مجله جستار های زبانی
سال هشتم شماره 7 (پیاپی 42، زمستان 1396)

Phonological opacity has always been the subject of much debate in generative phonology, particularly after the emergence of Optimality Theory (OT). According to Antila (2006) Opacity arises when a phonological process applies even if its conditioning environment is not met on the surface (overapplication), or conversely, fails to apply even if its conditioning environment is met on the surface (underapplication). Counterfeeding and counterbleeding interactions cause opacity. It may also be caused by a feeding interaction. Opacity is a challenge for optimality theory which denies phonological rules and intermediate levels between the underlying representation and the phonetic representation. While rule-based approaches that consider intermediate levels have no problem dealing with opacity. This research aimed at introducing opacity, arguing for the existence of Counterfeeding and counterbleeding interactions in Persian, arguing for the opacity of a feeding interaction in Persian, and finally analyzing these opaque interactions within the frameworks of classic Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/ 2004) and/ or Harmonic serialism (McCarthy, 2000). In order to identify the phonological processes, the data were carefully analyzed according to various phonological environments. Then, these environments were analyzed to determine the constraints involved in each opaque interaction. In this paper, first, the existence of a counterfeeding interaction in the conversion of the underlying representation /bA# am/ to the phonetic representation [bAm] (not to *[bum]) was discussed. This opaque interaction was analyzed within classic OT using enriched positional faithfulness constraint IDENT(low)/# which causes *[bum] to lose and [bAm] to win. Moreover, the counterbleeding interaction in the occurrence of “nasal place assimilation” between the palatal consonant /Š/ and /n/, and the consequent deletion of /Š/ (the source of assimilation) was discussed. This opaque interaction was analyzed within the framework of Harmonic Serialism by formalizing the markedness constraint Cσ*NP]. Finally, it was argued that the conversion of the underlying /-id/ to [-in] is due to the insertion of [n] between /i/ and /d/, and the consequent deletion of /d/. After arguing why this feeding interaction is considered opaque, it was analyzed within the framework of Harmonic Serialism by formalizing two markedness constraints *idCL and*nd].

Reduplication is a morphological process that is one of the most debatable linguistic issues being studied by various languages and many theories in different ways. Reduplication structurally divided into two parts: total reduplication and partial reduplication. In total reduplication a construction (a word or syntactic phrase) is repeated, but in partial reduplication some part of base is repeated (Shaghaghi, 2000:525,528).The current study tries to deal with total reduplication in Persian language based on Heidarpour’s classifying (2011) which included three categories: total improper reduplication, total proper reduplication and total echoic reduplication in terms of morphological reduplication theory. The research methodology is descriptive and analytical. The aim of this study is to determine whether the morphological reduplication is more useful and efficient or phonological copying and to explore how extent total reduplication is explainable based on patterns of morphological reduplication theory. With respect to the previous studies, it is assumed that total reduplication is analyzable based on morphological reduplication theory. There are two approaches in reduplication process: phonological copying and morphological reduplication. The first was defined by Marantz (1982) that essentially is a phonological process, the second is defined by Inkelas and zoll (2005), the morphological approach, based on the theory semantic identity is more important than phonological similarity. Inkelas and zoll’s morphological reduplication model included “the collection of input semantic features and a kind of semantic adjunct” (p.6-7). By emphasizing semantic identity, they predict existence of empty morph (semantically), melodic overwriting and tier replacement that have semantic identity (p.36-46).
Total reduplication divided into: improper, proper, and echoic. In total improper reduplication, there is phonological identity relation among reduplicating factors and belonging to different categories. In total proper reduplication, besides two reduplicated bases, there is a grammatical morph between two sisters’ factors that placed between two bases or after the second base. With regard to the placement of grammatical morph, this process is divided into two parts: medial and ending. Each of them has different kinds and various structures. In total echoic reduplication, the reduplicated part has the same rhythm as base’s, but is meaningless. In this pattern, changing happening initial consonant or vowels of base is doubling in reduplicated part. (Heidarpour, 2011:145)
The results suggest that kinds of total reduplication are describable in terms of morphological reduplication theory, whereas partial reduplication with suffix and prefix is analytical by phonological copying; therefor, morphological reduplication theory is more efficient than phonological copying theory. Findings of the study help us find out a universal view about reduplication process to classify world languages by linguistic typology.

