زهره سادات ناصری

This study examines the pronunciation errors of English consonant clusters among Iraqi EFL learners through the lens of Optimality Theory (OT).  For this aim, 40 first-year university students of different majors aged 18-25 years were selected from beginner and lower-intermediate levels based on their scores on Oxford Placement Test. Using different instruments, such as reading instruction and read-aloud test, and being informed from the category of major pronunciation problems by Arabic learners presented by Yavaş (2011), an Optimality Theory-based analysis was adopted in the research. Findings indicated that in pronouncing initial clusters of two consonants, *COMPLEX onset as the high-ranked constraint is frequently violated in Iraqi Arabic (IA), because in IA there are many words started with #CCV. Also, *#CCC is never violated in IA. Since constraints are universal, languages differ only in how they rank them. In pronouncing a coda cluster consisting of two consonants, although *CCcoda is never violated in IA, this constraint is not permuted in the pronunciation of the participants. However, to pronounce words with the structure of VCCC(C)#, it seems that the two low-ranked constraints, namely *CCCCcoda and *CCCcoda in English are permuted to high-ranked constraints in the pronunciation of IA learners.

Linguistics is one of the new trends in language studies knowledge that has created new tools for text analysis. On the other hand, the poet can use metaphor to give a special effect to the meanings of his poetry,

The present study is based on the library study method and the statistical population in it is parts 16 to 21 of the Holy Quran, which the authors have studied using the metaphorical conceptual knowledge introduced in linguistics.

In this study, we have examined the three parts of conceptual metaphor in the Holy Quran, which are: ontological, directional and structural metaphor, and we have extracted the evidence that exists in this regard in the book under study.

Many of the interpretations used in the Holy Qur'an, such as: seeing, hearing, speaking, etc., is in fact a conceptual metaphor and should be introduced with this word, as great commentators such as: Imam Khomeini and Allameh Tabatabai to express this matter, Research questions:- Under what subject can the interpretations used in the Holy Quran be examined and what kind of interpretations are these interpretations?- Among the previous commentators of the Holy Quran, who and with what title have named these interpretations?Research purposes- Examined the interpretations used in the Holy Quran and what are the main interpretations of these interpretations?- Examining the former commentators of the Holy Quran, who and under what title these interpretations

Functional linguistics is one of the most significant linguistic approaches of the 20th century, emphasizing the role of language and its structural units while examining structures beyond the sentence, namely, the text. The foundation of Halliday's Grammar relies on two attributes: Systemic and Functional. The semantic system encompasses the broadest functions of language; which Halliday calls metafunction. According to Halliday's Functional Grammar, there are six types of Ideational Metafunction: material, mental, relational, behavioral, existential, and verbal. This study employs a descriptive-analytical method to comparatively analyze these six processes in two of Mowlavi's prose works, Majalis-i Sab'e and Makatib. The aim is to answer the question of whether there is a relationship between the frequency of these process types and the textual and rhetorical structures that are considered prominent features of these works. This analysis seeks to shed light on these works’ stylistics based on ideational metafunction proposed in Halliday's Functional Grammar, thus providing insight into the author's worldview. The obtained results indicate that in Majalis-i Sab'e, the material process is more frequent, while in Makatib, the relational process has a higher frequency. This difference can be attributed to the nature of the discourse in each work. Majalis-i Sab'e consists of sermons and public speeches while Makatib comprises letters written by Mowlavi. Furthermore, among the nine peripheral elements, the spatial element has a high frequency in both works. Considering that the material process is the factor that raises transitivity and the relational process is the factor that lowers the transitivity of the text, low transitivity of Makatib has been compensated to some extent by the high frequency of the peripheral elements. This compensation allows the text to fulfill its intended purpose of teaching ethics and humanity.

Considering the importance of online classes in the Covid-19 era, this study surveyed the satisfaction of English language teachers in secondary schools with teaching on the Shad educational network in 2020 and 2021. This study aimed to explore the teachers’ attitudes towards the opportunities and challenges of the Shad application and to provide the educational community with solutions to overcome the obstacles in the application. A mixed-methods research design was employed, involving 55 high school English language teachers. The quantitative data were collected through a questionnaire that was adapted from several questionnaires in the field of online education (the validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by EFL instructors of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz and its reliability was estimated at 0.84 using Cronbach’s alpha, α = 0.84). The qualitative data were gathered through semi-structured interviews. Results indicated that the use of the Shad application increased the parents’ responsibility and involvement in the student’s learning process. The identification of capable teachers and the utilization of teachers’ experiences were among the opportunities of the Shad application. The teachers commented the biggest problem with using the Shad application was that it was too slow to transfer and learn.

