نشریه زبان پژوهی
پیاپی 27 (تابستان 1397)

Bipolar affective disorder is a mood disorder in which the sufferer experiences marked mood swings which are beyond what most people experience. About one percent of people around the world have had a diagnosis of bipolar disorder at some point in their lifetime, most of whom have heightened level of creativity. With respect to descriptive psychiatry, a host of artists, including authors, have been seen with bipolar disorder. This study provides a linguistic analysis of bipolar disorder; the case study is Sadegh Hedayat's letters. Actually it makes an attempt to find out whether it is possible to diagnose bipolar disorder via studying linguistic features in people's texts. The results of the present research might contribute to clinical studies as well. It seems that language and cognition are aligned. In addition, on the basis of ideational metafunction of language, language is the reflection of human's mind and it interprets human's experience. In this research, Sadegh Hedayat's letters to Shahid Nourai are studied. The addressee is fixed to minimize the effective factors. The data is semantically analyzed and to study pressured speech and poverty of speech, topical shifts and moves are analyzed as well. Based on linguistic study of each letter, the result shows that each bipolar disorder episode, i.e. hypomania, depression, euthymia and mixed can be diagnosed by using the mentioned linguistic criteria as shown below.
The findings of this research confirm psychiatric achievements. Obviously, other semantic criteria (such as humiliation and ridicule) are introduced, which are in line with psychiatric definitions. The existence of the mixed episode in the episodes of bipolarity which Sadegh Hedayat had experienced is one of the achievements of this research. Also, the semantic characteristics, the rate of topical shifts and moves of these episodes have been studied. In addition, the study of letters in terms of the time of writing, clearly indicates the characteristics of bipolar disorder episodes in the intervals such as hypomania which is accompanied by pressured speech, and the depression episode which is accompanied by poverty of speech. Moreover, it seems that Hedayat suffered from rapid cycling bipolar disorder.

The study is set up to see how participants deal with interpersonal interaction when they criticize their classmates and professors as interlocutors. This concerns lower-to-higher status with great social distance between professors and students compared to equal status and neutral social distance pertaining to the classmates. The study is concerned with the pragmalinguistic patterns, realization and mitigation strategies that the participants apply to criticize their interlocutors.
Criticism implies one’s dissatisfaction with a quality in someone or something. Criticizing implies voicing an objection or appraising the faults in somebody or something. Speech act of criticizing as a face-threatening act has been the focus of few studies (Nguyan 2005a, 2008, 2013). This neglected speech act has already been the focus of some studies but in a restricted way in terms of type and applied strategies. L2 criticism has been studied with respect to giving critical feedback on the learner’ peer correction of written papers in writing courses (Nguyen, 2005a, 2005b, 2008a, 2008b). This article aims to explore how Persian NSs perform facework to achieve politeness when they criticize their interlocutors. The researchers want to investigate the topics along with the features that characterize politeness among Persian NSs with regard to mitigating the face-threatening aspect of giving criticisms. This is an attempt to discover common issues and patterning of genuine criticisms (GCs) as they are used among native speakers of Persian in and around the University of Razi community. It explores how Persian NS students in relation to their professors and classmates realize and mitigate the speech act of criticism. The case study consisted of 200 adult B.A and M.A university students. They were all students from two universities in a western province of Iran, and the towns nearby, aged between 19 and 27 (Mean = 23). The participants were 105 females and 95 males. The themes of GCs and the level of seriousness of the topic of GCs vary according to the relationship between the participants. Three important interlocutor variables that are supposed to affect GC exchanges are gender, social distance, and power status. The manner in which interlocutors perform criticism is directly related to the interlocutor status, their relationship, and gender. Both male and female participants in the study seem to have similar general tendencies in terms of criticizing their interlocutors with equal status and little social distance. Nevertheless, they are different in terms of the strategies that they apply toward their higher status interlocutors with larger social distance. The strategies that male group use for criticizing their higher status professors are subcategories of direct/explicit strategies; however, the female group use indirect/implicit strategies. The findings indicate that male participants have the tendency to introduce their point of criticisms, i.e. use steers, regardless of the status and distance of their interlocutors. While female participants are inclined to soften the act of criticism by using consultative strategies. The relationship between GC strategies and social status of the interlocutors seems weaker than the relationship between GC strategies and gender. In comparing the results for interlocutors of equal status, it is apparent that for equal status participants the percentage of implicit strategies is higher than the percentage of explicit ones. It seems that in studied community it`s not appropriate for females to criticize their interlocutors directly when they are from higher social status, compared to the ones from lower social status. You would reasonably expect female speakers from lower social status to be more constrained when the addressee is from higher status. But for male participants, a combination of explicit and implicit strategies are employed. Similarly, equal status participants draw mainly on implicit strategies to realize GCs. All in all the findings indicate that male participants have the tendency to introduce their point of criticisms regardless of the status and social distance of their interlocutors. While, female participants are inclined to soften the act of criticism by giving suggestions, complimenting, or making requests i.e. they actually apply consultative strategies.
