فصلنامه زبان شناسی اجتماعی
پیاپی 1 (زمستان 1395)

Sociolinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that can provide a linguistic perspective of society and culture. One of the important domains of popular culture is popular songs which have not been seriously studied so far from a sociolinguistic viewpoint in Iran. The lyrics of these songs are reflections of the folklore in every society which makes their study worthwhile. Although such songs may have different themes but love has always been one of the key concepts and recurring themes in these songs. This study tries to find out how concept of love has been defined and reflected in the songs in the course of history. And more specifically, it tries to discover the chains of equivalence and the differences that are made along with them in these songs. To meet this end, from the perspective of Ernesto Lacalua and Chantal Mouffe’s post-structural discourse theory, specifically through their two concpets, ie chain of equivalence and chain of difference, it focuses on 16 Iranian love songs which were randomly chosen from among those songs performed by both male and female singers in between the years 1971 to 1979. The results show that the songs have availed from “the presence of nature”, “reference to the past”, “immortalization” and “the use of different fields of discursivity”, specially religious and political discourses, as a means of meaning fixation.

Each language continues to survive by means of some of its variations. One of the important sub-domains of sociology of language deals with the geographical distributions of these variations. The aim of this study is to investigate the geographical distribution of some vowel variations in Sistani dialect spoken in Shahraki-Naroui and Miyankangi regions of Sistan. In order to determine the guide and main linguistic variations, we provided the free speech of one or two of the above fifty-year-old uneducated or less educated female and male speakers in 28 villages. Then a questionnaire including a lexical list was prepared and carried out. Finally, the exact area of each vowel variation was specified by using linguistic maps and drawing isoglosses via Geogrephical Information System (GIS) software. The research findings reveal that vowel raising, lowering, fronting and backing, and vowel simplification processes are considerably observed in these two regions. Similarly, noticeable Middle Persian linguistic remnants such as vowel length process and some cases of vowel retention can be intentioned. In addition, in spite of the linguistic similarities, because of some differences in the speech of the speakers, some accents coulde be identified in Sistani dialect spoken in these two regions. The most conspicuous one is Bârâni (locally pronounced Bârni) accent in Miyankangi region the speakers of which use the vowel variations more similar to those of the standard Persian language.

From the viewpoint of sociology of language, one of the important linguistic phenomena in any given society is the formation of argots and their structural description. An argot is the language or the dialect of a social group whose members like the content of their speech remains secret for other groups, or, generally, for the majority of the people in their society. From some decades ago up to now, in some villages of Khalkhāl in Ardabil Province, a language known as Arrānaji or Qarqahdili has been commonly used by male workers who went to northern regions of Iran to do carpentry. The main questions of this study are: a) What kind of language is Qarqahdili? b) Which purpose was it created for?, and c) What are its structural characteristics? The data of this field study were gathered through interviews with middle-aged men of two villages called Karnaq and Lerd. The results indicate that Qarqahdili is an argot which is used to cover occupational secrets. From phonetic, morphological, and syntactic viewpoints Qarqahdili is similar to the Tāti language of the same areas but lexically there are some differences.Save for Tāti words which have gained secret meanings, some words from Azerbaijani Turkish are also present in Qarqahdili. Data analysis indicates that a great number of taboos and sex expressions are used in the workers’ speech apparently because they are all male and far away from their families.

News texts, and specially news headlines, must be interesting and persuasive so that they can draw the addressee's attention and encourage him/her to study and follow the news. One way to achieve this goal is to use metaphor and metonymy in the language of media. Metaphor and metonymy, as two cognitive conceptual processes, have their root in thinking and conceptualization processes and are the integral parts of the human cognitive system. The present research explores the function and importance of metaphor and metonymy in Persian economic media discourse and tries to identify and explain the fundamental metaphors and metonymys in this field. Besides, possible hierarchical relations between them will be taken into consideration. The data include 700 headlines taken from: economic news headlines of “Donya-ye Eghtesad” newspaper in all its issue numbers in Azar 1394 A.P., economic news headlines of “Young Journalists Club” news agency and “Emruz Online” news portal in Azar 1394 A.P. The results indicate that the main conceptual metaphors in the economic discourse include: “Economy is a living being”, “Economy is human”, “Economy is a route”, “Economy is a space/container”, “Economy is a natural phenomenon”, “Economy is a car”, and “Economy is substance/thing”. Moreover, some of the directional metaphors are significantly present in the language of economy.

Hawrami, a member of Gurani-Hawrami-Zaza language family, is a North-Western Iranian language. Many scholars consider Hawrami as a member of Kurdish languages (or dialects) but this is a controversial issue and structural differences between Hawrami and other Kurdish dialects have deepened this controversy. One of the differences is Hawrami’s complex system of Tense-Mood-Aspect (TMA), which this study aims to describe. A corpus of sound files and transcribed notes from NORM speakers of Hawrami living in Paveh has been used for this study. Analyses showed that TMA in Hawrami verbs consists of two tenses, past and present; five aspects including perfective, progressive imperfective, non-progressive imperfective, perfect and non-perfect ones; five moods including indicative, indicative/injunctive, subjunctive, imperative and conditional/optative ones. It was also revealed that, in Hawrami, perfective and imperfective aspects exist along with perfect and non-perfect ones. These possibilities together constitute 17 different categories, four of which in present tense and 13 others in the past. Besides, we found that Hawrami is mostly an ergative language, as 11 out of 17 TMA categories of this language have ergative case marking system. Ergative system characterizes itself with object agreement and adding some special pronoun clitics to the verbs.

Taboos make a part of people’s language in different regions and they are used under the effect of sociological factors. The aim of the present study is to examine and classify different types of linguistic taboos in Ārān and Bidgol dialect and to evaluate the difference of their usages regarding social variables of age and gender in single- and mixed-gender environments. The population of the study includes men and women living in Ārān and Bidgol and the sample consists of 180 people (90 men and 90 women). Gender, age, marriage status, and education make the independent variables whose effect on the usage of the taboos is calculated separately in each environment. The results indicate that men use taboos more frequently than women, and similarly, single people use them more frequently than the married ones. Besides, the number of taboos decreases along with the increase of their age.

Proper understanding and processing of a speaker’s emotional prosody is critical to effective social interaction. Vocal emotional expressions which carry a rich source of information about a speaker’s emotions and his/her social intentions are influenced by individual differences (eg, gender, age); among those, the role of gender has not been sufficiently studied and is still under debate. Moreover the existing literature on gender and emotional prosody has targeted speakers of stress-timed languages (ie, German and English). However, since prosody is affected by language-specific features such as the rhythmic division of time (ie, stressed- vs. syllable-timed), the author questioned the applicability of the results of the existing studies to languages with a different rhythmic division of time. Therefore, the present study examined the role of gender in the recognition of emotional prosody in native speakers of Persian, a syllable-timed language. To do this, in a behavioral experiment, 66 native speakers of Persian were asked to recognize the emotional prosody of a set of validated vocal portrayals. These vocal portrayals were a set of sentences with emotionally neutral lexical content, intoned in one of 5 intended emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) by a male and a female actor. The data of this test were examined by availing from logistic regression. In general, the results established that the recognition of emotional prosody significantly differed as a function of gender, that is, female participants outperformed their male counterparts in recognizing all the intended emotional categories. Additionally, our results suggest that rhythmic division of time (ie, stressed vs. syllable-timed) does not influence the emotion recognition performance.