Genre analysis studies have refined our understanding of the rhetorical organization of scientific articles. The present paper reports on a study which investigated the rhetorical organization of the conclusion section of English conceptual review articles in linguistics and applied linguistics fields. Drawing on a move-based genre analysis approach, the study was based on a corpus of more than 500 English conceptual review articles. The analysis involved detecting the generic moves and sub-moves that writers use to achieve communicative purposes. The results showed that first, conclusions in English conceptual review articles differ from conclusions in research papers in terms of primary communicative purposes. Second, conclusions of review articles contain a set five moves, including 1) territory, 2) purpose, 3) structure, 4) conclusion, and 5) suggestion. Third, conclusions of review articles feature a cyclic pattern in the last two moves, as the writer reports main findings of prior research, interprets them, relates them to educational practice, and recommends further research based on what is felt most necessary. Last but not least, unlike research papers conclusions, review articles conclusions contain ‘suggestion’ as a core feature of their rhetorical organization. The results of the study benefit both theoreticians and practitioners.

The most common plural markers in Persian are /-hɑ/ and /-ɑn/. The former is mostly used in speech and the latter is more common in writing (MacKenzie, 1961, p. 50; Rokhzadi, 2011, p. 128). It has different forms in some Persian dialects influenced by phonetic factors. This research aims at investigating the plural marker in Ghayeni Persian within Stratal Optimality Theory (SOT) (Kiparsky, 1998a, 2000). In SOT, there are (at least) two layers. The order of the constraints between the layers can be different, which predicts the opaque relation between the input and the final output. In SOT, the output of each layer enters the next layer as the input along with the special affixes of that layer (if any), and this process continues until the final output is produced.  In Ghayeni Persian, which is spoken in the city of Ghayen in the province of South Khorasan, the suffix /-hɑ/ is not used at all, and the plural /-ɑn/ is present only in the phonological representation. None of the plural markers of standard Persian are observed in the Pronunciation of Ghayeni plural nouns. If the plural form of a word is expressed alone or the followed word or morpheme begins with a consonant, the consonant /n/ in the plural morpheme is deleted. The plural /n/ is not deleted in some cases. In this study, the phonological behavior of the plural marker is examined in words that end in consonant. The previous researches that have studied the plural marker in Persian have not examined the pronunciation of the plural from this point of view.

This article investigates the spatial adpositions in Tati, analytically and descriptively, according to nanosyntax approach. Based on this approach, terminal nodes in the syntactic structure are smaller than a morpheme, i.e. one morpheme can lexicalize several terminal nodes in a syntactic tree. Tati is a postpositional language. Spatial adpositions are divided into two groups, Lexical adpositions are under the node of Axial Part Phrase and functional adpositions are in Path Phrase and Place Phrase. Based on nanosyntax approach, the syntactic structure of adpositions is [Route [ Source[ Goal[ Place[ Ax Part [KP [DP]]. In Tati, “Goal” is not phonologically expressed. So, the motion verb gives [+orientation] feature to the head of “Goal Phrase” and the morpheme which lexicalizes the head of VP, also lexicalizes the head of Goal P. The adposition for “Place”, “Source” and “Route” is -a(da). One of the principles of nanosyntax is superset principle which determines syncretism in morphemes. In Tati, the syncretism pattern is Goal≠Place=Source, which is a rare pattern among the world languages.

Clitics are linguistic units that have both some characteristics of words and some of the dependent morphemes. Therefore, identifying and examining them in different languages is one of the most interesting linguistic issues for linguists. Persian language is no exception to this rule. Thus, the aim of the present study is to determine and describe clitic pronouns in Ghayeni dialect based on Aikhenvald’s criteria (2003). The data have been collected by descriptive-analytical method, using different sources of Ghayeni dialect and recording free speech of 20 native dialects living in Ghayen and also the intuition of one of the authors. Clitic pronouns in this dialect include the object and subject clitics - (d)e, as well as third-person attached pronouns. The results indicate that object clitics refer only to the inanimate singular object and are added to the transitive verb in all persons and tenses when the object is not present. Subject clitics refer to the third person singular verb (mostly animate) and are added to the singular third person verb at all times when the subject is not present. In the case of agreement system, the conjunctive system prevails in this dialect only when it has a passive role in the sentence with the singular third person verb, (d)e-; In this case, it has the same marking as the intransitive verb and a different marking with the transitive verb. Here clitic personal pronouns only include third person pronouns. Clitic pronouns were validated according to Aikhenvald (2003).