The analysis of mitigation strategies to soften the negative impact of GC also shows that it may function positively in social interchanges and lead to creating a sense of solidarity between participants through strategies of complimenting and requesting. GC may function negatively when it is only a negative evaluation of the hearer, or it may serve to seek agreement between interlocutors. This study has implications for language pedagogy: awareness of social patterns underlying GCs is important for non-native speakers; by means of such patterns they learn how to criticize Persian native speakers appropriately, and, moreover, it increases their opportunities to interact with Persian native speakers.

The interpretation of a compound and access to it as a whole or its constituents separately as well as its retrieval from mental lexicon of speakers is heavily affected by the type of relation exist between elements of a compound; several relations might be activated at the same time and the speaker actually select a specific relation from simultaneously activated ones. Considering the semantics of compounds, semantic compositionality unites the meanings of components to reach a compositional meaning; based on this principle, there exist endocentric compounds with semantic head; On the other hand, there are plentiful of compounds in language with no semantic head and consequently no compositionality. Therefore the referent of the compound is out of it and the compound should be listed in the lexicon and memorized. Exocentric compounds with no clear semantic head and no compositionality have opaque meaning. Based on the claims of CARIN theory which has a cognitive approach, we could explain the semantic aspect of a compound (to be transparent or opaque) in terms of the existence or lack of a semantic relation between the elements. This paper aims at recognizing all possible relations in endocentric compound nouns of Modern Persian (Farsi). The interpretation of a compound and access to it as a whole or its constituents separately as well as its retrieval from mental lexicon of speakers is heavily affected by the type of relation exist between elements of a compound; several relations might be activated at the same time and the speaker actually select a specific relation from simultaneously activated ones. This area has been the focus of many researches done by cognitive linguists like C. Gagne and others as well as CARIN (CARIN theory known as competition among relations in nominals). Compound nouns are semantically classified in four groups: 1. Endocentric: a noun compound with one semantic head, 2. Apposition: a noun compound with two semantic heads, 3. Exocentric: a noun compound with no semantic head and 4. Co-ordinate; in these kinds of compound nouns the compound as a whole is not a kind of semantic head. Headless compounds do not contain an element to function as the semantic head modified by the non-head element; “football” and “greenhouse” are examples of headless compounds. Semantically an endocentric compound indicates a sub-group within the class of entities that head denotes. For example, a “schoolboy” is a kind of boy. Due to their semantic head, endocentric compounds are transparent in meaning. In other words, endocentric compounds have compositional meaning and we could guess their meaning when we face them for the first time. Exocentric compounds are non–compositional; their meanings are not predictable and should be learned and memorized; they are actually opaque. Many linguists consider a transparent compound to be decompositional but it is not always the case; there exist some compounds which are morphologically decomposable and are still opaque in meaning. The Principle of Semantic Compositionality is that the meaning of an expression is a function of, and only of, the meanings of its parts together with the method by which those parts are combined. From the cognitive view, an endocentric compound has focal concept that is the same as the semantic head in the compound. When the compound has no semantic head (exocentric), it does not have a focal concept which is compatible with the semantic head of compound; by missing these two elements in two different levels (i.e. focal concept (cognitive level) and semantic head (semantic level)), in fact the noun compound violates “the principle of semantic compositionality. This violation causes the compound noun to be opaque in meaning. For example in “teapot” the focal concept is “a kind of pot” not “tea” and this focal concept, as a semantic head, defines the meaning of the compound as a whole; so it is transparent. According to CARIN, interpreting a combination involves identifying the relation between two concepts. The relations assumed by CARIN form a small set of highly generalized types, adopted from the linguistic typology of Levi (1978). The theory makes two basic claims: first, the relation is a bound representation with no independent existence; it is captured within the representation of the modifier, but not the representation of the head noun. Second, several relations become activated and compete for selection during comprehension. The modifier is primarily responsible for interpretation, more frequent relations for a given modifier receive higher activation than less frequent ones. The very semantic relation that CARIN theory recognizes as the key entity for interpretation is responsible for a compound being transparent or opaque. In endocentric compound, the relation between head and modifier creates the focal concept in the compound; in fact such semantic relation leads to interpretation of noun compound even if we face it for the first time. The presence or absence of semantic relation for a compound is the key explanation behind semantic transparency and opacity. A generalization could be extracted based on the analysis of data: Endocentric compounds have semantic head, semantic relation as well as focal concept; they satisfy the principle of semantic compositionality and finally they are semantically transparent. Exocentric compounds lack semantic head as well as semantic relation and there is no formation of focal concept; they violate the principle of semantic compositionality and finally they are semantically opaque. This paper studies head- initial and head-final endocentric compound nouns of Farsi regarding meaning, inference and conceptual combination.

