نشریه زبان فارسی و گویش های ایرانی
سال ششم شماره 1 (پیاپی 11، بهار و تابستان 1400)

Language structure is the product of our interaction with the world around us. The way we build discourses and develop linguistic categories can be derived from the way we experience our environment. Language encodes some points of spatial orientations which are abstract concepts such as “up”, “down”, “front”, “back” and the like by means of concrete domains e.g. “body-parts”, “landmarks”, and “verbs”. In this research, the process of changing these objective sources into spatial orientation is called “directionization”. The present study investigates directionization in Persian based on Heine's (1997) approach, and Davari and Naghzguy- Kohan's (2017a, b) model which is used to determine the dimensions of directionization, or the extent of  semantic, morpho-syntactic and phonetic changes of the sources. The data were gathered from poetry and prose books, proverbs, novels, dictionaries, elementary and high school Persian textbooks, websites, and daily and television conversations. Time span includes Early New Persian (4th-13th century) and New Persian (13th  century- today). Data analysis indicates that Persian uses body-parts such as head, foot, eye, heart and the like for expressing relative and metaphorical directions. Through this process, mentioned lexical sources have undergone the second degree of grammaticalization.

The present article aims to investigate the non-verbal endocentric compounds in Laki language. The research data include endocentric compounds collected from two sources: the daily speech of Laki speakers by the researcher and the two-volume book of ‘Laki Dictionary’ (Kiyani Kolivand, 2011). The results of the research show that the most frequent structures of non-verbal endocentric compounds in Laki include [noun + noun], [noun + adjective] and [adjective + noun]. In addition to these structures, there are three subsidiary low frequency structures in this language: [noun + preposition], [preposition + noun] and [number + noun]. The semantic analysis of the structures above shows that the diversity of relations between components of compounds results in various interpretations, among which the semantic diversity of [noun + noun] compounds is by far more than other endocentric compounds. The [noun + noun] endocentric compounds are classified into two categories, head-initial and head-final, in which numerous concepts are found: source, content, usage, similarity, material, place, dependency, amalgamation, time, specialty, type, nutrition, manner, and purpose. The [noun + adjective] endocentric compounds also have considerable semantic diversity and different meanings are found, including performance, an instrument of production, content, relation, features, and special relationship.

This paper attempts to examine humorous grammatical innovations in contemporary Persian press in recent years within the framework of Bybee’s language change theory (2015) in accordance with the usage-based approach to grammer. In this regard, by collecting data from satirical press, this research endeavored to understand how and by which process these innovations have been produced, in which constructions they have been used and what characteristics they have. To this end, the humorous grammatical innovations have been classified in three categories consisting of derivatives constructions, fabricated verbs and constructions with “al-“. In this research, we demonstrate that a high number of innovations have been created on the basis of analogical processes. Furthermore the findings suggest that seemingly most of the innovations have the potentiality to enter the formal language but evidently the language enclines to absorb the innovations which have been coined by virtue of the language exigency or the deficits of applicable grammatical constructions.

The current study aims to investigate stative lexical aspect of Sourani Kurdish predicates made by adjectives and copula bu:n, ‘to be’, applying binary classification of Smith (1997/1991). The findings reveal that the predicates are not always stative experiencing a kind of aspect-conversion influenced by two factors. The first factor is the copula bu:n, ‘to be’, which is a homonym with two different meanings, bu:n, ‘to be’, and ‘to become’ The predicates which are the result of adjectives and copula in the meaning of ‘to become’ are always non-stative and stage-level. Besides, the data show that all predicates which are the result of combining adjectives and copula bu:n in the meaning of ‘to be’ are not always stative influenced by the content of the adjectives in the structure. According to adjective classification by Schmitt (1972) and Bach (1978), the predicates made by the adjectives belonging to the classifying group and bu:n, ‘to be’, always make stative individual-stage predicates. However, the ones belonging to the qualifying group produce non-stative stage-level predicates.

This research is about lexical variation in Khorramabad county of Lorestan province. The data come from the data gathered for Linguistic Atlas of Lorestan. The data are categorized as kinship terms, words related to natural objects, words related to human, animal names, words related to plants, words related to human-made objects, pronouns, demonstrative – place adverbs, question words, and numbers. The language varieties of the villages whose data are analyzed in this research are varieties of Lori and Laki languages for which the coefficient of variation is calculated and analyzed separately. We see not only considerable language variation in Khorramabad, but also many lexical differences in the varieties used in villages of the county. Findings indicate that in both Lori and Laki, the category of number has the least coefficient of variation, and the category of words related to human-made objects has the largest coefficient of variation. The analysis of the data also shows that words for “father”, “language”, “bread”, and “blood” have had the least variation in language varieties whose data have been analyzed in this research, so they can be considered as the most basic words of those language varieties.

Cyclic meters in Persian Poetry are generally consisted of two half-lines or hemistiches, but this paper deals with cyclic meters consisting of more than two hemistiches. This paper deals with such poly-hemistich Persian meters which totally belong to contemporary poets. These meters have been introduced and analyzed based on numerous evidences taken from Panahi’s corpus (2016-2020).