The present article deals with the study and analysis of the titles among the female and male students. Nicknames are those groups of informal names which in addition to the main names are added to a person. The data has been collected in sample volume of 60 girls and 60 boys in high schools. Totally 347 nicknames were extracted. After inserting the data into SPSS program by using dependent t test, the data were interpreted. The findings of the research showed that the nicknames were originated in four languages of Turkish, Persian, English and Arabic. In this component, we observed the vast application of Turkish language in giving a nickname (46.69 percent) by the male group and the vast application of Persian language by the female group (52.40 percent). From the perspective of identity (local, national and transnational), we also witnessed the high frequency of nicknames (42.54 percent) in the male groups to the local identity and the greatest number of belonging with (46.38 percent) of female nicknames to the national identity. From the aspect of reasons for giving nicknames (contemplation, affection, satire and no reason), in both male and female groups, we observed the high application (70.16 (male) and 53.61(female) contemplation. Finally, from the viewpoint of the intention of the nickname giver, we classified the nicknames under consideration into daily talks, media, taboo and religious ones. The general result was that in all mentioned components, there was a significant relation between the variable of gender and giving a nickname.

Van Leeuwen's socio- semiotic network of social actors (2008), is a framework in Critical Discourse Analysis which helps discourse analysts discover how the social features ,settled in the underlying levels of discourses, are represented on the upper levels. This study tries to explore the way social actors are nominated and categorized in “Al” which is a story about the culture of nomadic people in Iran by Mohammad Bahmanbeigi, a famous Iranian novelist and the winner of the UNESCO’s literacy prize. By social actors we mean every single person that plays a role or occupies a specific position in a given society. Particularly, this study attempts to find answers to the following questions:1. How does the writer use nomination and categorization to express his own viewpoints about the social actors of Nomadic societies of Iran?
2. Can these nominations and categorizations reflect the nomadic people's viewpoints about social actors at the time of nomadic people's illiteracy?
Adopting Van Leeuwen's model of representing social actors, a lot of researcher have tried to explore the social actors of different political and educational discourses but the innovation of this study is that it tries to change the direction of studies from political discourses to literary ones. Another point is that most of the studies about the representation of social actors have relied mostly on the frequency of the socio- semantic features for their final discussion and results but this study has focused more on qualitative analysis than just counting the frequency of the socio- semiotic features. Although counting frequencies can reveal significant patterns, it is better not to make great claims for numbers. On the contrary, it is important to realize that frequencies often shift with the stages in the writer’s argument and may not be an overall characteristic of the text (vide. Van Leeuwen, 2008: 31).
The results of this study show that the representation of social actors in “Al” is purposeful and serves to control the viewpoints of the society. The writer, using the advantages of nomination and categorization, expresses his viewpoints covertly and portrays the oppression of women in nomadic societies. On the one hand, the writer categorizes women generically to demonstrate them as the social actors engaged in common complications and on the other hand, he nominates women specifically and individually to picture them as distinguished and independent persons. Men's appraisements are all positive and represent the nomadic people's opinions about males but the appraisements of women, according to the social norms dominating the text, are changing. Using the advantages of deviation, the writer introduces the main character of the story as a deviant actor involved in opposite activities to challenge social norms and beliefs.