In one of dialects of Turkish, so called Azarbaijani, some postpositions not only have grammatical function but also serve as lexical categories in some contexts. There is an underlying assumtion that the mentioned postpositions are formed out of lexical items such as nouns and adjectives through grammaticalization. Grammaticalization is a process through which lexical items and constructions turn up in certain linguistic contexts to serve as grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, they continue to develop new grammatical functions. Forms do not shift abruptly from one category to another, but go through a series of small transitions, transitions that tend to be similar across languages. These transitions can be shown in a cline of grammaticality as follows (the overlapping stages of grammaticalization form a chain generally called a cline): content item> grammatical word> clitic > inflectional affix. Each item to the right is more grammatical but less lexical compared with its partner to the left. In this article some postpositions of Azerbaijani Turkish have been studied in corpus; the basis of analysis is grammaticalization framework introduced by Hopper. Hopper introduces five cross-linguistic principles that enable linguists to recognize grammaticalization cases in different languages without relying on historical data. These principles are as follows: 1) layering: within a broad functional domain, new layers are continually emerging; as this happens, the older layers are not necessarily discarded, but coexist and interact with new layers. 2) Divergence: when a lexical form undergoes grammaticalization to a clitic or affix, the original lexical form may remain as an autonomous element and undergo the same changes as ordinary lexical items. 3) Specialization: within a functional domain, at one stage a variety of forms with slight semantic differences might emerge; as grammaticalization takes place, this variety of form choices narrows and the fewer number of forms selected indicates more general grammatical meaning. 4) Persistence: When a form undergoes grammaticalization from a lexical to a grammatical function, so long as it is grammatically viable, some traces of its lexical meanings tend to adhere to it, but details of its lexical history might be reflected in constraints on its grammatical distribution. 5) De-categorialization: through the process of grammaticaliation, morphological markers as well as syntactic features (such as Noun or Verb) pertaining to some forms are either lost or neutralized; but instead the characteristics of secondary categories such as Adjective, Participle, Preposition, etc, are presumably attributed. As mentioned some postpositions in Azerbaijani Turkish along with their grammatical functions, are used as autonomous elements such as Noun or Adjective as well; according to our assumption this can be due to grammaticaliztion of these elements to postpositions. The purpose of the present research is to describe the validity of the above hypothesis by using the Hopper's grammaticalization principles. In this regard, we adopted a field-library method for collecting data. For studying postpositions in context, 100 sentences containing postpositions were extracted from Azari corpus which contains contemporary written texts. Then the samples of grammaticalization were analyzed applying Hopper`s principle. This paper deals with identifying and analyzing eight cases of grammaticalized postpositions including Ajrµ, kimi, sArµ, irQli, GArtSµ, doÄru, ytSyn, ilQ. Having studied the change process of these words in terms of the principles of grammaticalization, it was revealed that a number of proper postpositions are as the result of grammaticalization out of other categories such as nouns and adjectives. Some of postpositions have lost their primary role, while some of them in spite of accepting a new role as postposition, have retained their original role. It has been observed that in some cases these postpositions have lost their original lexical meaning, and in contemporary Turkish, they only have a grammatical function. The process followed by these words is justifiable by the principle of decategorization; according to this principle the basic categories lose their characteristics and take the characteristics of the secondary categories. In other cases, the lexical categories, while preserving their original lexical meaning, they also take the function of postposition as the result of grammaticalization. So it can also be explained by the principle of divergence. The divergence and decategorization of these cases show that the grammaticalization of these cases is still in the initial phase of grammaticalization (content item> grammatical word). For the case of ilQ,due to the deletion of instrumental case-marking -nin the contemporary Turkish, its function has been granted to ilQwhich is the consequene of the grammaticalization. This postposition also undergo the process of cliticalization which, with regard to the grammaticalization cline, can eventually be replaced with the old and abandoned case-marking suffix. Thus, in Azerbaijani Turkish, by means of grammaticalization, the required grammatical categories are reproduced; this process can be seen in 7 other cases that are still in the initial phase of grammaticalization.

