مجله جستار های زبانی
سال هفتم شماره 6 (پیاپی 34، پاییز 1395)

This research deals with the learning style of the non-Iranian learners of Persian as a second language in Iran. The primary objective of the study was to identify the learner's perceptual learning styles. The second objective was to study the relationship between demographic variables like language (Arabic versus non-Arabic languages), nationality in both Asia and Europe, level of education (undergraduate versus postgraduate) and the gender of Persian language learners with various perceptual learning styles. The participants of this research included 131 non-Iranian male and female students who were randomly selected from the Persian Language Center in Imam Khomeini International University. Reid's (1987) Perceptual Learning Style Preference Questionnaire (PLSPQ) was administrated and the results obtained showed that the major preferred learning styles were tactile, auditory and kinesthetic while visual group and individual styles were minor learning style preferences of the learners. Other findings indicated that the mean score obtained by the European learners was significantly lower than that of Asian learners on auditory and group learning styles. The mean score obtained in the kinesthetic learning style by non-Arabic speakers was significantly higher than that of the Arabic language speakers. Other results did not reveal any significant differences in score between two groups of men and women in their preferred learning styles.

The Quranic word “ʽilm” (knowledge) is one of the central concepts in the language of the Quran and the center of semantic field of knowledge. Because of this, understanding its historical formation is important not only for semantic approach to Quranic lexicology but also for anthropological approach to Quranic revelation context, and is helpful for interpretation of Quran. This paper studies various meanings of stem ʽILM in Arabic and the other Semitic languages such as Sabaic, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Ugaritic, Akkadian; then whith dating these meanings and searching the possible semantic relations, explores the relations between meaning (know) and the other meanings. By this research, it becomes clear that firstly the meaning “conceal” that has a strong presence in the central north branch of Semitic languages is in opposition with the meaning “indicate” that is seen in south branches; And so, this Opposing pair is as old as ancient Semitic language; Secondly the meanings “sign” and “knowledge” have a powerful relation regarding sub branches like “indicate” in one hand And “take notice”,” teach” from the other; And because the meaning “sign” is older, the meaning “knowledge” is derived from it. Thirdly Occurrence of meanings like “write”, “seal” and “signature” in the south Peripheral branch; “scratch” in Akkadian; “see” and “look” in Afro-asiatic and also the kind of referents of the concept of “sign” in the Arabic Make the concept of sign in the Semitic-Arabic space far from auditory signs and near to visual signs. And so, we should conclude that the meaning “Ilm” (knowledge) is derived from the meaning “visual signs”.

Carried out in the framework of Transformational Grammar and Typology, this research aims at determining the generation place of Persian Object Clitics, and examining the effects their synchronic-diachronic analyses may have on typological studies. The underlying order ‘Object Clitic Verb’ was consequently considered to be at work in correspondence to SOV order; And, it’s the Move-α Transformation that drives the clitic out to surface elsewhere, i.e. mostly in Postverbal Position. Moreover, syntactic, morphological, and prosodic alignments were introduced to be influencing in cliticization in Persian as a trio of criterions which may change by the passage of time; Grammaticality of encliticization to the nominal part of Complex Predications in Classic New Persian and the ungrammaticality of the same process in some CPs of Standard NP was mentioned as an example; Referring to the UG Principle of ‘Minimal Link Condition’, this duality in behavior was argued to be an approval of the interaction between cliticization and incorporation processes. Finally, to explain the possible effects of the above results on the typological analyses, the hypothesis of Persian’s type change from OV to VO suggested by Dabir-Moghaddam (1997) was reformulated by keeping an eye to the diachronic change in the Clitic System; it was put forward that the historically-growing inconsistencies of this language to some of the Dryer’s (1992) criteria and specially to the Greenbergian 25th Universal are mostly applicable to the change stated. It was therefore concluded that the synchronic-diachronic behavior and placement of these elements testifies the aforementioned type-change hypothesis.

