نامه فرهنگستان
سال پانزدهم شماره 1 (پاییز و زمستان 1394)

The postposition -ra has received the attention of both traditional grammarians and linguists. The present article describes an occurrence of -ra which can best be described as genitive/ possessive -ra. This use of the postposition fills a hitherto undiscussed slot in the Keenan and Comrie’s Accessibility Hierarchy.

Nowadays, in the Persian language, hærþe, hærþænd and hærkodam not only are used with the same general meaning and role, but also have evident differences. However, in earlier times, particularly in the texts that belong to the fourth to sixth centuries AH, they have been used in a structure, in association with comparative adjective, which exaggerated the adjective’s meaning. Sometimes, this similarity in the meaning and rhetorical function has been neglected and consequently has created difficulties and ambiguities in textual criticisms and commentaries. The aim of this study is to clarify this issue.

Loan words, as a product of cultural, political, social, and commercial interactions with other nations, are found in almost all languages around the world. However, the frequency with which such loan words appear in a given language strongly depends on the relationship with other nations, susceptibility to their culture and, in some cases, lack of efficient protection against foreign influences. While some loan words borrowed from Arabic have preserved their grammatical categoreis and others have changed, there are a number of words which remain controversial. One example is Yæ’ni, which is a masculine singular third person simple present active verb in Arabic but remains to attract contradictory opinions about its category in Persian. The present study, has reanalyzed the grammatical category of the word Yæ’ni in simple and compound sentences by using the substitution method. The results showed that the word Yæ’ni is a discourse marker in Persian in the following three categories: a) in three part simple clauses it works as a preposition discourse marker or link word; b) in those three part simple clauses in which Yæ’ni is used immediately before the apposition marker, it represents the apposition and is identical to a comma or semicolon; and c) in coordinate and subordinate compound clauses, it is a conjunction.

Persian language frequently uses compound verbs along with simple verbs as verbal predicates. In addition to ‘compounding’ as a morphological process, ‘metaphorization’ is a semantic change method applied to the verb formation. As a typological property, these two types of verb formation strategies are used in abundance in Persian language. In this study, the essential criteria for the definition of the sentence verb is based on both the ‘argument structure’ and the different possible forms of ‘event structure’ mentioned in the sentence. This is a semantic-based approach and explores formal diversities in order to discover the meanings hidden inside them. In this study at first we look at the definition of the verb and investigate its different forms and then ‘compound’ and ‘fragmented’ verbs are introduced as two forms of the verb in Persian.

According to a number of modern grammarians and linguists, one of the significant inaccuracies of traditional grammars is their failure to dissociate the categories tense, mood, and aspect. This study at first defines the concepts of ‘tense’, ‘mood’ and ‘aspect’ and delineates the boundaries of them and then examines the concept of ‘tense’ in the most important grammar works of Mirza Habib Esfahani, dæstur-e soxæn and dæbestan-e parsi. This study shows that Mirza Habib was aware of the distinction between time and tense and explicitly mentions this distinction. He also distinguishes tense from mood and implicitly dissociates aspect from tense.

This article attempts to explore the impersonal passive construction in Persian within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. It aims to introduce how the impersonals are unfolded in this approach, and then on the basis of it, to analyze the Persian impersonal passive. In contrast to personal passives, impersonal passive constructions have only one participant. They need not to encode the agent, and there is no recipient of the energy. Cognitive Grammar introduces a construction called 'setting-subject' construction in which setting is considered as the most prominent element (trajector). Regarding the phonological pole of the impersonal passives in Persian, two tokens are considered: in the first one, it is the setting which has the maximal prominence within which the event unfolds. In the data of the second token neither the participant nor the setting is prominent, however it is the event (state) which is considered as the trajector. The construction is analyzed as designating an abstract and generalized setting; in such a construction the conceptualizer is responsible to profile the setting according to the non-linguistic context.

The present study intends to investigate the position of adjective phrase (relative clauses), purpose clauses, purpose prepositional phrases, and Instrument prepositional phrases in Persian clauses. These elements are considered as non-core arguments because they are peripheral elements of the verb. The present study, with a functional approach, looks at the factors that control the order of these constituents in Persian clauses. In other words, it investigates the motivation for variant orderings of these elements.

This survey relies on sixteen criteria to evaluate the use of the Persian orthography approved by the Academy of Persain Language and Literature in a selected number of the ISC Journals. The Journal were chosen from various fields and disciplines. The results revealed that the Journals Studies in Islamic Art and Association of Electronic Engineers showed the most and the least inclination to use the approved orthography, respectively.