Morphological stem is defined as the form of a lexeme which plays the role of the base in morphological process in the lexeme-based morphology framework introduced by Aronoff (1994). According to this model, the base is a lexeme and the stem is some form of the lexeme. Indeed, there are many bound morphemes considered as bases/stems in Persian morphological processes which do not denote specific meaning and are not registered in the lexicon, however they belong to a lexeme. The question then arises: “what are they”? The present study tries to put Aronovian framework to the test in order to examine how much this theoretical framework can account such morphological facts in Persian. From this perspective, morphological stem is considered as a separationist entity because it acts only as a phonetic form without regard to its meaning and syntax in morphological processes. In this article, this separationist aspect of the stem is studied in order to show if the separation of the stem from its semantic and syntactic aspects can explain a number of mismatches between form and meaning of the stems in inflected and derived words. The absence of a systematic one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning in the elements of complex words is one of the linguistic facts which challenges Morpheme-based Morphology. In creating complex words, while morpheme-based­ approach maintains a concatenation of elements into a linear sequence on the syntagmatic axis (with a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning pertaining to every element), the lexeme-based approach, however, insists on the separation of the form from meaning. The analysis of data in this article has been carried out in line with lexeme-based morphology; a number of Persian derived and inflected words as well as a group of verbal compounds were included in data for this purpose. After analyzing every word, it was observed that the bases of many Persian derived and inflected words as well as some compounds, are not real lexemes; actually they turn up in morphological processes without which these processes cannot operate. Some instances of this type of stem include the morphological stem ''xasteg'' which appears during the derivation of ''xastegi'' (boredom) by means of adding suffix –i to the stem; the stem ''xasteg'' is not an existing Persian lexeme but it belongs to the lexeme ''xasteh'' (bored); ''xasteg'' does not have anytransparent meaning, but it occurs as a phonetic form or one of the morphological stems of this lexeme in this derivational process due to phonological context. The other example of morphological stem is ''săx'' which appears in inflection when past tense marker suffix (–t) is added to the stem, the output of which is ''săx-t'' (made/ constructed). The inflectional stem ''săx'' is not a real free morpheme, but its presence is inevitable in inflection because of phonological assimilation with the following past marker –t. In a considerable number of verbal compounds, the same form can denote several meanings, that is, several syntactic/semantic features maps on to one morphological form or morphological function. This function is neither syntactic nor semantic but rather purely morphological; morphology by itself as Aronoff names it (1994); he calls the level of such purely morphological functions ''morphemic''. For example, some Persian verbal compounds including ''danesh ămuz ''(student/agentive) ,''dast ămuz ''(pet/past participle( and "bad ămuz " (cause to teach a bad habit/ causative) ,all of which derived from one verb stem in present tense, the same form of the verb "ămuz'' (teach) combines with its arguments to build a construction which refers to several semantic and syntactic properties including agentive noun/adjective (so called “sefat-e faeli” in Persian), past participle (so called “sefat-e mafuli” in Persian) as well as causative concepts. Indeed, exactly the same form for agentive nouns/ adjectives may correspond to other concepts like past participle or causative meanings. So, the form "ămuz'' is a purely morphological stem regardless of its syntactic and semantic features in word formation processes in Persian. Therefore, the presence of such forms in a lot of Persian words shows that these elements are not haphazard as they may seem, but they should be related to a level of language system at which phonetic forms of the elements in derivation, inflection and compounding are important, rather than their semantic and syntactic aspects; this level is called '' morphological spell out'' in Aronoff's lexeme-based morphology, these types of stems are ''morphemes'' which belong to spell out level. Based on the separationist hypothesis, the morphological spell out of this type of stem in morphological processes is independent from its semantic/syntactic aspects. In sum, this separation can account for morphological asymmetries such as one-to-many and many-to-one relationships between form and meaning in stems in a significant number of Persian derived and inflected words.