Perceptual dialectology deals with the comprehension and attitude of speakers towards concepts such as the geographical demarcation of the dialects of self and others, prestige and social status of dialects, etc. In this study, 64 native speakers living in Shabestar County in North West of Tabriz (including Shabestar, Shend Abad, Daryan, and Khameneh) have been interviewed. The research is conducted using four audio files as well as one researcher-made questionnaire. The findings indicate that the middle-aged group and female group are more successful in finding out the geographical distance and fellow-citizenship of the narrators of the audio files, giving weight to the former studies like Diercks (2002) in Germany. In other words, the middle-aged as well as female individuals display higher levels of linguistic awareness. It is also noted that the administrative and economic situation of an area (Shabestar city) convinces native speakers of the region to consider its linguistic variety as an urban variety. Furthermore, it is revealed that opposing the well-known presupposition in sociolinguistics, the linguistic variety of the smallest town in the region, i.e. Khameneh is regarded more prestigious than those in other areas

The present article aims to explore VP ellipsis as well as modal and main verb (Those that take a clause as their complement) complement ellipses in Persian. This research therefore addresses the question: what is the account of modal and main verb (Those that take a clause as their complement) complement ellipses, which are superficially similar to VP ellipsis, in Persian? The proposed hypothesis is that by definition, Persian lacks VP ellipsis; however, modal and main verb complement ellipses exist in this language which both are regarded as a single structure and an example of v-stranding VP ellipsis.
Having critically reviewed the previous studies done on the structure under discussion, modal and main verb complement ellipses are explored in detail. Unlike English, Persian disallows VP ellipsis (according to the most accepted definition in Generative Linguistics) in the sense that it is impossible to delete the verb phrase of a sentence and strand the tense. But, in a similar structure, it is possible to delete the complements of modals except ‘bayad’ meaning ‘should’ and main verbs if the conditions on ellipsis are met. Persian modals are morpho-syntactically main verbs and they appear in the same syntactic positions as main verbs. For this reason, the complement ellipses of both are regarded as a single structure. Extracting a constituent like an object out of the ellipsis site, Missing Antecedent Phenomenon, and finally strict and sloppy readings are the major syntactic properties of this structure which all back up the ellipsis analysis of the structure under investigation.
The results of this research suggest that E-feature resides on v. When the verb raises to v and as soon as the uninterpretable features are checked via Agreement, the complement of v is deleted but v itself is stranded. Since indirect objects and adverbs occupying positions higher than CP undergo ellipsis as well, it can be argued that the VP, which is situated higher than CP, is deleted. This structure is, therefore, regarded as an instantiation of v- stranding VP ellipsis.

In this research, we examine the Impersonal Constructions in Guilaki within the framework of Minimalist theory. The purpose of this research is to determine the nature of preverbal element. We will show how the case of DP at the clause-initial position of these constructions, is checked. Also we will discuss the merge position of this DP and where it moves in overt syntax. Examining Guilaki data reveals that the impersonal construction involves a compound verb and the verb is unaccusative. The preverbal element as the head of the predicate assigns experiencer theta role to the DP at the initial position of the constructions under study. This DP is in fact the complement of rā which is a postposition, so they form a prepositional phrase (PP). This PP is merged in the specifier position of the predicate phrase (or Spec of VP). We apply subjecthood tests to the DP and it does not pass any of these tests. So it does not move into the specifier position of tense phrase. Hence, we conclude that the PP has been topicalized and Guilaki lacks quirky subject.

The matter of transformation in the writing system of Persian language and employing a Latin- based alphabet for this mean has attracted, for a long time, the attention of many linguists and grammarians. In addition to cultural, economic and political factors as well as teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers, the technological development and some phenomena such as internet (chat), electronic letters (e-mail) and short messages (SMS) have made the issue more crucial.
Different reasons have been presented and some methods or alphabets have been proposed. But are the presented reasons always logical and scientific? Are the writing methods practical and usable? In this paper, we will argue the reasoning of three groups Eurofarsi, Unipers and Parsic for changing Persian alphabet and their proposed Latin-based alphabets for Persian language, as well as the common public method of Latin-based writing of Farsi. The findings showed that the relevant arguments seemed illogical and formed on the basis of this presupposition that Persian writing system has caused many problems for acquisition of this language. Furthermore, the proposed writing systems of these groups were not considered applicable to Persian.