In Ghayeni Persian, for nouns ending in vowels /ou/, /ɑ/ and /a/, the plural marker is represented as [au], and in words with vowels /i/, /u/, and /e/, it is pronounced as [u]. These pronunciations confirm that the underlying structure in Ghayeni is /-ɑn/. To explain this, the authors examined the data within Stratal Optimality Theory (SOT) at three levels: stem, word and, post-lexical. The results showed that the phonological processes of pre-nasal raising and hiatus resolution occur at stem level and vowel change and final /n/ deletion take place at word level. Derivations indicated a kind of opacity (bleeding interaction) between pre-nasal raising and the final /n/ deletion. Post-lexical level includes two cases: adding third person singular pronoun /in/ "his/her" and fist person plural pronoun /mɑ/ "we" to the output of the word surface. In this level, the phonological processes as final /n/ deletion and monophthongization are involved. Here another kind of opacity (feeding interaction) between the processes of ezafe vowel deletion and the final /n/ deletion is seen. Therefore, in present study, the opaque interactions in derivations of plural nouns with a final vowel in Ghayeni is analyzed based on SOT. SOT is more efficient than Parallel Optimality Theory (POT) in explaining opaque phonetic changes at morpheme boundaries

The process of Reduplication, due to its importance, has attracted very much attention from linguists in recent decades The present research aims at describing and analyzing total reduplication processes including added medial and final total reduplication and echo reduplication (changing the initial consonant or vowel of reduplicant) in Ghayeni dialect based on Parallel Optimality Theory (POT), in particular Stratal Optimality Theory (SOT). To this end, the considered reduplicative data were gathered based on Shaghaghi reduplication model (2000, 2018). To analyze some data, we need to predict the correct output through some levels to consider the morphological derivation correctly. Since POT has a one-level (input and output) nature, it is unable to explain some reduplicative data. So, SOT, with no limit on the number and kinds of levels, is used to analyze the medial and final added total reduplication. In the present study, the final added total reduplication is considered in two stem levels in which ONSET is on the top of constraint ranking. Since the final consonant of the base undergoes germination, in the medial added total reduplication using enclitic /o/, two levels of stem and word are required. In the medial added total reduplication, the constraint ranking is only different in stem level (a) because the type of reduplicant (echo or non-echo) is determined in this level. But in the next levels, stem level (b) and word level, which undergoes germination and resyllabification, constraints have the same ranking. The results show that SOT presents a more obvious analysis of the mid-levels in the medial and final added total reduplication.

Review articles are important in academic research. Therefore, the reader can read only one review article instead of several research articles. Moreover, review articles have a higher citation rate than other articles and can thus increase the impact factor of journals. Yet, these types of articles are not very common and very few of them are published in scientific journals, especially in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics. One of the reasons for the very few number of such articles is that such articles are difficult to write. Unfortunately, research on such articles is rare. To the best of our knowledge, only Zare & Naseri (2021) have examined the rhetorical structure of English conceptual review articles.Zare & Naseri (2021) examined the moves and steps, used in the abstracts of English conceptual review articles, published in linguistics and applied linguistics fields in prestigious international journals. Based on their observations, the writers of English conceptual review articles use moves and sub-moves in their abstracts which are different from those. These moves include a) territory, b) problem, c) purpose, d) structure, and e) conclusion. The ‘territory’ move clarifies the scope of the paper and summarizes the results of previous research. The ‘problem’ move points to the abundance of research and indicates a gap or a problem in the field. The ‘purpose’ move expresses the goals of the article and states limitations in the scope of the article, if any. The ‘structure’ move describes the methodology and structure of the article. Finally, the ‘conclusion’ move reflects the author's views and suggestions, and expresses the relevance and contribution of these views to previous research. The purpose of this study was to investigate the rhetorical structure of the introduction section of English conceptual review articles, published in prestigious international journals in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics. 

A corpus consisting of the introduction section of 100 English-language conceptual review articles formed the basis of this study. These articles had been published in international highprofile journals in linguistics and applied linguistics from 2000 to 2018. Each major (linguistics and applied linguistics) accounted for 50 articles. In selecting the articles, different authorship aspects such as the number of authors, nationality, English language level, and whether English was their mother tongue or not were not considered. Also, only articles with separate introduction sections formed the corpus. In terms of the analytical procedure, a two-stage analytical method, based on move and sub-move, with a top-down corpus-driven discourse-analytic genre analysis approach was used. The top-down approach refers to the recognition of moves and sub-moves based on the rhetorical functions of discourse units, rather than their lexical or structural features. The corpus-driven approach refers to the fact that in order to examine the rhetorical structure of English conceptual review articles, the researchers of this study approached the articles in the corpus with a blank slate and without considering what earlier research had to offer. Therefore, we first studied some of the articles to see what moves emerged. Then, we examined them in the entire corpus. MAXQDA 2018 was used to detect and code the moves and sub-moves. After coding the moves and sub-moves, their range and frequency distribution were calculated. A third coder was invited in case disagreements happened between the two coders. 

