فصلنامه پازند
پیاپی 16-17 (بهار و تابستان 1388)

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay is best-known for his views on the distinction between phonetic and phonemic analysis of sounds. His theory of the phonemic and phonetic alternations has lead to the modern phonological schools of linguistics. De Courtenay was in fact a pioneer of the modern linguistics who anticipated most of the basic concepts of structuralist theories. In particular, his formative influence on modern phonology is generally acknowledged. However, unfortunately, his name is missed in the history of linguistics as the one who first introduced the most basic concepts in this science. This paper, deals with his beliefs and achievements in modern linguistics.

This paper presents Abdu’l-Qaher Al-Jurjani’s conception of meaning together with the role of context and speaker in this regard. He appears to have a functional approach to meaning and awareness of the notion of ‘text’. The distinction he makes between what could roughly be called meaning and implicature is to some extent like Grice’s dichotomy of sentence and speaker meaning.His theory of Nazm(Construction), his insightful consideration of context and his dichotomies of form/meaning and figurative/literal are also presented. Jurjani’s theories show considerable similarities to present day linguistic trends.

The aim of this paper is to present linguistics thoughts of Abu Nasr Farabi within the frame work of his philosophical system which exist in his two famous books “Ihsa al-’ulum” and “Al-Huruf” which had influenced on western and eastern ancient science and on the science dividing. The present article has three parts. First,Farabi’s biography and his books and articles; second, the linguistic subjects in the books and third, a conclusion.

The basic ideas behind The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis are (1) there are quite different morphosyntactic configurations of meaning in languages, particularly of those belonging to different language families,(2)these language-specific morphosyntactic configurations control our thought processes and our experience of reality. If so,we can speak of structural relativity of thought and orldview with respect to using a different language. I will in this paper first give a brief historical overview of this issue and cite evidence from several languages (mainly English and Persian), to show that though, there are quite different lexical and grammatical categorizations of languages, data from semantic changes show that Linguistic Determinism cannot be literary true, and categories and morphology labeling them can change independently, therefore linguistic patterns do not shape and affect our thought directly. we try to show this Whorfian thought arises from the fact that they believe there is a direct relationship between language and the world, whereas that’s not the case and language categories the world through a complicated network of concepts. I will then argue that Whorfian effect of languages on thought can be true only once we take aesthetic function as the only role of language and when we focus just on aesthetic-related productions (i.e. literature). In the end I will try to explain why it was possible for quite well-known scholars to hold such relativistic opinions on this major issue.

Any investigation about Language Universals, aims at finding common characteristics of languages, and considers the spread of variation across languages. The term “Universal” refers to the idea that the distributions of certain features and paradigms across human languages have been a topic for research. Investigating language universals leads to the understanding of basic features of human languages, and this is what shapes the possible wordless of languages. The present paper deals with language universals, the literature dedicated to this subject and the types of language universals, and finally the universals introduced by Framkin and Rodman and Greenberg are included.

The present article represents a general review of the history of linguistics studies in ancient India. Endeavour has been made to introduce some of the important people in this field who had a great influence on the evolution of linguistics in India. There after we discuss about the reasons of Indians attention to the study of linguistics. After all we focus on the syntactic area of Ancient Indians grammar and present some general information about it.

This article mainly concentrates on similarities and changes of cultural treatment toward “elephant” in transmission and mutation from old India to pre-Islamic Iran. This subject which is studied generally in four research materials (archaeological finds,documentary representations (such as objects of art like paintings,sculptures, monuments and…) and philological deductions (Shahbazi, IranicaII: 498)) raises the necessity to acknowledge coexistance and inter-relations between man and elephant in these two societies’ actual and mental treatment and is to determine the criteria by which the position of this creature is evaluated in Iranian religious society.

India, since a long time ago was the main shelter of Persian language and Iranian literary men who were running away from war and death. The India’s role in protection of Persian language is so much that one of the main literary styles in the Persian poetry, called “Indian style”was created in this country, principally by the Iranian or Indian poets who lived in India in the 16th to 18th century.Bidel Dehlavi is one of the most famous Indian poets who learned Persian language and composed many touching mystic poems in Persian. His poetry is one of the main examples of Indian style which shows its principal characteristics. So the study of Bidel`s poems, apart from recognizing Bidel`s individual style, could result in knowing more realities about this literary school.