Graffiti, which is also called silent discourse, reflects different status of women and men in social structure. Hence, studying graffiti can provide us with salient information regarding their anonymous writers’ linguistic and social features. The present study aims at analyzing sociolinguistic features of “theme” and “style” in a corpus of female and male university students’ Persian graffiti in the university campus clarifies some basic sociolinguistic processes such as similarities and differences in communication patterns in female and male (silent) discourse. To this end, a corpus of 640 graffiti (320 written by female university students and 320 written by male ones) were collected from female and male dormitory areas as well as central library study halls at University of Sistan and Baluchestan in a one-month period. These graffiti were then analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The results revealed that both groups had used “love, solicit help from God, depression, declare presence, wish, time and date, swear, poetry, kidding, and friendship” themes. However, “study lesson subjects” were used only in female students’ graffiti while “advice” and “financial anxiety” themes were used only by the male counterparts. Furthermore, content analysis of the graffiti showed that the male students predominantly sought to “confirm power” and “ higher status” while the female ones attempted to “express emotions” and “make solidarity”. In addition, the obtained results with respect to style showed that the male students tended to use more words than their female counterparts, but the latter were more apt to use linguistic elaborated code through prepositions, impersonal pronouns, and dependent clauses and hence had a linguistic superiority over the males.

Tarsousi's Darab- Naameh is a long folktale related to sixth century. According to the main action on which the subject's intention is focused, Darab-Naameh is divided into three separate stories. The story, in addition to its three main plots, is comprised of infinite narratives within each grand narrative. Sometimes the little-narratives become structurally related and coherent to the main narrative, and they are also formed independent from the grand-narratives in other situations. And so these little narratives distort the unity of narration by their disturbance, independency and separation from trilogy processes of speech evolution. The discourse system, despite its action-oriented nature, in the story of Alexander precedes two types of the state and actional discourses on parallel bases, and cognitive and situational discourse system affects actional discourse too. This paper aims to study narrative syntax, organizing levels of narration and interaction between them from the narratology perspective, and examine the way of meaning creation in the long folktales by dividing Darab-Naameh into deep and surface structures. Have narrative processes been organized in a distinct juxtapositional system? Can scattered narratives of the story, as instrumental narratives, lead the grand-narratives to the achievement of the main action? Is the story plot within its narrative syntax in interaction and harmony with the basic structures of meaning? We try to answer these questions within this research by analyzing Darab-Naameh. Keywords: Tarsousi's Darab-Naameh, Narrative Semiotics, Plot, Semiotic square tensive axis

The body-part term dast ‘hand’ is investigated in this article as used in the first part of 160 Farsi compound nouns. The questions are: How is the semantic change pattern of hand used in Persian compound nouns? Also how the collective mind and social/ cultural memory of Persian linguistic society can be accounted for and compared with Chinese and English? The aim is investigation of semantic change or even meaning proliferation pattern of hand in compounding so that the analysis of differences and variations can be explained by the cultural differences in a way that non linguistic(cognitive- cultural) explanations are used to explain language variations. The method used here is a corpus-dictionary investigation based on SOKHAN in a cultural linguistics framework. As for findings the results show that conceptualization differences do have cultural explanations. Here, the innovation is that of the investigation of the semantic change of this body term as used in compound contexts based on an objective way, considering word frequency,and representing cultural explanations finally. As for the results and achievements: cultural analysis of differences and similarities of Farsi, Chinese, and English, meaning changing illustration, introducing a new way of vocabulary learning based on cactus model by the use of contrastive semantic and cultural psychology. Here, the critical point of view is that it is necessary to study semantic change pattern in compound contexts.