The results of this study showed that, firstly, in terms of rhetorical structure, the introduction of English conceptual review articles is slightly different from the introduction of research articles. Second, this difference is related to the use of the following three moves, along with their sub-moves. These moves and sub-moves are: (a) Introducing the field, including 1) Expressing the importance/ centrality of the subject, 2) Summarizing the results of existing studies and inferring from them, (b) Stating the gap/ research question in the field, including 1 ) Referring to the existing gap, 2) Stating the question(s), (c) Introducing the present research, including 1) Expressing the objectives of the present research, 2) Presenting the hypothesis, 3) Presenting definitions/ explanations, 4) Presenting findings and implications, 6) Expressing the general structure of the article. The high frequency and range of these moves and their similarity to the moves of introductions in research articles indicate their importance and comprehensiveness, regardless of individual characteristics. 

The results of the present study, although not definitive, considering the limitations of the research, can be useful. Theoretically, the findings of the present study can be used to provide a corpus-driven rhetorical model for the introduction of English conceptual review articles. Practically, the results of the present study can be used to prepare textbooks, related to the writing of such articles, and teach them to those who do not have sufficient knowledge of English or even those who have a high command of English, but have difficulty in writing English conceptual review articles.

Numerous studies in the last decade that have investigated the stylistic features of literary works in morphological layer do not help much in advancing stylistic studies and historical behavior of Persian language. In the present study, which evaluates the literature of stylistics in morphological layer, twenty-seven research papers and dissertations written in the Iranian departments of Persian language and literature of academia have been reviewed and critiqued. Numerous studies in the last decade that have investigated the stylistic features of literary works in morphological layer do not help much in advancing stylistic studies and historical behavior of Persian language. In the present study, which evaluates the literature of stylistics in morphological layer, twenty-seven research papers and dissertations written in the departments of Persian language and literature in Iran have been reviewed and critiqued. The findings indicate that these studies suffer several shortcomings, including: misunderstanding the basic morphological concepts, defining overlapping morphological categories, misreading texts and misidentifying the grammatical role of words, neglecting the diachronic behavior of Persian language, confusing research strategies and introducing unnecessary and redundant models and some other common mistakes. These problems are serious hurdles in the way of stylistic studies in morphological layer and also understanding Persian language changes. Finally, some suggestions have been made to address the aforementioned problems.

This study was an attempt to shed light on the formulaic nature of the language of theoretical review articles. The study was based on a corpus of 517 English review articles from linguistics and applied linguistics disciplines. Following a corpus-driven discourse analytic approach, we identified four-word bundles occurring at least 20 times per million words in at least five different articles and investigated their structural and functional features. The results showed that the dominance of text-oriented and phrasal bundles, especially framing signals and prepositional phrases, indicates the highly informational nature of review articles in linguistics and applied linguistics and the importance of organizational features of discourse in articles. Moreover, the low proportion of participant-oriented bundles and resultative signals implies the writer’s avoidance to make claims and interpretations in English review articles. Additionally, the varied and frequent use of the anticipatory-it structure among clausal bundles, the low proportion of engagement bundles, and the fact that this dialogic feature of article writing was conveyed through an impersonal construction point to the writer’s reluctance to explicitly show commitment to his/her evaluations. Finally, expressing stance through anticipatory-it constructions and shell nouns indicates the writer’s intention to hide or foreground authorial observations, interpretations, and claims.

One of language learning difficulties for Persian speaking learners is the pronunciation of sounds that do not exist in their mother tongue. These sounds include English consonants /w/, /θ/, /ð/, and /ŋ/. Due to the interference of the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), most Persian speaking learners replace the unfamiliar sound in L2 with a similar one in L1. This research, adopting a descriptive-analytic approach, aims to investigate the substitution of each English consonant with their corresponding consonants in Persian through argumentation around their constraints and ranking of Optimality theory in order to avoid interference in the later stages of language learning. To this end, 50 seventh-graders (middle school students) were randomly-selected from those who had not previously attended any English class outside school. Then they were asked to read 10 sentences containing at least 2 words with one of the English consonants /w/, /θ/, /ð/ or /ŋ/. The results show that these students substitute English consonants /w/, /T/, /D/, and /N/ with their corresponding counterparts in Persian [v], [t], [d], and [Nɡ], respectively. In some cases, depending on the consonant position in the syllable, they are replaced by another similar consonants in Persian, as [s] and [z] instead of /T/ and /D/ at coda position.

