نشریه مطالعات زبان و گویش های غرب ایران
سال دوم شماره 5 (تابستان 1393)

The study investigated the unmarked placement of manner adverbs of Persian as an SOV language by an experiment in which 30 informants were asked to correct the order of sentences in which a manner adverb was used. The study shows that some adverbs significantly appear at the beginning of the sentence before subject, some between subject and object, some between object and verb and some between indirect object and verb in double object constructions. The study also shows that some adverbs occur in two or three places almost equally. Based on results it has been argued that the placement of adverbs depends on semantic and syntactic properties of the structures as well as semantic properties of the adverbs. Considering the fact that speakers had no chance to change the adverbs, the study shows that their decision on adverb placement is not significantly effective. In this study, it has also been argued that VP shell analysis can account for adverb placement if the placement defines both as an adjunct to intermediate projection (X') as well as head (X) in the framework of Minimalist Program.

Unaccusative constructions are one place predicates and their single core argument, like a passive predicate, functions as un undergoer rather than actor. This study attempts to explore the characteristics of these constructions as well as their differences with passive predicates in Bakhtyari dialect of Masjed Soleiman. Unaccusative constructions are morphological in nature formed by the aid of two suffixes –eh in present and –est in past stems. Interestingly, these two suffixes are used to express passivization as well. Consequently, passive and unaccusative predicates are apparently similar in this dialect. However, one can distinguish these two constructions using two grammatical tests. The first is the fact that only in passive predicates can we add an agentive prepositional phrase to the sentence. The second diagnostic test to differentiate these two types of construction is that only in unaccusative predicates the adverb xos be xos (impulsively) can be used.

This research article is aimed at investigating the acoustic analysis of intonation in the story-telling of the 5-6-year-old children in Persian and also studying the correlation between gender and intonation. To fulfill this end, we analyzed the distribution of “pitch” and “duration” patterns in 40 interrogative utterances produced by 8 children (4 girls and 4 boys), based on Taylor’s rise, fall and connection model (RFC) (2009). Then the acoustic parameters “pitch” and “duration” were measured, and the data were analyzed statistically using T-test to verify the dependability of the data and the correlation between intonation patterns and gender. The results revealed that, gender parameter did not affect the intonation patterns in children’s story-telling and in spite of some trivial differences in the degrees of “pitch” and “duration”, there was no statistically significant difference between the two genders. However, the average of values of “pitch” and “duration” in the rise part of the intonation pattern was higher among the girls, while, in the fall part of the intonation pattern, the average of values of the two acoustic parameters was higher among the boys.

This research was planned to investigate color semiotic system in the discourse of some commercial billboards in Tehran to systematically reveal dimensions of meaning-making in colors. The research corpus involved three Commercial Billboards of Moallem Insurance, Taj Washing Powder and Cheetooz Snack companies. The corpus was collected by field work, through taking pictures from the billboards in Tehran, between1392 - 1394. The research method was descriptive-analytic. Accordingly, an integrated model was utilized for analyzing the corpus, which included methodological considerations of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2002), Van Leeuwen (2011), and Holtzschue’s (2006) theoretical foundations, which served as basis for using color minimal features and color Metafunctions as concepts with which to study meaning-making mechanisms in colors. Furthermore, Color Harmony was applied in addition to Color Contrast. Finally, the results showed that meaning-making mechanisms of colors’ semiotic system in the research corpus could be studied better by means of color Minimal Features and color Metafunctions in the Socio-Cultural and Situational contexts. Eventually, in this regards, color Textual Metafunction by means of Inside textual relations among color semiotic modes and through outside textual relations with other semiotic modes such as image and language, could play a key role in meaning of colors as compared to Ideational and Interpersonal Metafunctions.

The aim of the present research is to study syntactic category of grammatical voice in the short story “Ghafas” by Chubak. An author’s thought is always associated with his or her syntactic style. Regarding this association, the dominant view of an author like Chubak can be explained. “Ghafas” maps a world which is based upon the struggle for existence metaphor and the image of the chickens as well as the roosters kept in the cage is an allegory of the human society. Results showed that the most frequent grammatical voice in this story is a passive voice (80%), and its high frequency reveals Chubak’s view of the human as proactive creatures that do their best to liberate themselves from biological determinism they are stuck in and who struggle for life. However, since they are affected by strong forces and determined rules, they inevitably have to be passive and receptive to these forces. It should be noted that even the apparently active grammatical voices are passive within the implicit meaning and part of the active grammatical voice states Chubak’s view and thoughts of death that destiny or death is constantly busy with the action of killing people, destroying them one after the other and people have no choice but to surrender to this inevitable fate. Thus, believing in determinism, destiny and fate as well as people’s unsuccessful attempts to liberate themselves emerges in passive grammatical voices, which can be representative of naturalistic view of Chubak.

This article presents an introduction to an onomasiological theory of word-formation. Onomasiological theory presented by Pavol Štekauer is a cognitive theory which responds to naming demands of a speech community. The goal of this research is to describe the word-formation components of the onomasiological theory; meanwhile, we attempt to illustrate the fundamental principles of the theory via Farsi lexical units. The results stated that with respect to the seven levels assumed in the model of word-formation of this theory (i.e. speech community, extra- linguistic reality, conceptual level, semantic level, onomasiological level, onomatological level and phonological level) and five onomasiological types referred to as cluster types, the illustration of the word-formation systems is possible.