As a branch of morphology and a mechanism of word-formation and due to its high frequency and productivity, compounding has received considerable attention by many linguists. However, it has not yet been studied in Mazandarani. In the present study, Mazandarani compounds taken from Tabari dictionary have been analyzed semantically and in terms of the relationship between their constituents. Based on Bisetto and Scalise’s categorization as the theoretical framework of the study, compounds are classified into three major groups, namely, coordination, attributive and subordinative. Regarding the relationship between the constituents, compounds are divided into verbal and non-verbal ones. Verbal compounds and their classifications are the main focus of the present study. A verbal compound is a type of subordinative one in whose construction, the non-verbal constituent is the complement of the verbal constituent. Semantically verbal compounds are classified into four groups including argument, non-argument, reduplicative, and phrasal ones. The evidence shows that there is almost a complete correspondence between Mazandarani and the classification suggested by Bisetto and Scalise.

Language vitality is a concept that indicates to how extent a language is used as a communication instrument in different social situations. The highest point of the vitality of a language is when the language is applied in full-scale both at home and outside in the society for all purposes while the lowest point is when no one applies the language for no purpose, that is to say the language is extinct. Nowadays, threats to languages are a global crisis, since the number of children who learn their native languages is remarkably decreasing. Mazandarani is not also excluded from this threat. The aim of this study is to apply UNESCO framework that is a result of a collaboration of an expert group of scholars on endangered languages, to assess the vitality of Mazandarani in urban areas. Analyzing the data resulted from questionnaires, official and library sources and field study indicated that Mazandarani receives the point 2.74, a situation a bit worse than what is defined as “definitely endangered” in UNESCO framework for assessing the vitality and endangerment of languages. Discussion on research variables, gender, education, and age, specified that comparing to women, men totally both have a better and more positive attitude toward Mazandarani language and use it more. As education level rises, the use of Mazandarani decreases and the attitude of speaker society toward this language becomes more negative and pessimistic as well.

This study was conducted with the aim of detecting the social status of Gonabadi dialect as one of the oldest dialects of Iran via the analysis of the effect of social parameters like age, education, gender, and urbanity upon the frequency of Gonabadi usage in diverse fields including family, school, art, office, alley and street, and hobby. Our method was field analysis and the recruited instruments included questionnaire and interview. The sampling method was random based on which our statistical society included 240 participants from three age groups of 12 to 17, 25 to 35 and 50 and more were selected proportionally and equally from each gender and from two urban and rural societies. The results demonstrated that Gonabadi was the dominant language of informal fields, specifically, family, though in the more formal fields including school and office, Persian was the dominant language. Also, the propensity to utilize Persian among female, young, educated and urban participants outweighed this tendency in the male, older, uneducated, and rustic counterparts. Hence, on the light of these results, it could be asserted that Gonabadi is undergoing gradual trend of extinction in the realm of great Khorasan.

Languages use different strategies for representing the concept of negation. According to the typological approach of Payne (1985), we can classify negation into two categories: sentential negation and non-sentential negation. The sentential negation that has scope over the whole clause contains various possibilities like using affixes, negation particles, negative auxiliary verbs, higher negative verbs, negative nouns, negative adverbs, and negative quantifiers. Non-sentential negation is divided into two subdivisions, including derivational negation and negation in subordinate clauses. This descriptive study attempted to introduce the concept of negation in the Persian language according to the natural language data using the Persian Proposition Bank and different examples in web pages. The findings showed that the dominant pattern of negation in Persian is affixation, but other strategies of the sentential negating introduced by the Payne can also be found in Persian. The particle na ‘not’, main verbs such as xoddɑɹi kardan ‘avoid’, the auxiliary verb nakaɹdan ‘do not’, adverbs such as abadan ‘not at all’ and the negative quantifier hič ‘no’ are some examples of negation possibilities in Persian. This study also showed that the occurrence of a negative verb or quantifier does not necessarily lead to a negative verb.

In this research, various types of vowel raising in Sabzevari dialect are analyzed in different contexts in the framework of Generative Phonology (Chomsky & Halle, 1968). The main concern in this paper is to investigate various phonological contexts in which vowel raising takes place in this dialect. The data of this research are collected via two sources: written sources about Sabzevari dialect and recorded speech of some Sabzevari speakers. To this end, the phonological and phonetic forms of the data were first compared to one another and analyzed afterwards. Standard Persian was taken as evidence in this research. The results of this research reveal that vowel raising applies in two different phonological contexts: when low or mid vowels are adjacent to high consonants, that is to say, alveo-palatal, palatal and velar consonants. and when mid or low vowels are adjacent to nasal consonants. Overall, nine types of vowel raising take place in Sabzevari dialect.

Irony in the tradition of studying rhetoric refers to a word that has two meanings and the audience realizes its implicit meaning according to the circumstances. A look at the background of the study of irony shows that this device, which today is no longer limited to the field of literature and is generally used in everyday conversations of speakers, has always been confused with other processes such as metaphor, metonymy, implication, and so on. The present article, while referring to these overlaps, seeks to provide a clear and independent definition of irony, and, in particular, tries to provide an analytic-descriptive perspective with the help of various data from the in-context everyday sentences of Persian speakers. The perceptual approach lets us examine how irony is understood and interpreted. This study shows that speakers interpret irony by relying on perceptual context information, whether linguistic context (context A), situational context (context B) or pre-existing information in memory (context C). In the meantime, the existence of specific information in context C plays a major role, according to which, each sentence can be interpreted in its contradictory meaning.