نشریه پژوهش های زبان شناسی تطبیقی
پیاپی 22 (پاییز و زمستان 1400)

The purpose of this article is to update existing views on the Zazaki dialectology and answer these two questions: Are the Zazas Kurds? Is Zazaki Kurdish? To answer this question, methods of comparative linguistics and perceptual dialectology are used. The first part of this article deals with the background of Zaza studies. The second part, based on the perspectives of perceptual dialectology, attempts to provide a clear picture of the complex status of the identity of the Zazas from emic and etic perspectives. The third section focuses on comparative linguistics research and examines a number of typologically marked grammatical characteristics in several Iranian languages that are important for studying the classification of Zazaki. The last section provides a conclusion and answers the two main questions of this research.

Persian owns a flexible syntax and is thought to be a free word order language. In this paper, employing a Role and Reference Grammar framework, we argue that constituent reordering in preposing and left-dislocation constructions of the Persian left-periphery is the result of the interface between information-discourse structure, on the one hand, and a certain syntactic position in the layered structure of the clause, on the other: topical, focused, and contrastive constituents are hosted respectively by the left-detached position, pre-core slot, and kontrast position. Bear in mind that each position requires a certain discourse condition to be met. We also show that non-canonical constituent orders at the Persian left-periphery are not merely a rearrangement of syntactic units for pragmatic reasons, they are in effect ‘constituent ordering constructions’ in line with the notion of construction as proposed and defined in the RRG theory.

Spoken in central Iranan, Jowshaqani is a variety of the Central Iranian languages that shows specific features of pronominal clitics. The present paper has dealt with the function and placement of pronominal clitics, the rise of procliticisation and endoclitisation of the clitics, doubling and clitic cluster in Jowshaqani. Jowshaqani shows very good evidence for proclitisation; having lost their syntactic host, enclitics can change their attachment orientation and become incorporated into the verb which follows them in the form of proclitics. It also provides a rich source for the study of endoclitics, where a clitic can appear as endoclitic between the prefixes and the stem. Jowshaqani also shows two other syntactic aspects of clitic: clitic cluster which appears typically when the obligatory non-canonical subject clitic follows the possessor-indexing clitic; and clitic doubling which means a proclitic pronoun occurs together with the non-clitic pronoun in the same syntactic function.

In this paper, by examining some patterns in the pronunciation of the Arabic loanwords in the early Persian texts, we show that the Arabic loanwords have borrowed from two sources of Arabic, one is the Conquests Arabic, which is the colloquial language of Muslim conquerors, as well as their written language until the late Umayyad period. the other is Classical Arabic, which until now has been considered by Iranologists as the only source of Arabic loanwords in Persian. We suppose that the attribution of many non-classical pronunciations of Arabic words in early New Persian, such as Shān (in Classical Arabic: šaˀn), ḏīb (in Classical Arabic: ḏiˀb), belleh (in Classical Arabic: billāh), masala, mesla/masla (in in Classical Arabic, masˀalah) etc., contrary to what previous researchers have said, have nothing to do with the Persian phonology, but the special pronunciation of these words shows that they are borrowed from the Conquests Arabic.

The present contribution bears an attempt to take a novel synchronic perspective on clitics in Persian namely canonical clitic. Introduced by Spencer & Lewis (2013) and being a sub branch of canonical typology approach, canonical clitic viewpoint looks for canonical instances of single grammatical categories which are the best, the clearest and the indisputable ones rendering spectacular typological definitions. In this paper, and analyzing 10 clitics, we endeavord to discover whether clitic system is canonical in Persian or the clitics are far from canonicity in some degrees. The data analysis revealed that among 70 points for the fully canonical system, Persian gained 64 which portrayed %9.1428 deviation from the canon, illustrayting that clitic system in Persian is so close to the canonicity of clitic systems world wide.