Forensic Linguistics is a new and interdisciplinary branch of applied linguistics and law that analyzes oral and written legal texts by using language tools and linguistic evidences and helps in detecting crime. The goal of present research is to obtain spoken features of robbery defendants in order to provide a unique conversation of thieves in detection of crimes. The authors are trying to describe and explain speech of robbery defendants in Semnan province judicial system from the perspective of Forensic Linguistics.The results show that the robbery defendants by using many linguistic principles such as high modality, activism deletion, infelicitous utterance, illocutionary act try to gain interrogators confidence. Investigation of lawsuits details show that robbery defendants in their defenses use linguistic principles differently. In particular, they use in their speech modality for 29%, contradictions for 16%, activism deletion for 14%, presupposition for 10%, speech acts for 3%, implicature for 1% and middle voice construction for 0/5%. The methodology of the research is descriptive-analytic and its purpose is to describe and explain the spoken features of the robbery defendants according to linguistic principles from the perspective of forensic linguistics. According to the research topic that it describes and analyzes the spoken features of the robbery defendants, we have selected four robbery cases from Semnan prosecutors. The four cases have been read in full and in rows from the initial stages of investigation to interrogations and trials and the linguistics tools examined, have been identified, extracted and analyzed.
Also results suggest that attention to features and elegances of language like low modality, contradiction in speech, activism deletion, presupposition, implicature; middle voice construction and Gricean Cooperative Principles can help investigators and judges at crime detection.

According to Talmy (2000), the basic motion event consists of one object (the ‘Figure’) moving or located with respect to another object (the reference-object or ‘Ground’). Moreover, its semantic structure has another two internal components, i.e. ‘Path’ and ‘Motion’. The ‘Path’ is the track followed or the location occupied by the Figure object with respect to the Ground object, and the ‘Motion’ refers to the presence in the event of motion or location.
The present research focuses on the transitivity of motion verbs in Persian language. In order to seek the notion, research data have been analyzed based on Talmy's theoretical framework (2000), and the components of motion in these verbs have been investigated. The research method is descriptive-analytic. Consequently, seeking the notion of transitivity in motion verbs, the research includes 219 Modern Persian verbs from two sites (Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) and Hamshahri Online news website). Among those mentioned motion verbs, 126 cases were intransitive and 63 were transitive. Based on the main goal of the research, the question was raised; “what is the difference between the figure and the ground in transitive and intransitive verbs?” it is necessary to mention, the criterion for determining the transition is following the pattern of "NP1, transitive verb, NP2".
Persian language express a Motion event using the transitive construction in which the subject denotes the Figure (the moving entity) and the object denotes the Ground (the reference object). In Persian language, in most cases, verbs can express a motion event in the Intransitive Construction. . In Persian, the object usually depicts the referral point or path based on the semantic features of the verb. In cases of causative verbs, the object is the same as the figure that makes the displacement. In addition, in the intransitive structures, the subject is the figure and intransitive verbs demonstrate a change or a new position. In these examples, the path is often shown through a prepositional phrase.

Linguistic deficits and disorders are among the most significant properties observed in Alzheimer's patients. Pragmatic domain is the major linguistic area affected by the disease. Furthermore, Alzheimer's patients are confronted with lots of problems in the interpretation of figurative and non-literal language. In this research, the abilities of 5 Alzheimer's patients in the comprehension of Persian proverbs have been compared to 10 monolingual education-and- age- matched control via Oral Explanation and Force Choice Tasks. The results of the research indicated the poor performance of Alzheimer's patients compared to the healthy individuals. The poor performance of Alzheimer's patients in MMSE and the relationships between subject's performance in the cognitive tasks of clock Drawing and Stroop Color Task with Proverb Comprehension Task , along with patient's inclination to interpret proverbs literally corroborated that a number of deficits in the cognitive processing domain culminated in the poor performance of patients in proverb comprehension.

Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) is one of the most noteworthy sub-fields of Translation Studies. The current qualitative descriptive study applied House's (1997) model, which is based on Hallidayan Systemic-Functional Theory, to investigate the quality of Farsi translations of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey translated by Milad Zakaria and Omid Nikfarjam. As House has suggested, translations are categorized into covert and overt ones. An overt translation, in contrast to covert translation which is domesticated toward target language, is one that must overtly be a translation with probable unfamiliar cultural elements. House claims that overt translation is preferred for culture-oriented texts, particularly literary ones. By applying Houses’s model, the present study aims to investigate the way in which the function of literary text is represented in target language system. To this end, selected segments of the corpus were compared and contrasted to their Persian equivalences in two mentioned translations. The findings of this research revealed that although both translations tended to familiarize the text to the translation audiences, Milad Zakaria’s translation was more overt compared with the translation by Omid Nikfarjam. Therefore, it can be claimed that the first translation is functionally more adequate compared to the second one in preserving the “function” of source text in target language.

