مجله جستار های زبانی
سال نهم شماره 5 (پیاپی 47، آذر و دی 1397)

Negation is one of the basic concepts in natural languages. In all natural languages, there exist negative statements corresponding to positive sentences. The meaning of negative sentences in these languages is contrary to the meaning of the corresponding positive sentences. The purpose of this study is to elucidate the morphological and syntactic representation of negation and its position in Lori dialect of Kohgilouyeh based on Minimalist Program. In this regard, the main research questions are:1- Is the negative marker in Lori dialect a word or a prefix?
2. Does the negative marker place in different positions in Lori dialect?
Based on the main research questions, the following main hypotheses are expressed:1. Negative marker in Lori dialect is a word.
2. Negative marker places in different positions in Lori dialect.
Although one of the authors is the native speaker of this dialect, the research data was extracted from the speech of five male and female elderly speakers, as well. The research results show that the negative marker in Lori dialect precedes the Tense Phrase/TP as an independent phrase and occurs in different positions in the sentence. In non-attributive and interrogative sentences, the negative marker manifesting in the head position of Negative Phrase (NegP1), first precedes the TP and then it is attracted by the verb. In this position, the relationship between the verb and the head of the negative phrase is realized by Agreement relation. The Negative Phrase2 (NegP2) is another position in which this marker appears in the indicative attributive sentences. In this position, the negative marker is not subject to any movement and remains in its situ position. In addition, in these sentences, the negative marker can also move to the specifier of Focus Phrase/FP. Similarly, the negative marker can occupy the head position of Complementizer Phrase/CP in yes-no question sentences. Moreover, this marker can be used as a prefix before the verb and also locate before the TP as a negative adverb.

In the framework known as processing approach to grammar, it is argued that processing provides a full-fledged functional explanation for all syntactic phenomena including constituent ordering. Linguistic structure is simply built in a way that eases processing difficulty of sentences and results in efficiency of language use. It seems that the operation of that part of the linguistic representation system that leads to formulation of concepts utilizing lexical access procedure is governed by processing mechanisms. The processing mechanisms, as it has put forward by Hawkins (1994) are those that make it possible for humans to recognize (and produce) grammatical structure in a rapid and efficient manner. The formulator is also planned in a way that minimizes the processing load. Therefore, it appears that some ordering regularities and grammatical constraints in word order and syntactic phenomena such as movement are motivated by the flawless performance of this phase of human linguistic processor. According to performance theory and efficiency principles, constituent ordering is influenced by processing efficiency, i.e. the ordering of constituents is intended to facilitate processing. The research aims to study the processing basis of relativisation and syntactic movement known as scrambling and the effects of grammatical weight in Persian by drawing upon evidence from self-paced reading. Adopting an online reading time paradigm, the research was aimed at studying the role of grammatical weight in likelihood of post-verbal movement and processing loads of pairs of corresponding sentences. Hypotheses: Questions increasing the motivation and triggering initiation of doing this research are how different structural configurations of sentences with identical truth condition modify processing level and if the increase of grammatical weight could result in likelihood of syntactic movement. The final questions are how the movement of grammatically heavy constituents including relative clause and scrambled constituents explained in terms of processing implications. Accordingly, four hypotheses were developed in the course of the research. The aforesaid paradigm, as an efficient experimental technique to assess processing speed of syntactic structures, was designed by Open Sesame Software. Two sets of 24 sentences in three levels of weight (light, medium and heavy) and two structural levels (unmarked preverbal constituent and post-verbal one) were presented to 40 randomly selected Persian-speaking participants (between the ages 18 and 40) with university education. The first set consisted of sentences containing relative clause in two configurations and the second set of pairs of scrambled (post-verbal) and unscrambled sentences. Sentences were followed by a yes/no question. Data was analyzed using SPSS and ANOVA test. Findings: In light level, the mean reading time of sentences with canonical constituent ordering was less than those with post-verbal constituents. However, this trend got reversed by the increase of grammatical weight of the constituent subjected to scrutiny. In other word, the post-verbal movement of constituents resulted in reduction of mean reading time in medium-weight sentences. This decline was markedly more significant in heavy sentences. The ordering of constituents and the likelihood of movement is highly weight-sensitive. As a conclusion, the end-weight principle as an incentive to optimize the processing efficiency was approved in Persian.