Statement of the problem: Social, economic, political, and cultural changes in recent years, along with the development of technology and communication have made the native speakers of some languages or dialects to learn standard language which is generally considered to be formal and more prestigious; this trend, which is the case for Iranian local languages and dialects, can weaken the status and threaten the survival of such languages and dialects. Mazandarani, a vernacular in the north of Iran, has long been the mother tongue of inhabitants and dominant language in Mazandaran Province. Nowadays, its usage has declined in various contexts and its acquisition as a mother tongue has decreased among younger generations. This study tries to gather information about the social status of Mazandarani and its usage, along with Farsi, in different contexts in Mazandaran; other factors influencing the usage of Mazandarani or Farsi in different contexts are also studied including speaker's attitudes toward Mazandarani as well as social factors.
Theoretical framework, questions and hypotheses: The present study has adopted the domain analysis method introduced by Fishman (1966) in which the language usage is measured in terms of setting, subject and interlocutors. In this study, language use in 6 domains – family, school, office, street, religion, art & hobbies- is investigated. The main questions raised are: 1- In which domain does Mazandarani have the most usage? 2- Do the majority of subjects acquire Mazandarani as their first language in family domain? 3- Do the majority of young people acquire Mazandarani as their first language in family domain? 4- Is there any correspondence between the age of parents and encouraging their children to acquire Mazandarani? 5- Can the age of subjects be an effective factor in acquiring or using Mazandarani? 6- Is there any correspondence between the sex of subjects and using Mazandarani in different domains? 7- Is there any correspondence between urbanization and using Mazandarani in different domains? 8- Does the usage of Mazandarani vary in different cities of Mazandaran? 9- What kind of attitudes do the subjects have toward Mazandarani? 10- In general, does the evidence imply a case of language shift or maintenance? The following hypotheses are formulated: 1- The usage of Mazandarani in family domain is more than that of other domains. 2- Most people acquire Mazandarani as their first language. 3- The minority of young people acquire Mazandarani as their first language. 4- There is a direct correspondence between the age of parents and encouraging the children to acquire Mazandarani. 5- The usage and acquisition of Mazandarani in older generation is more than that of younger one. 6- The usage of Mazandarani by women is less than that of men in various domains. 7- The usage of Mazandarani by urban people is less than that of rural people in various domains. 8- The cities studied in this research have similar conditions in terms of using and acquiring Mazandarani. 9- Most subjects dont have positive attitudes toward Mazandarani. 10. In general, the evidence implies a case of gradual shift of Mazandarani to Farsi.
Research method, statistical society, gathering and analyzing data: This research is a field study that describes and analyzes the data gathered through questionnaire, interview, and observation. The questionnaire includes 36 closed questions which investigate the usage of Farsi and Mazandarani in different domains; it also investigates the attitudes of speakers toward these two languages. 1200 subjects were randomly selected from urban and rural regions of 5 cities – Amol, Behshahr, Ramsar, Sari, and Noor – in Mazandaran Province. The subjects were equally divided into three age groups – 14-18, 30-40 and over 50 years old – they were also divided according to their sex. The researcher also observed 240 cases of communication context in Amol. The data are classified in tables and diagrams; it`s described and analyzed through k square as well.
The findings of research: The analysis of data shows that the most usage of Mazandarani belongs to family domain and the increase of the formality of context leads to decrease in usage of Mazandarani. Mazandarani acquisition varies according to the type of family and its members. In general, 60 percent have acquired Mazandarani as their first language, but in younger age group (14-18 years old), just 25 percent have acquired Mazandarani as their first language. The kind of language people apply for communicating with other family members depends on their age. For instance, 48 percent of young group use Mazandarani for talking to their grandparents. In contrast, 38 percent of this group speaks with their parents in Mazandarani. In communicating with their younger brothers or sisters, only 24.75 percent of them use Mazandarani.
