نامه فرهنگستان
سال هفدهم شماره 4 (بهار و تابستان 1398)

Adopting the Systemic-Functional Theory (Halliday, 1985) as its theoretical framework, the present corpus-based study explored the application of different types of ideational grammatical metaphors in Persian academic articles. For this purpose, 105 Persian research articles written over the three decades of 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in the fields of physics, chemistry, linguistics, political science, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and medicine were selected as examples of scientific discourse and the grammatical metaphors with the highest and lowest frequencies were determined. The disciplines exhibiting the highest frequencies of grammatical metaphors were identified as in the following descending order: civil engineering > medicine > physics > political science > mechanical engineering > linguistics. Based on the results obtained, deverbal nominalization recorded the highest frequency across the disciplines reviewed. In addition, no significant increase was observed in the use of grammatical metaphors among the research articles written, by Iranian writers over the past three decades. The findings also indicated that writing academic articles, in Persian, by Iranian researchers follows a too slow trend so that special plans and measures need to be adopted for its enhancement. Another aspect of the study involved the level of discourse complexity. For this purpose, the present author introduced the three indices of ‘the level of grammatical metaphor application in a specific discourse’, ‘awareness of the metaphorical processes in language’, and ‘their usage in scientific discourse’. Analysis of the corpus based on these indices rejected Holtz’s (2009) hypothesis stating that empirical sciences, compared to humanities, are expressed in a more complex language. Rather, discourse complexity estimates must be based on all the three indices introduced.

Adopting Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) classification as its theoretical framework, the present descriptive-analytical study examined conceptual metaphors in the three disciplines of physics, medicine, and linguistics seeking answers to such inquiries as ‘how conceptual metaphors are substantiated in academic language’ and ‘how frequently they occur in the three disciplines mentioned. For the purpose of this study, 21 abstracts from among research articles written over the two years of 2017 and 2018 were initially selected. Their lexical ranges were then determined to be 1486, 1102, and 1420 items belonging to the fields of medicine, physics, and linguistics, respectively. Conceptual metaphors were then identified in each sentence, the total frequency of which was determined at 305 (i.e., 7.6% of the total lexical ranges), all of which were recognized as ontological metaphors. In addition to these, 129 metaphors were recognized as belonging to the structural and 21 to the orientational class of metaphors. Results indicate that metaphors have a higher frequency of occurrence in the linguistics discipline than in the other two fields investigated.

Drawing upon the newly-proposed concept of emotioncy in psychology (emotion + frequency of senses), the present study attempts to measure the cultural weight of 6 selected Persian neologisms and their foreign equivalents. To this end, in the quantitative phase, 148 participants were asked to take an emotioncy scale on a number of selected words. Also, to conduct the qualitative phase of the current study, 75 individuals were interviewed about the senses of the words under study. The findings indicated that emotioncy analysis could be an effective and useful method of measuring the cultural weight of words. Moreover, the outcomes revealed that, in most cases, foreign words have recorded higher degrees of emotioncy than their Persian neologisms

The lexical items approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (hereafter called the Academy) lack a proper tree or thesaurus structure despite being originally selected in clusters from foreign languages. A semantic network viewpoint not only helps detect easily the gaps among the Persian equivalents selected for foreign words but also delineates the semantic relations among the equivalents provided. The semantic network approach provides lexicologists with a new tool for selecting or coining Persian equivalents for foreign words and organizing them into relevant structures. In this regard, a thesaurus structure seems to allow for the lexical items approved by the Academy to be organized in a systematic and structured manner. Webbased publication of such items structured within a conceptual network and their subsequent retrieval and analysis can in no way be compared with any of the existing traditional practices. The Chemistry Thesaurus compiled based on the chemistry terms approved by the Academy has not only created a small corpus in a specialized field but will also open new avenues to the generation of a large corpus of all the lexical items approved by the Academy. It is the objective of the present article to propose a model that employs the semantic network theory for both the initial selection of foreign words and the subsequent organization of the Persian equivalents formed in a thesaurus format.

The present study explores the application of medical terms approved
by the Academy of Persian Language & Literature in Iranian medical journals using the Dictionary of A Collection of Medical Terms as a reference for comparisons. For this purpose, six distinguished Iranian medical journals with the highest impact factors were selected to collect 1547 articles. It was found that the journals using the highest number of approved terms were Journal of Dentistry, Journal of ‘Salmand’ (the Senile), Knowledge and Health Quarterly, Journal of Iranian Vocational Health, Journal of Audiology, and Journal of Life, in an ascending order. The Journal of Dentistry with the lowest Persian to English term ratio of 2.21 and the Journal of Life with the highest Persian to English term ratio of 6.31 used the highest and lowest numbers of English terms, respectively. Another aspect of the study involved identification of the inadequacies of the Dictonary of A Collection of Medical Terms; these included identical equivalents for different terms from the source language, literary terms and some vulgar terms used as scientific terms. Regarding the journals investigated, they exhibited such problems as simultaneous use of both English and Persian terms in the same context, failure to observe Persian affixation rules properly, extreme use of derived forms, use of different word orders for a single compound term, and application of words from two different word categories for a single meaning. Overall, the journals examined seem to have paid no heed in most cases to using terms approved by the Academy.

This article examines a number of preferred words approved by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (hereafter called the
Third Academy) despite the presence of widely-used counterparts. The article strives to provide explanations for such instances as the rejection by the Third Academy of the Tajiki /čarxbāl/ for the English [helicopter], on the grounds that it is structurally ambiguous, to opt for /bālgard/; replacement of /tārnamā/ [website], on the grounds that it is semantically inadequate, with /vebgāh/, in which the English [web] is borrowed into Persian and used in a word-cluster derived from it; preference of /porčarbī/ [fatty], due to its more common and frequent structure, over /porčarb/; selection of /dūrnegār/ [facsimile] preferred to /namābar/ for its greater semantic flexibility due to the syntactic relations between its constituents (i.e., /dūr/ [far] and /negār/ [scribe/ scriber]; the stringent rejection of the word-for-word translation /xodzendegīnāme/ for [autobiography] in favor of /zendegīnāme-ye xodnevešt/; selection of the less familiar /šodāmad/ [exchange of visits; traffic] at the expense of the more common /raftoāmad/; or, the simple /šomār/, generally meaning [number], selected as the equivalent for ‘tirage’ (<fr.) [circulation for periodicals or publications] to avoid the suffix /-gān/ that has been used in a specific sense in other cases. These explanations are meant to illustrate how the word selection principles and guidelines adopted by the Academy work in practice.

The cultural approach to terminology entails identification of the mechanisms available in a target language for handling novel scientific concepts borrowed from a source language. This objective is achieved by exploiting the cultural structures available in the target language to bridge native speakers’ previous knowledge to their perceptions of novel concepts. Looked at from this viewpoint, the cultural approach to terminology involves the development and exploitation of the tools already present in a target language to meet its speakers’ emerging conceptual needs. Introducing the basic concepts of the cultural approach, the present article initially reviews its theoretical foundations to set the grounds for making a linguistic distinction between Saussurean and cultural views of the signifier-signified relation. In a second stage, the study provides descriptions of reconceptualization in the target language, term variation, and term processing in scientific language. In the section on term selection and neologism, the morphological-semantic dimensions of term structure will be explored within the framework of the approach adopted and the role of metaphor will be highlighted both as a semantic shift process and as an aspect of syntagmatic term construction. Finally, in the section on data analysis, both native terms and those approved by the Academy of Persian Language & Literature selected from different areas will receive an in-depth analysis.