نشریه مطالعات زبان و گویش های غرب ایران
سال یکم شماره 2 (پاییز 1392)

The purpose of this paper is investigating vowel reduction in vowel /æ/ in Kermanian accent. Vowel reduction is a process which occurs in an unstressed syllable. It leads to change unstressed vowels and tend them to other vowels. In order to investigate vowel reduction in Kermanian accent, 6 male native speakers of Persian are participating which 3 of them are native speakers of Kerman and 3 others, speakers of standard Persian accent. The data included 4 words which were read by speakers and were recorded by a Shure microphone in the acoustic room of the linguistic department of Sharif University of Technology. Then duration, intensity, F1, F2, COG and f0 of the vowels were measured. The results show that duration, intensity and fundamental frequency of this vowel are less in Kermanian accent than that in standard accent. Also, the results of studying F1 and F2 of [æ, i, o] proves that this vowel in Kermanian accent is tending to center. So, this kind of vowel reduction in Kermanian accent is called centripetal.

This article investigates the obsolescence of Arabic loanwords in Persian press. For this purpose the Ettelaat newspaper of the years of 1310 and 1311 was selected and some of the Arabic words having been extensively used in Persian at that time was gathered. The major reason of obsolescence of these words is word coinage and the tendency to replace foreign words with Persian words. Negative attitude to Arabic language against positive attitude to Persian is the important reason of Persian word coinage that here the Academy of Persian Literature and Language has played the important role. Furthermore being heavy of Arabic words, linguisticpurism and also patriotism have been resulted to word coinage. Besides word coinage, there are another reasons for obsolescence of Arabic words that are: social, cultural and political changes, taboos and euphemisms. In this article we just investigate the word coinage that is the most important reason of obsolescence.

Despite many investigations have been done aiming to describe linguistic issues of Iranian languages, their semantic and anthropological issues have somewhat been neglected. This problem specially makes sense for western dialects of the country. The present study, using semantic and anthropologic theoretical concepts, specially those proposed by Murdock, aims to investigate kinship terms and their related concepts in Hawrami of Paveh. The investigation resulted 63 Hawrami kinship terms, including 27 consanguineal, 18 affinal, 9 step and 9 collective kinship terms.

The syllable is structured in every language according to the specific rules of that language. The purpose of this article is to study and describe the consonants and vowels, the syllable structure and consonantal clusters in the Hawrami language (the dialect of Hawramane Takht), one of the members of the new northwest Iranian family of languages. For gathering data, we have done and recorded an interview with five native speakers, men and women, literate and illiterate, aged between thirty and seventy for about five hours. Furthermore, we have used one of the writers, linguistic intuition who is the native speaker of this dialect and also the written sources in this connection. The research has been done synchronically and is analytic - descriptive. The data has been transcribed according to the International Phonetic Alphabet "IPA". In the end, 30 consonants and 8 simple vowels were identified. One of the other results of this research is the syllable structure in this dialect that is (C)(C)V(C)(C) in the deep structure. There aren,t more than two consonantal clusters whether in the syllable initial or final position. In syllable structures with one consonant in their onset, the consonants /ɫ/, /r/, and /ɹ/ cannot occure in the onset of a syllable. Therer aren,t syllabic consonants in this dialect and only vowels can function as the nucleus of syllable.

This study reviews and analyzes checking system in modern Persian according to Case and Theta features in Minimalist approach. In this study which is done by analytical-descriptive methods, the way structural cases such as Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Ablative, and Oblique are checked and theta roles are checked in structures that have complex predicates are considered. All structural cases of nominals are checked through spec-Head relation and theta roles are checked under merge. What is important to notice is that “Ra:” plays a significant role in checking accusative case and theta role of the object; if it is morphologically apparent. The other point is that in checking non accusative cases, there is a close relation between theta roles as features and checking system. On the other hand there is no meaningful relation among structural case and theta roles in nominals and we cannot subdivide complex predicates according to this criterion.

The particle "ke" is an interesting and important grammatical morphemes in Persian for which several functions are known in written Persian. However, this particle has some pragmatic functions in spoken Persian which lead us to study it apart from the usual functions of a grammatical morpheme. In This article, some pragmatic functions of "ke" are introduced, according to the data recorded from casual speech, in order to provide the reader with a complete picture of the functions "ke" may have in Persian.

“Modality is concerned with the status of the proposition that describes the event” (Palmer, 2001: 1). This grammatical category is common to every language, shown by the help of some grammatical or lexical elements such as mood, auxiliaries, clitics, etc. because it’s a universal concept. This article deals with this notion in Sorani Kurdish from the viewpoint of modal auxiliaries. As this study is the first one on modal elements in this language, it has a descriptive sense, but in order to reach this description, the author tries to use some formal tests when interpreting the modal’s different modal meanings. These tests are gotten from Palmer (2001) and some work based on Kratzer (1977). It becomes clear that Sorani uses the auxiliaries “ʔeshe”, “bu:in” and “twanin” to show modality, each one stating three of the four main kinds of modality introduced by Palmer (2001); naming epistemic, dynamic and deontic, without conveying any meaning for evidential modality. The elements that help distinguish their different modal interpretations rest upon modal degrees (necessity and possibility) and their kinds (speculative, deductive and assumptive for epistemic modality; laws, norms and personal power as the sources for deontic modality, and desire and ability for dynamic) which all are determined by the context in which they occur.