Coercion is a long-discussed issue in linguistics and its mechanisms have been imaged differently. This article tries to introduce the theoretician's views about the nature of coercion and analyzes this phenomenon in some morphological and syntactic Persian colloquial data. It is supposed that this analysis will elucidate some points in Persian morphology and syntax.
This study relies on the framework proposed by Audring and Booij (2016). According to this approach we will expound three coercion mechanisms or effects: selection, enrichment and override. In coercion by selection, the resulting meaning is a part of the semantic repertoire of the coerced word to begin with. From this perspective, coercion works largely ‘bottom-up’, with only a light role for the context selecting one interpretation from the range of alternative readings. In coercion by enrichment, lexical semantics is preserved, but augmented in context. It represents a stronger ‘top-down’ influence, adding meaning to the utterance. In coercion by override, in turn, contextual ‘top-down’ force is strongest; it modifies, replaces, or removes properties of the coerced item. The current research is presented within the framework of Construntion Grammar. The data is based on the the analysis of modern Persian colloquial data drawn from the oral data, including radio and television programs and the researcher's interactions with others and also Google Persian sites sentences.
The data analyzed showed that we can put all three above mentioned mechanisms along a single axis, considering the degree of top-down influence of complex morphological and syntactic constructions on the lexical semantics or category of the unified element. Idiomatic constructions are the most radical coercion of the override type. The present study shows the applicability of the approach in Persian data analysis. Moreover, it shows that coercion can support the notion of 'construction' and subsequently the Construction Grammar. Using coercion besides construction, this study presents a new analysis for making not only words basad on possible words but also the so-called fake infinitives.

Critical metaphor analysis tries to be a multidisciplinary approach that studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk through metaphors in the social and political contexts.in the present research, through electing such approaches such as critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics and corpus analysis, instances of discourse metaphors extracted from opposing wing’s newspapers such as Keyhan and Mardomsalari in Iran and Telegraph and Mirror in England analyzed based on Lakoff’s cognitive approach and Cameron’s discourse metaphor following Charteris-black’s integrative critical metaphor research. The aim was to investigate the similarities and differences between metaphors and conceptual metaphors in each discourse and subsequently in each language. To tackle this concern, considering each wing’s core principals, political parts of the intended newspapers were analyzed and to narrow down the research just five source domains including conflict, structure, journey, religion and plants were focalized. The results showed that the aforementioned languages and the political wings are different in terms of source domains and frequency due to multilingual factors including society, history and culture. The results also demonstrated the metaphorical features of the discourses in terms of source domains. In this study also each kinds of Lakoff’s structural, ontological, directional metaphors and Cameron’s systematic metaphors were identified. Furthermore, this study showed how identical facts are demonstrated differently by opposing ideologies. Finally this eclectic approach came to known as an effective approach in demonstrating hidden power relations.