Across most languages, verbs produced by agrammatic aphasics are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically inappropriate inflectional affixes. The present study focuses on tense and grammatical agreement in the speech of Persian agrammatic aphasics according to the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997). We wanted to know whether or not all functional morphemes are equally affected in this syndrome. We hypothesized that tense features are more severely impaired than agreement inflection. So we evaluated two Persian agrammatic patients in this descriptive-analytic study. They were classified as agrammatic Broca's aphasics according to the Persian aphasia test. The spontaneous speech, verb completion task and sentence repetition task were also designed and performed. Our findings showed that tense features are more severely impaired than agreement inflection. Results did not indicate a significant difference between different aspects of the Past tense; there was a significant difference between the mean of responses to Past tense in comparison to Present tense and Future. Our findings showed that the impairment in use of Past tense was more than the other tenses. On the other hand, tense features were more severely impaired than agreement inflection. This is because in languages with a rich system of agreement inflections like Persian, the verb agreement is a phonological representation of agreement between subject and verbal head in a specific position called Inflection phrase. Subject-verb agreement errors may occur because there is no movement of verb from the head of the tense phrase to the head of the agreement phrase as a kind of head-to head movement. The general idea is that the selective pattern of impairment in Broca's agrammatic aphasia and the dissociations witnessed in tense and agreement use follows from the inaccessibility of high nodes of the syntactic tree to agrammatic speakers. This causes syntactic structures that relate to high nodes of the tree to be impaired in agrammatism, whereas lower structures are unimpaired. A retrospective examination of the literature shows that our findings are corroborated by others. These findings also bear upon central issues in linguistic theories, such as checking theory in Minimalist Program by Noam Chomsky (1992) and that of Pollock (1989), regarding split inflection.

This research aims to conduct a comparative study of the narrative discourse in two short story collections: Ghesehaye Majid by Houshang Moradi Kermani and Poil de Carotte by Jules Renard. By employing Dominique Maingueneau’s theories of discourse analysis on literary texts, and by emphasizing the textual components of the two aforementioned collections, instances such as the relationship between the narrator and the narrated, kinds of discourse, and also polyphony in narration have been explored. Dealing with the life of a young adult and including much biographical information from the writers’ own lives, the employment of a humorous and realistic language are instances which make these two collections as good instances of the literature of children and young adults. This study has taken advantage from the theories of critical discourse analysis as an approach which analyzes literary texts and stresses the discursive and interactive aspect of communication. As a result, this research shows how the two writers are in fact very different in their narrative technique, the situation of narration and narrator state, the kind of productive discourse and narrative polyphony, which has resulted in a considerably different kind of literary production of the two authors.

The present research is a comparative study of the comprehension and production of passive verbs in Persian monolingual children with Turkish-Persian bilingual children. Given the fact that the usage of passive structures in Persian is more often in writing than in speaking and also having in mind that Turkish passive structures are completely different from the ones in Persian, we want to see if Turkish-Persian bilingual children who have grown up with their native language are able to comprehend and produce Persian passive structures.
Many researchers working abroad have tested the production and comprehension of passive sentences in children using pictures, puppet shows and films. In Iran, although some researches have been done on passive structures and bilingualism, the production and comprehension of passive sentences by bilingual and monolingual children has not been compared yet. Due to the large number of bilingual people in Iran and the importance of bilingualism in language programming, assessing the effect of bilingualism on using Persian passive structures is important. Theoretical framework of this research is Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) according to which, two kinds of passive structures including main passives and non-personal passives are recognized.
In this research, eighteen 5- to-7- year old Persian monolingual children (9 girls and 9 boys) and eighteen 5- to-7- year old Turkish-Persian bilingual children were monitored to see if they produce and comprehend Persian passive structures. These children were selected randomly from the schools of Tehran and Sarab. In order to assess children’s comprehension and production of passive sentences, pictorial tests were used. Independent variables in the experiment are multilingualism and age and dependent variables are the comprehension and production of passive sentences. To do the experiment, sentences were made using 16 Persian verbs including: eat, milk, cut, plant, break, wash, kill, cook, write, sew, draw, weave, build, dig, pick, and steal. Afterwards, pictorial cards were drawn showing the action represented by the verb. Tests were organized in 4 parts. The first three tests, analyzing the comprehension and production of main and non-personal passive sentences, are the ones introduced by Demuth (2013). The forth test, a production test, is Manetti's (2013).Analyzing the data using SPSS, version 19, we found out that both bilingual and monolingual children have the ability of comprehending and producing passive structures of Persian language. So, multilingualism and age do not have a significant effect on the comprehension and production of main and non-personal passive verbs. Also the results showed that children most often tend to generalize the voice structure they hear to newly given situations i.e. when they are questioned about a patient (3rd test), they may or may not produce a passive sentence but when they are presented with a model passive structure in one case, the children copy the structure they hear to new situations.

In this paper, attempts have tried to study Fairclough’s theory of “inequality of power in the dialogue" by analyzing the dialogues between identical and opposing characters in the novel Fire without smoke by Nader Ebrahimi to identify powerful or passive characters, and decode the novel from the ideological perspective of the author.
To more regulate, this theoretical framework, the questions raised in the Shorter’s model (1996), were used to analyze power relations in the dialogues of characters with the aim of determining the type of relationship and the dominance of the personality poles of the story: Galan - the hero that relies on his physical strength - and Alani - the hero who relies on the power of thought and mind.
The analysis of data suggested that the way the two main characters of the novel interacted with others in their discourse was directly related to the up and downs of their lives. Galan's interaction was limited to an esoteric group of people around them, and as this circle of friends was limited down, his power diminished too, so that with his death, the coercive hegemony and compulsory domination associated with his behavior came to end.
In contrast, Alani not only struck a conversation with people from all aspects of life, especially women and the lower classes of the community, but also urged them to play a key role in the dialogue with the people around them. This contributed to the recognition of his intellectual and political authority and conduct, and even after his death, his thoughts continued to touch the speech and practice of the next generations.