As the formal educational language at school is Farsi, it`s obligatory to speak in Farsi at school. 97 percent of students have claimed that they speak in Farsi with their teachers in classrooms and 97.5 percent of them use Farsi in speaking to the headmasters at schools. 81.25 percent of students apply Farsi in communicating with one another in classroom.
The streets and marketplaces form another domain which is wider than other domains and include various participants. The kind of language used in this domain is highly influenced by the situation, social status, age and sex of the interlocutors. Farsi is mostly used in formal situation, in the case that one of the interlocutors is of higher class or he/ she is a young or unknown person. For example, 29.49 percent of interviewees speak with their neighbors in Farsi, while 72.58 percent of them use Farsi in conversing with a young stranger.
The office domain is a formal domain and this formality necessitates the higher usage of Farsi. 63.91 percent of customers use Farsi in talking to clerks at their offices. Facing a doctor at his/her office, or a receptionist, 77.58 and 73.74 percent of them use Farsi, respectively.
Domains like religion and art are defined on the basis of subjects rather than situation or participants. The investigation of language use in artistic and aesthetic affairs such as, poetry, fiction, theater, movie, and music shows the general dominance of Farsi, but in some cases like poetry and music, the majority prefers Mazandarani to Farsi. In general, 52.41 percent of people prefer Farsi for radio and TV programs. As for religion, approximately half of the subjects use Farsi to worship and pray.
The information gathered through observation in Amol, to a large extent confirms the data gathered via questionnaires and interviews. As an example, the questionnaire data demonstrate that 56.25 percent of students use Farsi in conversation with one another at school and the observation shows that 51.66 percent of them use Farsi in this context.
Age, sex, education, and urbanization are influential in language use in different domains. Young people more than older ones, women more than men, urban people more than rural ones and educated people more than illiterate people use Farsi in different contexts.
On the whole, the findings of the research indicate the gradual loss of Mazandarani in the region. The argumentations that support such a claim are as follows: 1- The youngster's tendency to acquire and use Farsi implies the reduction of native speakers of Mazandarani in the future.
2- The girl's tendency to acquire and use Farsi means the increase of Farsi acquisition by next generation, because these girls as future mothers have a crucial role in transferring language to the next generation.
3- The tendency of educated and urban group to acquire and use Farsi indicates the increase of Farsi-speaking population in the future, since both literacy and urbanization are spreading.
4- Employing Farsi as the language of instruction and the only medium of communication in educational domain could lead to the creation of negative attitudes toward Mazandarani.
5- Mazandarani is not mostly used in religious affairs, whereas religion is one of the last domains for an eroding language.
6- Lack of positive attitude, interests and devotion to Mazandarani signifies the lack of collective determination to maintain this language.

Nowadays there are abundant resources for learning Persian (Farsi); nevertheless, among these available references, it is necessary to select books that meet the requirements of language learners and instructors. Evaluation of educational references seems to be necessary for getting familiar with methods of preparing educational books and selecting suitable resources; it requires scrutinizing available references via considering indices regarded as basics. The purpose of the present article is evaluating the elementary book titled “Farsi Shirin Ast “(2010), which means “Persian is a sweet language”; the evaluation is based on indices for evaluation of textbooks introduced by Cunningsworth. The set of Farsi Shirin Ast is written by Pouneh Shabani Jadidi and Dominic Parviz Brookshaw; it`s a book that attempts to teach grammatical as well as communicative competence simultaneously. Writers believe that this book is suitable for both native speakers of Persian, already familiar with this language, and non-native speakers of Persian who are learning Persian as foreign language. This book consists of 15 chapters; in each chapter different language skills are merged. Writers have stated that the key characteristics of this book include teaching language through conversation, using text with different topics (culture, history and Iranian traditions), teaching pronunciation by means of imitating the audio files, having comprehensive Persian-English and English-Persian dictionary, using controlled practices for stability of learning new grammatical points, making a link between new information and language learners` previous knowledge. The entire book, except the first chapter that teaches Persian alphabet, consists of merging several language learning skills. Each chapter consists of specific structure that follows pre-determined path for language learning. For evaluation of this book, 30 indices introduced by Cunningsworth were considered. In Cunningsworth`s book a wide range of evaluation questions is offered for evaluating the characteristics of textbooks. Cunningsworth has introduced 45 criteria for revising a textbook; these criteria are classified as follows: goals and approaches, organizing, linguistic content, skills, subject, methodology, teacher’s book and applied considerations. Chapters 3-12 introduce indices for evaluating textbooks and for each index, some questions are suggested. In this article, except specialty indices for a specific skill, other indices including educational assistant references for teaching/learning methods, studying methods, manual book of teacher, Persian educational materials for specific goals as well as other indices are evaluated. Examination of the mentioned indices revealed that in spite of attempts for meeting requirements necessary for teaching language, set of books titled “Farsi Shirin Ast” is very far from standard educational package; the reasons are as follows: lack of diversity of communication assignments, lack of enough attention to listening and writing skills, left to right book binding and artificial audio files that lack background information.

