The International Journal of Humanities
Volume:26 Issue: 2, 2019

This paper examines the differences between two types of categorization and then the use of conventional metaphor and metonymy and their relationship among Persian-speaking Iranians. Recent studies on categorization show that Persian speakers, similar to the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, categorize based on thematic relationships, unlike the European Americans who categorize based upon taxonomic relations. These studies have shown that Eastern Asians, with regard to categorization, act on the syntagmatic axis and the units in the context, and Westerners act upon the paradigmatic axis. Therefore, the hypothesis was put forth that these different cognitive functions are also represented in the application of metaphor and metonymy that is, those who use the category-based classification are more likely to use metaphors, and those who are inclined to use the relationship-based categorization tend more toward using metonymy. Examining the Persian corpus of 30,000 sentences confirmed this hypothesis. Persian speakers, who categorize based on relationships, use metonymy, which works on syntagmatic axis and based on the contiguity of two things, more than metaphor, which is based on the similarity and paradigmatic relation between two entities. The present study confirms this fact again that cognition is not the same in all human beings.

In this study, corpus method was used to test an assumption of Conceptual Metaphor Theory ‎‎(CMT) that systematic and conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions have literal ‎meaning in the source domain. The conceptual metaphors LIFE IS A JOURNEY and IDEAS ‎ARE PLANTS were selected for analysis and three keywords from source domain of the ‎metaphors were chosen and matched with their English equivalents. Hamshahri 2 collection ‎of Farsi texts was selected as the corpus of the study. For ease of processing, one third of the ‎corpus comprising of fifty million word tokens was randomly sampled as the working corpus. ‎The collocates of the source-domain keywords as realizations of fixed metaphoric expressions ‎were extracted using AntConc software and their concordances were examined. It was found ‎that 1) in conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions, when source-domain keywords were ‎used metaphorically they had collocates that rarely appeared with the same source-domain ‎keywords used literally, and 2) source-domain keywords had gradable degrees of ‎metaphoricity. The findings were interpreted as suggesting that the meanings of fixed ‎metaphoric expressions are not systematically connected to the metaphor's source-domain ‎meanings. ‎

This article explores the polysemy of four negative non-verbal prefixes in Persian language (zedd ‎‎'against, opposite of', bi 'without', nā 'not' and qejr 'not, non-') based on Principled Polysemy ‎framework (Tyler and Evans 2001, 2003). First, the primary sense of each prefix is determined ‎and then it is explained how non-primary senses are derived from the primary one, hence ‎demonstrating the semantic network of each prefix as a radial category. In this research, using ‎AntConc software (Anthony, 2014), first all the occurrences of the four prefixes were extracted ‎from the Hamshahri Corpus Version 2 (AleAhmad, Amiri, Darrudi, Rahgozar & Oroumchian, ‎‎2009) and then in order to analyze research data, some of them were randomly selected. The ‎findings of the study indicate that only in three of the four prefixes under study, polysemy is ‎observed, and that the frequency of use, ease of derivation and predominance in the semantic ‎network are the best criteria for determining the primary sense. The conceptual phenomenon ‎involved in the polysemy of these prefixes is metonymy. Data analysis shows that metonymical ‎shift occurs at two levels: at the level of morpheme/prefix sense and at the level of word-‎formation, and that the former leads to more straightforward relations within the semantic ‎network. This is due to the fact that the latter requires a more complex line of imagination which ‎automatically translates into a corresponding complexity of relations in the semantic network and ‎significant reduction in the type frequency of non-primary senses as a whole.‎

In this study, we have examined the effectiveness of operant conditioning on the development of linguistic skills in Persian children with autism. It was a quasi-experimental study, and done by using pre- and post-tests. We randomly selected 40 children (6 girls and 34 boys, 5-10 years old) and divided them into experimental and control groups comprising of 20 children each. We used the Autism Spectrum Screening Questionnaire (ASSQ) to screen subjects and the Test of Language Development (TOLD-P:3) to measure their language skills. Both groups received grammatical comprehension and grammatical completion subtests. Using the Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) method, the experimental group was then subjected to 48 one-hour intervention sessions ran for 24 weeks. After the intervention, we ran a post-test in both experimental and control groups. The data were analyzed using SPSS software. In the experimental group, the mean score in the grammatical completion subtest had increased by 4.2, and in the grammatical comprehension subset, the mean score had increased by 3.6. In contrast, in the control group, the mean score of the grammatical completion and comprehension subtests had increased by 0.25 and 0.3, respectively. The findings suggested that operant conditioning had direct effects on the improvement of the 5-10 years old Persian-speaking children with autism.

It is a typological observation in more than 90% of languages where the basic word order is either subject–verb–object (SVO) or subject–object–verb (SOV). Functional typologists believe that the prevalence of these two orders; in which the subject precedes the two other elements, and the verb and the object are contiguous is due to the functions of language in the real world. Hence, the two principles of subject salience and verb-object contiguity have been proposed. The typological explanations put forward for these two principles hold that transitive sentences of a language have come into existence as a result of the encoding of the prototypical transitive action scenario. In such a scenario, subject salience is a result of the fact that the transitive action scenario is started by the doer of the activity. Also, because of the tight causal relationship between the activity and its receiver, the linguistic counterparts of these two elements, too, tend to be contiguous. Since functional pressures can only be manifested in language through human cognition, the present paper looks at the cognitive processes involved in the cross-linguistic prevalence of the afore-mentioned word orders.

The present paper aims to investigate the polysemy of the Persian word /šax/ from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. The study begins with introducing the tenets of cognitive sociolinguistics, and then goes on to investigate the polysemy of the Persian adjective /šax/ within this framework. In cognitive sociolinguistics, it is believed that polysemy cannot be reduced to a static state, one and the same for all speakers of a language. Rather, social variables like age and gender of speakers affect the way they perceive different senses of the polysemous words. This paper, in line with cognitive sociolinguistic, studies on polysemy, specifically those of Robinson (2010, 2012a, 2012b, and 2014), employed advanced statistical methods of Logistic Regression and Cross Tab to study the polysemy of Persian adjective /šax/ among 200 Persian speakers, both male and female, of different ages, selected from the Narmak neighborhood, Tehran, Iran, within the time span of spring and summer 2018. The results show that the cognitive sociolinguistic approach works desirably in lexical polysemy studies. In addition, the use of advanced statistical methods revealed a number of important facts about different senses of /šax/ in terms of age and gender, which provide a better description of polysemy in Persian language.