The present paper investigated the reasons of the omission of Place and Goal markers. Place and Goal markers can be omitted whether a class2 preposition is present in a PP or no. When the omission takes place, the verb lexicalizes the Place and Goal nodes in syntactic tree. In the case of Place marker, when the verb is stative it belongs [䫖궊, ⺇᪶⯞] feature. When Place marker dar is present in a PP, the Place head is lexicalized by the morpheme dar which has [⺇᪶⯞] feature; but when dar is omitted, the feature of [⺇᪶⨧] is attracted to the Place head by the stative verb. According to nanosyntax Goal head, Place head, AxialParts and DP can be omitted in Persian, but Source head and Bound head cannot be omitted in any situation. Therefore, referring to nanosyntax, the nodes which dominate Goal P do not have the ability to be omitted.

The purpose of the present article is to investigate some phonological processes such as consonantal fronting, spirantization, initial insertion, non-contiguous assimilation, debuccalization, stopping and final devoicing in Roudbari language variety (Islam Abad), within the framework of optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993; 2004). This research was carried out based on a descriptive-analytic method. To collect data, 10 native informants (5 women and 5 men in the ages from 45 to 80, from low literate/ illiterate to educated) have been interviewed. Also, some available sources on Roudbari language variety were used. To investigate, describe and analyze the data, the most important dominant constrains over optimal surfaces have been explained for each of the phonological processes examined in this research within the given framework of optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993; 2004). These explanations have been provided through giving the reason for constrains responsible for the occurrence of these processes and their rankings. Description and ranking of constraints indicate that constraints *G and ONSET are never violated and always are posited at the highest rank of optimality tableau.

The present paper investigates the syncretism patterns of path expressions in Persian, Kermanshahi Kurdish and Luri (Minjayi dialect) according to Nanosyntax theory. In the introduction, we elaborate Nanosyntax theory by referring to some works as literature review. In the next part, along with explaining Path decomposition, we investigate syncretism patterns in the three mentioned languages. The data is gathered from native speakers. This paper indicates the extent in which Nanosyntax can answer the syncretism in Iranian languages and which patterns they have. The pattern of syncretism in Persian is Location¹Goal¹Source = Route. Most of the time the syncretism of Route = Source is spurious and the reason is that the verb lexicalizes the route node. Syncretism pattern in Kermanshahi Kurdish depends on the position and type of the verb. In the case of verbs which accept enclitics, if the verb is in the initial position, the pattern is “Location=Goal¹Source”; and if the verb is in final position, the pattern will be “Location=Goal=Source”. In the case of verbs which don’t accept enclitics, there are two patterns: “Location=Goal=Source” and “Location= Source≠Goal”. In Luri, if the verb is in the initial position, the syncretism pattern is “Location=Goal≠Source”; and if the verb is in the final position, the pattern will be “Location= Source≠Goal”. According to researches, no language has been found to have the last pattern in Path syncretism.

Critical discourse analysis is the modern approach to discourse analysis which has been used in a wide range of disciplines in recent decades, including literature and psychology. Although critical discourse analysis approach prioritizes the relationship among language, power, ideology and discourse in political-social issues, it is possible to analyze and interpret the literature of nations in the context of critical discourse analysis and linguistic criticism. Tarikh-e Beyhaqi is among those literary works which can be studied in the framework of this approach. It enables the analyst to reveal the relationship among power, ideology and discourse. Linguistically examining the episode ‘The Death of Bunasr-e Moshkan’, the present study sought to explore the deep and hidden layers of the text, i.e. the status of the relationship between power and ideology in Ghaznavi period. It also aimed at achieving critical defamiliarization through discovering and interpreting different ideologies in the text. In so doing, the writers used Norman Fairclough’s approach in critical discourse analysis and analyzed the text in descriptive, interpretive and expressive layers. In descriptive layer, word selection, characters and metaphorical aspects are emphasized, so that the ideological approach of Beihaghi is expressed. The noticeable features of this part included the cold and lifeless space dominating the episode, the serious state of society at that time, and the sense of freedom-seeking and desperation of the protagonist. All of tÉese features were masterfully indicated in words and expressions of the episode. In interpretive layer, the emotional and mental crisis of that time and the discourse of different groups of people are interpreted through intertextuality. In expressive layer, the contrasts of mental comfort and discomfort, responsibility and irresponsibility, loyalty and betrayal, and friendship and enmity, adds a contrastive excitement to the episode.