There is a mismatch between the types of errors that receive corrective feedback (CF) and those that learners manage to notice; the beneficial effects of CF on some linguistic targets in comparison to some others have been reported. The present study explored the effectiveness of recasts and prompts with regard to different linguistic targets (grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation). Seventy six intermediate Iranian learners of English, randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group, were exposed to recasts, prompts, or no feedback condition. Fifty four hours of the interactional episodes were audio-recorded, transcribed, and later coded for types of error. Analyses of individualized immediate and delayed-posttest results indicated no significant difference in the performance of the prompt and recast groups in dealing with grammatical and lexical errors but outperformance of the recast group in pronunciation errors was observed in comparison to the prompt group. Also, the two experimental groups achieved statistically significant gains compared with the control group in all the linguistic domains targeted in this study.

Functional linguistics is regarded as one of the dominant approaches in contemporary linguistics that focuses on the functions of language. The greatest theoretician of functional linguistics Michael Halliday, in cooperation with Roqaye Hassan, have investigated the unity and coherence of text and have categorized its elements in Cohesion in English. The theory of the unity and coherence of text, which is based on the relations of sense and text, is considered as a branch of discourse analysis that investigates text. Coherence has an important and significant role in the structure of a text. The author reflects his real and surreal world in the text. Though time coherence is subverted in this reflection, he conveys meaning and creates text through language and maintaining lexical and syntactic relations.
Surrealist writers attempt to create imaginary and unreal milieus by means of free imagination and the unconscious to reach at a world beyond reality and away from preoccupations of contemporary culture. Since the surreal text is a reflection of surreal world free from limitations of language (automatism), it is assumed that such texts possess no unity and coherence and semantic relations in them is chaotic. Accordingly, this study investigates lexical cohesion of Blind Owl, in a descriptive-analytic method, based on Halliday and Hassan’s theory. The present research seeks answers to the following questions: Does the overflow of lexicons, originating from automatic writing out of the hallucinations of surrealist writer, create an incoherent text or not? Does the surrealist text take distance from language standards and their lexicons and their sentences have no unity and coherence as surrealists do in their real life? At last, it is argued whether Halliday’s linguistic theory can be useful in the analysis of surrealist texts in order to understand writer’s mentality and spirit.

The aim of this study is to determine the underlying laryngeal feature of Persian obstruents in final position and their neutralizations based on the concepts of Laryngeal Phonology and acoustic measurements. Four female speakers read the words inserted in three carrier sentences. Hence the effect of three environments on neutralization phenomenon has been investigated: pre-silence word final position, pre-vowel word final position, pre-obstruent word final position. Applying Praat software (version 5315) seven acoustic correlates of voicing distinction have been extracted from the data: vowel duration, consonant duration, voice bar duration, voice rate, voice onset time, burst duration and intensity of burst. After statistical analysis, underlying laryngeal feature has been specified based on the concepts of laryngeal phonology. The findings show that the distinctive dimension in Persian obstruents is GW which is not neutralized in final position. Furthermore, Persian unmarked phonemes are passively voiced in inter-sonorant position. Thus Persian, like other Germanic languages, is an aspiration language in which GW is phonologically specified.

