them. Thus the subject in these structures is called "experiencer". Another element which has a role in impersonal sentences is the source of the events, activities and experiences. It's presence in the sentence depends on the meaning of the verb. In Sogdian beside some of the modal verbs which are in accordance with the definition of impersonal verbs, there are two other verbs which are impersonal too. These are rēž- and nam-. As will be shown rēž- is appeared as an impersonal verb approximately in all the remaining evidences, but nam- has impersonal use just in one of it's evidences. In this article I will study and analyze these two verbs.

Urartians left pieces of evidence of their domination in North West of Iran. They were extraordinary metalworkers and sometimes wrote the name of the Urartian king on their objects. They sometimes decorated or even inscribed horse equipment with short inscriptions. Some discs from horse harnesses, with or without inscriptions, are found from Urartian kingdom. A similar object exists in Eastern Azerbaijan Museum which is a bronze disc from the horse harness with the inscription of Argishti I. This disc is dedicated to the museum by a rural from Varzaghan. Although the name of the king’s father is not written but epigraphically it is from Argishti I.

This paper aims to investigate markedness in nominal and pronominal morphology of modern north-western Iranian languages from a diachronic perspective based on Hawkinʼs (2004) minimized forms principle. Based on this principle marked forms ocuupy the lowest and unmarked forms the highest position in performance-based hierarchies. Forms are ranked based on their frecuency in performance-based hierarchies. The reason that there exist these different frecuensies can be attributed to communicative reasons, complixity and different occurances of linguistic units in outside world. In this paper, we have shown that markedness changes in number and gender hierarchies are in line with minimized forms principle and its predictions in the investigated languages, but there are some exceptions in case hierarchy, which is not in line minimized forms predictions.

Prepositional phrases have a significant place in different syntactic theories. In Role and Reference Grammar these constituents are categorized into three classes namely Adjuncts, Argument markers and Argument-adjuncts. Adjuncts PPs offer semantic information for the sentence in which they occur. They are adverbial elements modifying the event or situation described by the predicate. Argument marking PPs mark an argument of the predicate. In this class the preposition itself does not contribute semantic information. Argument- adjunct PPs contain predicative adpositions that add to the meaning of the sentence. Also, they introduce one of the participants in the event. This paper examines different PPs in Persian based on the classification of RRG. It will be demonstrated that PPs in Persian do not always function as adjuncts, but they play as markers of arguments in ditransitive clauses or even as direct objects with some predicates. To conclude we will show that RRG accounts for prepositional phrases in Persian.

The present study, evaluated the developmental process of metaphor comprehension in Persian-speaking children of three age groups of 6, 7 and 8 years old. Some researchers believe that metaphor comprehension occurs at the beginning of adolescence. Another group believes that preschool children can understand metaphorical concepts. Cognitive linguists believe that metaphors are fundamental aspects of language and cognition, which are used innately and subconsciously, for perceiving emotions and other mental and abstract concepts. To examine the children’s metaphoric competence, a multiple-choice test of 36 metaphoric sentences, in four subtests, was designed. Based on the findings, children are able to comprehend different types of metaphors at early ages, and their interpretation of metaphors develops progressively with the increase of age and world knowledge development.

Human language is a very complicated system that has been studied by scholars in different centuries; among whom was, "Abdul-Rahman Ibn Khaldoun", the great Muslim scholar, that discussed language faculty in his study of society and named it "Al-Malakat Al-Lughawiyah" (The Queen of Words), in his famous book "Al- Muqaddimah" (The Introduction) where he argued that, a child has an innate ability for language learning to him, this is a gradual quality that does not come about all at once. In the same vein, "Chomsky", the contemporary American linguist, explored linguistic competence following “Ibn Khaldoun”. He, too, believed that, language faculty is innate, and that the mind sets parameters for universal principles. Results of this comparative study of the two scholars, highlighted differences and similarities between the two, and revealed that Chomsky’s language faculty was first introduced by "Ibn Khaldoun"; whom should, therefore, be accredited as the founder of this view based on the results.

Poetics is the knowledge to read a literary work, not solely based on the meaning of the text, but rather based on the more abstract elements that create the literary piece. Consequently, the Poetics of a literary work can be indefinitely identified only via the structure of the work itself, based on descriptions and elicitations of how it was developed and evolved. The poetics structural format of a literary work consists of fore-text, text, and post-text, which are constantly under the influence of the process of writing in its past, present and future, as an abstract and experimental phenomenon. Poetics, according to their performance score on the analysis of literary work, can answer the question of value and status of literary works, in relevance to literary criticism.. This paper strives to explain the concepts and theories related to the topic, and analyze the Poetics elements involved in the creation of a literary piece. In conclusion, in addition to clarifying the metaphysical presence of process, the post-textual evolutionary and developmental parameters are analyzed.

Identification and recognition of the Turfan Manichaean fragments belonging to the Ewangelyōnīg bāšāhs are the main aim of this article. In a codicological study the author attempts to show whether the fragment M441 is a piece of the same manuscript page from which M507 has been separated. Positive answer to this provides a new unified text which mainly contains a poetical expression of the Manichaean Creation myth and of the quarrelsome deeds of the “Prince of Darkness” (Ahriman) in Manichaeism.

Linguistic diversity, across socio-natural environments, reflects similarities and differences in ethnic groups’ views towards natural ecological phenomena. This diversity is driven by needs, cognition, culture, human-related and environmental factors. Lexicon, categorization, and classification in any given language, act differently with regard to interaction with ecology. Ecolinguistics emerged in 1990s as a new approach in language studies, which focuses on the interrelationship between a given language, and its users’ geographical and natural environment. This paper, aims to introduce Eco-linguistics, as well as its potentials in dialect-related research, highlighting the impact of natural environment on lexical, morphological, and syntactic differences among languages and dialects. The current paper, studies the relationship between Eco-linguistics approach, and Gilani and Semnani dialects from two different ecologies. The results reveal that, in the authors’ beliefs, this new approach can explain why the means of naming concepts and phenomena vary in dialects, how metaphors develop, and why regional–and local-dialects sometimes differ incredibly in terms of their lexicon and morpho-syntax. The answers eco-linguistics provides to these questions appear reasonable to a considerable extent.