Possession is one of the universals in linguistics; it can be encoded in nominative and predicative forms. Stassen (2009) proposed four types of predicative possession: locative possession, ‘with’ possession, topic possession and 'have' possession. Present article studies predicative possession construction in Shahmirzadi language based on typological-functional approach; it tries to answer this question: “which types of predicative possession strategies are used in Shahmirzadi language? A questionnaire was prepared for this survey and data was gathered by interviewing native speakers of Shahmirzadi. The questionnaire contains 53 sentences which are positive and includes predicative possessions with “be” and “have”.

By investigating the passive structures in Persian using a qualitative method in terms of the theory of Dynamic Anti-symmetry (hence, DAS) (Moro, 2000), we intended to examine the factors which trigger passive sentences; the study was done in a unified and different way. A passive sentence is a kind of unaccusative sentence which has an explicit/implicit external theta role as an agent; it`s the most eminent distinction between unaccusative and passive structure. Having studied the literatures, we understood that none of those previous studies, except Karimi & Osmani (2016), had explored the external theta role; they have considered an essential role for the verb /ʃodæn/ (to become) in passive structures, though. These facts persuaded the researcher to scrutinize the passive structure and provide an explanation for the presence of the agent and study the role of verb /ʃodæn/ (to become) in passive sentences. Meanwhile, according to DAS, we took movement as a symmetry breaking process, but not a process through which uninterpretable features can be checked.
We indicated that active and passive structures are alike. In other words, in both types of sentences we observed that in line with UTAH and Collins (2005), a DP, but not a by-phrase, merges (as an external argument) with a in Spec-ⱱP and construct a ⱱP and another DP merges as the complement of this ⱱP. The first DP carries the agent theta role and the second one carries a theme theta role. This fact justifies the presence of an agent in passive sentences. In passive structure, this ⱱP then merges with a by-phrase, then this by-phrase merges with a Voice Phrase (hence, VoP) which is the result of the hierarchy of projection; this VoP is assumed to bear the passive feature and values the [u-infl.] feature of the light verb as passive. This light verb cannot value its complement as accusative; therefore, the [u-case] feature of the complement of the light verb is valued as nominative through the agreement with tensed passive (Voice) node and then, the complement can move to Spec-TP according to the principles of DAS. This ⱱP will be spelled out as the past participle unless the VoP is not filled by verbs such as "/ʃodæn/, /gæʃtæn/, /ɑmædæn/ and /ræftæn/".
Although previous studies have considered the verb /ʃodæn/ (to become) as a trigger for passive, we showed that according to Bateni (1969), Dabirmoghadam (1985) and Mansouri (2010) this verb is not the only verb which can appear in passive sentences and since there is no trace of such a verb in passive structures in Old and Middle Persian, this is crystal clear that /ʃodæn/ (to become) by no means triggers passive sentences, rather this verb is considered as a phonological representation of a Voice node bearing the passive feature. Therefore, this verb can be assumed neither a light verb nor an auxiliary one but something completely different (Bateni, 1969). According to the results of this study we argued that there is no such a structure as passive, but it is the emergent property of a functional node called Voice node.