Spelling is one of important skills of the second language learning, which deserves to be considered due to its importance and its impact on reading and writing skills. However, this language aspect has been less considered by educational planners and teachers. Learning spelling is a completely systematic process that is influenced by learners’ knowledge on different aspects of language (including phonological, morphological and orthographic knowledge). Through investigating the spelling errors of Persian learners, it is possible to achieve their real understanding from the second language structure at each stage of their linguistic development. Thus findings of such research are useful for teachers, curriculum and textbook designers who are eager to identify problematic areas for Persian spelling learners. The data of present research help them find in which linguistic aspect of spelling, their learners need more training.
The significance of this issue and the lack of literature in this field have led the authors of the present paper to analyze the spelling errors of Arab learners of Persian language by using contrastive and error analysis approaches. The data collected from 105 of learners’ intermediate and final spelling tests in three levels of beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The population of the present research has been selected by simple random sampling among Farsi-learners at Jam’at-al-Mostafa-al-Alameyyeh , Ghom branch. Regarding errors’ sources, the data obtained divided into three groups of intralingual, interlingual and ambiguous and based on their category, they are classified as consonantal, vowel and form errors. The results indicate that categorically, the errors related to vowel system have the highest frequency (47%) and there aren’t much differences between consonantal (26/8%) and form (26/4%) errors. Also according to the source of errors, the inter lingual errors with the source of mother tongue with 56% have the maximum frequency and ambiguous and intra lingual errors are in the second and third places (26% and 18% respectively) (table 1). Therefore, it can be said that the most important source of spelling errors of Arab learners of Persian is the interference of learners’ mother language on Persian spelling learning. These kinds of errors are resulted from trivial differences between Arabic and Persian phonemic systems. This matter confirms with the moderate version of contrastive analysis.

The purpose of the present research is to analyze one of the most frequently used derivational suffixes in Persian, namely “-i“, and to examine its various structural and semantic/functional aspects. The study adopts a construction-based approach and, using a descriptive-analytical method, tries to explain the word formation patterns using the notions of “construction” and “constructional schemas” within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010, 2015). It then represents the hierarchical and network relationships among constructional schemas and subschemas in a systematic way. The data under study are extracted from the authors own morphological corpus which includes more than 8000 derivational and compound words as well as Farhang-e Bozorg-e Sokhan (The Great Sokhan Dictionary) (Anvari, 2002). The findings of the research show that “-i” has 38 different meanings/functions and thus we can consider this affix an extremely polysemous one which is always susceptible to new meanings/functions. This polysemy is not explainable at the level of words but at the level of abstract schemas, and therefore is called “constructional polysemy”. In other words, Construction Morphology theory brings us to a new conception of polysemy: a hierarchical and multi-level polysemy at the level of abstract constructions of language.

Focusing on Persian language continuum of styles, this research aims at studying the stylistic variation of Persian language according to the native speakers’ judgment of the formality of some Persian sentences that are related semantically, and conveys the same proposition, but considered to be different regarding the number of formal or informal and colloquial words, phrases, and syntactic features in them. Therefore, this research is categorized as a research in perceptual dialectology. The main goal is to analyze the relation between the lexical and structural features of formality with the native speakers’ perception of the degree of formality of the sentences.The main questions this research tries to answer are as follows: Is it possible to define the degree of formality of a sentence according to the linguistic features? And, which phonetic, lexical and structural features exert more influence on Persian speakers’ judgments?
The research hypotheses are as follows: It is possible to define the degree of formality according to some linguistic features like how close the pronunciation of a word is to standard language, the use of some formal or informal words and expressions. And, the use of some lexical items and expressions or taboo words affects the native speakers’ judgment more than other features.
A researcher-made questionnaire consisting of 15 sentences which communicate the same proposition was used for gathering data on speakers’ judgments. Informants were 70 men and women in three different age-groups, 20-30 (n=35), 30-40 (n= 20)and 40-50 (n=15) who analyzed and graded the sentences, according to the degree of formality, on a continuum from the most to the least formal, based on their intuition. A descriptive – analytic method was used to analyze the data quantitatively and qualitatively. The topic and theoretical frame work of the research are the innovative features of the study.
The results show that it is possible to measure the approximate degree of formality of a sentence by counting the stylistically marked linguistic features. Nevertheless, the speaker’s judgment on the degree of formality does not necessarily depend on the number of these features, and some lexical items and terms that are marked due to observing politeness will affect their judgment. In general, lexical choices and some phonetic changes seem to have more influence on the speakers’ judgments than structural features.