Mystical ̍Shathʹ is formed in the context of language event context. The notion of event system belongs to post-Greimasian semiotics. The language event system finds a tensive-emotional function due to features such as momentary and discursive transformation. This situation benefits from phenomenological and emotional presence and tension for the subject, in which the subject is in a passive state and reaches the state of ecstasy. Many of Rumi's sonnets are the products of these moments; moments in which the subject loses self-consciousness and inevitably reveals the mystery. The result of this revelation can be interpreted as a ̍Shathʹ. According to this, the fundamental question of the present article is that what processes and discursive functions lead to ̍Shathʹ in the overall linguistic system of Rumi's sonnets. In fact, the purpose of the present research is to analyze the semiotic components of ̍Shathʹ in Rumi's sonnets in order to explain its event and the process of meaning-generation. This feature transforms the atmosphere of Rumi's Ghazal. This research shows that such an atmosphere has transformative, aesthetic, corporeal and the state functions in the discursive system of Rumi's. Thus, we are witnessing the sequence of events and their restoration. In essence this feature allows the subject to reach the same depth with the absolute truth and depth of being.

Publishing new Iranian high school English books after two decades has led to different reactions by educational experts and Iranian English teachers. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the newly-developed textbook of Iranian high schools (Vision 1) from teachers’ perspectives. The participants consisted of 66 experienced EFL teachers (30 females and 36 males) who were selected through convenience sampling from different high schools in Kermanshah, Iran. The evaluation of the textbook was conducted quantitatively through a checklist developed by Litz (2005). Moreover, some open-ended questions were asked from teachers to express their ideas about the book. After analyzing data, the results revealed that although the textbook had some shortcomings, it presented more authentic materials and included ample practices and drills for all four language skills. The results of this study can be helpful for the materials developers and curriculum designers in the Ministry of Education to revise the current textbook for new edition.

Around the 1950s and the publication of Jakobson's works on structuralist linguistics, Russian formalists innovated in the field of structural analysis of literary texts. Jakobson’s theory of structuralism has its roots in Husserl and Saussure's discussion; he also separates literary text from the context and the conditions for its creation, and examines it within the text. One of the most prominent manifestations of literary text is poetry; according to Jakobson, poetry language is a language that speaks of a special experimental and semantic construct and its form is inseparable from its meaning. In fact, the method of studying the poetry language is a method of linguistic studies; therefore, in poetry, we study phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic processes; because poetic language is the language of indirect, mysterious and ambiguous messages. In fact, structuralist critique considers literary texts to be a set of linguistic phenomena that distinguish them from any other text. The processes that make this distinction are recognizable at all levels (phonological, syntactic, and lexical). In this study, we rely on Jakobson's work to examine a poem of Mehdi Akhavan Sales called “A night’s story” . We know that the study of poetry entails mental effort and the search for concepts that the poet, consciously or unconsciously, has included in his literary creation; in the same vein, structuralist analysis helps us to have a careful reading of the text, and to reflect on the form and the format of poem with more delicacy to reach the hidden semantic network of poetry. In fact, the purpose of this study is to answer questions such as how linguistic functions, in the form of the geometric structure of poetry, serve to transfer the concepts better and how does the system of words, behind its superficial structures, include deep concepts appropriate to the space and the main theme of poetry? Structural analysis is a tool that shows that we should not only suffice the initial concept that derives from the text. Since the purpose of the structural analysis is to discover the hidden system and the deep relationship of concepts through the communication of words in a text, this study shows us that in this poem Akhavan has been able to express the concepts of sadness and poverty in a clear and transparent structure. The transparency of the images and the unpredictability of its description are not hidden from the reader's sight. Although this poem is written in the form of a new poem, it has the meter and rhyme, and even these meter and rhyme have added to its richness. Despite the lack of uniformity, the concepts are equally distributed. This poem is also very phonetically rich, and the phonemes emphasize characters and concepts. Finally, it should be acknowledged that Akhavan has been very successful in using words and phrases and while maintaining the beauty of poetry and observing the rules of versification, he has taken advantage of their ability to emphasize the concept of poem and the transfer of implicit concepts. Thus, by examining phonological, syntactic, lexical and semantic processes, we have shown how the system of words has led to the emergence of hidden layers of poem that have been effective in the creation of beauty, and so we have come to discover the semantic network of poem.