The present study is an attempt to determine the frequency and the role of circumstantial elements with a comparative approach between writers in both sex within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar. In this research, data include two stories called ʻBroken Marbleʼ, written by Simin Daneshvar (2001) and ʻThe Same as it wasʼ written by Jafar Modarres Sadegi (2006)which have been analyzed according to the concepts discussed in ʻIdeational Meta functionʼ and ʻTransitivity Systemʼ. As giving details in Functional Grammar is represented in the form of circumstantial elements in the text, at the first step, all the circumstantial elements in the stories were found and then according the Functional Grammar and linguistic context were categorized. Analyzing the data showed less circumstantial elements in Daneshvar's story than Modarres Sadegis; but the former was more versatile in using various kinds of circumstantial elements in her work. In both stories, placeʼ adjuncts have allocated the highest amount of circumstantial elements to itself. In the work of man writer, there is no guise and sourceʼ adjuncts , while woman writer has used these kinds of adjuncts. She has used all of them in the form of quotation (citation), so that, when she narrates the story from the mouth of the main character, remembers other's utterances in each situation. Also, in the story of woman, it can be seen that there are the situations which represent feelings, and she has transferred these feelings by using different kinds of adjuncts. It seems that review of literary texts from this perspective reveals new aspects of these works in fiction, literary criticism and stylistics. Introducing this category and applying it in stylistics of stories, is another objective of the present article.

There is still controversy over the organization of the two languages in a single brain and the degree of similarities and differences in linguistic processing across the two languages in a bilingual brain. In the present study, the researchers aimed at comparing L1 and L2 lexical richness and speech fluency in aphasic bilinguals. Fifteen right-handed Bilingual (Azari: L1 – Persian: L2) female patients within the age range of 30 and 70 years who were diagnosed with a specific type of aphasia due to cerebrovascular accident and head trauma were selected for the study. Neurolinguistic assessments of the patients were done once at the time of onset of aphasia and also three weeks after the onset of aphasia with the use of Azari and Persian versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT). The extent of damage to lexical systems and speech fluency in both L1 and L2 at the mentioned time points were compared for each individual. According to the results, different degrees of impairments and different patterns of recovery of L1 and L2 lexical system and speech fluency were observed in aphasic bilinguals. Indeed, most of the patients improved in the measured categories three weeks after the onset of aphasia. However, the difference was not statistically significant between L1 and L2 lexical richness and speech fluency in aphasic bilinguals (p>0.05). The results of the present study are probably in favor of the notion which advocates that bilinguals have differentiated linguistic systems. However, further larger studies are suggested.

In the present study, which aims to promote the critical knowledge of the readers we are going to reveal the ideology of rival discourse based on Faircloughʼs critical discourse analysis approach in journalistic texts by encoding them and discovering the meanings beyond the forms of the language structures. To achieve this goal, we determine to analyze one specific topic which appears in different discourse framework based on Faircloughʼs critical discourse analysis approach. So we select some texts with the subject of offering educational scholarships in the tenth government of Islamic Republic of Iran. The data of this research are collected from two rival journalistic media (Keyhan and Eatamad newspaper) at the specified interval (November 1993). The data analysis demonstrates that Keyhan authors use more ideological structures at the descriptive level such as using punctuations, metaphors, marked syntactic structures and presuppositions to castrate or deny the mentioned discourse. While, the writers of Eatemad try to uphold the said discourse by using quantity strategy and giving instances.

The current paper focuses on polysemy of one highly flexible spatial term in Persian, namely "zir", from the Principled Polysemy Model perspective. The studied applications of "zir" are mostly taken from 'Farhang-e Sokhan-e Anvari' and the Principled Polysemy Model has served as the analytical tool. Besides discussing the semantic aspects of spatial "zir", the study aims to investigate the applicability and efficiency of Principled Polysemy model in semantic analysis this specific term. In fact, we seek to know what strong or weak points the principled polysemy framework shows regarding primary sense specification and distinct senses discrimination. After the model's application on uses of "zir", its primary spatial sense was specified and next, four distinct extended senses were determined and all of them constituted the semantic network of "zir". The results of its semantic analysis within principled polysemy framework confirmed this model's two points of advantage compared to some other leading cognitive investigations especially Lakoff (1987); one in determining the primary sense due to considering certain linguistic criteria in the procedure, and the other in restricting the number of distinct senses by adopting a moderate view towards polysemy. However, the semantic analysis of "zir" in the adopted framework faced some challenges too, among which two more significant issues included the psychological reality of distinct senses and their high level of context-dependency.