Persian with CV(C(C)) syllable structure is a language with just a double consonant final cluster. The present study is an investigation of consonant deletion in Persian final clusters. To do this 1500 words, at least 600 of them one syllable were investigated. The study has classified the clusters into two classes, with or without consonant deletion (stable or instable cluster).The consonants of the clusters were analyzed based on the sameness and distinctions of investigated features. The study has indicated that the number of clusters with consonant deletion is less than those without. There is a direct relationship between the sameness of values and stability of clusters. In stable clusters the same values for obstruent, continuant and voice in general, are significantly less than those with different ones. The difference between the number of F and –F for continuant and voice are statistically significant while for obstruent is not. The study has also indicated that in addition to features phonotactic as well as word structure is also effective. In the present study consonant deletion in Persian has been analyzed in the frame work of Optimality theory. In this way it has been argued that marked constrains hierarchy stand above faithful ones.

Nowadays, with increasing competition among economic agencies, the role of advertising is very decisive. The purpose of this research is to analyze the commercial advertising of the Tejarat Bank in the theoretical framework of semiotics. The research method is qualitative and descriptive-analytical. The data include 16 images and videos collected from Bank archive. The analysis of the data shows that in the advertising of this bank, attention was paid to implicit meanings and cultural, social and biological elements such as respect for customers, praise of the past, modernism, environmental attention, prospects and new technologies. Furthermore, the bank logo has existed for decades and needs innovation and reform. This study highlights this fact that the bank advertising is not effective and requires more modern advertising.

The aim of this paper is to investigate adverbs within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar. Testing the hypothesis of layered structure suggested for the adverbs in this theory, presenting ternary classification of nuclear, core and the clausal for them and explaining the reasons behind their order are the main goals of this study. What diversifies different approaches is the extent to which they allow meaning to determine the order for adverbs. The extent is the most in functionalism and the least in formalism in their extreme terms. Role and Reference Grammar which bridges these two extremes is considered the most qualified approach for the study of adverbs since it considers all the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects together for the analysis of different phenomena including adverbs and thus its viewpoint toward adverbs has been a model for us in this study.
In order to investigate this claim regarding Persian adverbs, attested data have been gathered from written and spoken sources and the order principle was checked against the sentences containing adverbs; so that the well-formedness level of sentences containing different adverbs was evaluated and the decrease in the well-formedness of sentences having the reordered version was judged to indicate the deviation from the seemingly basic order. Supporting the admission of the layered structure hypothesis for the adverbs, some complementary tests such as the sensitivity of nuclear adverbs to aspect, the ambiguity in interpretation for some core adverbs, different positions for various adverbs and their interpretation and finally the questionnaire and frequency test were used. Results from all of the tests have shown that Persian to a great extent follows the ordered principle suggested for adverbs in Role and Reference Grammar and the flexibility for the position of temporal adverbs and also of the adverbs within each layer do not question this as this theory itself has predicted them beforehand. Worth mentioning that order principle was observe red to hold for some of the adverbs in each layer such as between evidential and epistemic modal adverbs belonging to clause layer. This supports more the ordering hypothesis.
Besides, in this study different types of adverbs were recognized based on their interaction with operators. For nuclear adverbs, several number of aspectual adverbs were identified In Persian. What seem to be directional adverbs corresponding directional operators both in nucleus and core layer are either directional prefixes or argument adjuncts which the main predicate license them in the logical structure. And also the elements which seem to be negative adverbs which correspond with the negative operators in all of the three layers are actually negative polarity items in Persian since they always co-occur with negative operator. The event quantificational adverbs denote the times an event is happened which are considered as core adverbs. Also the adverbs which show deontic modality observed in Persian belong to core layer. Besides the adverbs which correspond to specific operators in the layers so far, there are adverbs belong to the layers without having a corresponding operator such as degree adverbs modifying the nucleus and manner and temporal-locative and also subject-oriented adverbs which modify the core layer. Finally we can point to epistemic modal and evidential adverbs as the main representatives for the clausal layer adverbs. The number for clausal adverbs, of course, will exceed if we add evaluative adverbs to them. Generally these were the main three classes of adverbs in Persian based on Role and Reference view on the adverb types. There are for sure some alternation between adverbs of different types and that’s why we can’t consider an absolute border between adverbs of different layers.
In conclusion, Persian adverbs, as predicted by Role and Reference Grammar, reveal layered structure and obey the ordering principle and therefore we can present a ternary classification of nuclear, core and clausal adverbs for them which supplements the traditional binary classification for them; which means that they modify predicate, predicate and its arguments and the whole proposition in respective.

Nowadays, commercial advertising is an inseparable part of urban life and billboards as significant components of outdoor advertising are used to persuade consumers unconsciously. In addition, billboards are usually used to reach a very large audience and high cost is spent on them, so they are expected to be efficient enough to persuade their audience to choose among the mass of similar products. In this study, 100 randomly photographed billboards of London and Tehran in 2014-15 are analyzed from the perspective of functions of inductive action, with a particular focus on various persuasion techniques.
Umi (2010) defines persuasion as an art of verbal with the intention to assure someone to do something appropriate with the speaker’s purpose for the present time. It means that the purpose of persuasion is that the speaker tries to persuade the listener to act something with no violence and coercion. So, in persuasion the speaker needs the efforts for stimulating the addressee in taking decision. Larson (1986) believes that Persuasion is a process to change attitude or behavior, and opinion. Persuasion occurs only through cooperation between sender and receiver. The focus of persuasion is not only on the sender, the message, or the receiver, but all of them are equally focused on. All of them have to make cooperative in making a persuasive process, so it can be said that persuasion is a result of the combined efforts of source and receiver.
According to the findings, it can be argued that advertisers tried to use a particular language depends on different techniques and various linguistic devices to purposefully persuade and generally attract the attention of the audience. The results of the research proved how advertisers employed a myriad of techniques and devices such as exaggeration-based/ value-based manipulative actions to convince potential customers. Furthermore, this study showed that techniques such as explicit claims with the frequency of 64% - 56% (respectively in Persian and English), association with the frequency of 82% - 54% (respectively in Persian and English), and the provision of contact details with the frequency of 46% - 66% (respectively in Persian and English), were the most common techniques in both languages. Therefore, this study aims to investigate similarities and differences of Persian and English billboards according to discursive devices and diversity and distribution of persuasion techniques.
Moreover, the results indicated that in these English and Persian samples, the frequency distribution of the techniques were almost identical. This conclusion is logical due to the existence of mass media and mass communications in the modern era of technology. In general, in both languages, the samples were rich in the variety and the number of the techniques which were used so they were expected to deliver the message to the customers well. But the extent of their success in convincing them can be studied in other researches.

This paper aims to examine and explain, from a Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) viewpoint, the alternation and substitution of light verbs (LVs) in Persian complex predicates (also referred to as light verb constructions). To this aim, the hypothesis we are going to test is that semantic features including meaning commonality, distinct aspectual features (LVs’ aktionsarts), difference in argument structure, etc. are some of factors involved in LV alternation with a particular PV. A thorough examination of various kinds of alternation and substitution of LVs combined with the same pre-verbal element (PV) suggests that the information encoded in different lexical-semantic structures (Argument structure, Event structure and Qualia structure) of PVs and LVs, including arguments encoded in a-structure of predicative PVs, as well as aspectual features, such as initiatory vs. transitory or spontaneous vs. durative aspect, of light verbs make it (im)possible to substitute different light verbs occurring with a particular PV. Information represented in lexico semantic structure of linguistic items, especially Qualia structure which includes limited but necessary information for explaining lecical semantic relations between two LVC components serves to account for alternation ant substitution of LVs in complex predicate structures based on the concepts of Generative Lexicon theory.
The research method is descriptive-analytic and the data under study consist of Persian complex predicates (gathered and cited from Anvari 2002) consisting a nominal PV and each of the light verbs kardan (‘do, make’), zadan (‘hit’), kešidan (‘pull, drag’) and dâdan (‘give’).