In sexism, the juxtaposition of words forms can elevate one gender above another and unsettle equality between genders. In the present work, sexism is examined in a corpus-based manner through qualitative and quantitative analysis of collocations of the words woman and man in Hamshahri Corpus version 2. In the present research which has been done on the basis of Baker’s (2006, 2010a, 2017) corpus-based approach, the collocations of the words man and woman have been identified using Antconc software functions of collocates and concordance and the data have been classified semantically. The results show the existence of sexism in the collocations of written Persian language; while both of the words man and woman co-occur with collocations having neutral-meaning, qualitative analysis of collocations categories reveals that women, in comparison to men are in lower position. Also, sexism against women is observed in categories like family, job, personal characteristics, art and crime.

The aim of the present article is to investigate morphological diversity in nominative adjective in Persian. To reach this purpose, morphological patterns of nominativeadjective in the previous researchers’ works were gathered and criticized.To remove the weaknesses, they were presented within a new approach of “construction and interpretation”, because it was revealed the cause of morphological diversity in nominative adjective is the role of usage as the basis of conceptualization in language; In other words, by usage and interaction of it with meaning, speaker updates and creates new constructions; the listener interprets the new construction in a verbal communication and in this way, conceptualization takes place. In all patterns, nomination is central meaning but each time the speaker links some of his illocutionary force to it and creates a form with a new meaning as a different construction; so while keeping its central meaning, the new construction finds a new usage.

Aspect is divided to lexical and grammatical types. Lexical aspect is derived from verb meaning and its subtypes are states, activities, achievements and accomplishments; Grammatical aspect is represented by inflection or some auxiliary verbs and includes perfective, imperfective, perfect and prospective ones. The present paper, in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar, studies the interaction of Aktionsart and progressive aspect in Persian verbs. It is usually accepted that states, don’t appear with progressive aspect, while “waxing or waning situations, agentivity and temporary situations”, pave the way for them to be used with progressive aspect. Activities are mostly compatible with progressive as their dynamicity is in accord with progression. Achievements are usually regarded unacceptable, but they can have different readings in progressive aspect including preliminary process, slow motion, iterative, futurate progressive and commentary reading. Accomplishments due to being durative and having stages, are acceptable in progressive aspect.

Numerous linguistic studies as well as language planning involves the use of corpus to analyze different aspects of language. In present study a corpus was built from published articles of the journal of information processing and management. The corpus include more than 600 articles and 4000000 words. The articles cover hot topics including information science, information technology,, linguistics, computational linguistics, terminology, ontology and the like; so, actually the corpus is the specialized one which could be considered as a prerequisite for specific language processing. After sampling, in present study, data as well as metadata was inserted to corpus, Then, normalization and POS tagging were done via available software and finally some files were randomly chosen for checking their POS tags which led to extracting some rules for correcting wrong tags. Then the rules were applied to corpus.

Sarawani Balochi is one of the dialects of the Balochi language. The aim of this paper is to study and describe some of the historical phonological changes from Old Iranian in this dialect and comparing them with Persian. Moreover, the syllable structure in Sarawani Balochi will be compared with Old, Middle and New Persian. To achieve this goal, phonemes were gathered from the speech of Sarawani Balochi speakers and some phonological changes were compared diachronically. Findings show that, for example that the Old Iranian diphthongs have remained in Sarawani Balochi. Also, the preservation of the phoneme /t/ at the end of words is another feature of this dialect. The comparison of syllable structure in Sarawani with Old, Middle and New Persian shows that the (c)cv(c)(c) structure is more similar to Middle Persian than New Persian.

The previous studies have shown that the difference between question and statement types is in the utterance-final edge. The aim is to determine the manipulation of which parts of the pitch curve perceptively influences the sentence type. And, to what degree, can the manipulation of the utterance-final edge affect the perception of the listeners and lead them to understand the statement as question? These manipulations have been done in two steps: first the target points were manipulated in statement sentence through the tilt pattern and then through the duration intonation synchronisation pattern by Praat software. Perceptual salience of these target points is investigated through questionnaire identification tests. According to the results, the utterance-final edge can not categorically convert the statement into question, but it is an important factor in determining the sentence type. Approximately 90% of the listeners perceive the utterance manipulated at the nucleous peak as question.

This research studies the phonological processes of assimilation, voicing, glide affrication, metathesis and elision in Persian language based on Vennemannʹs approach to linguistic change to improve syllable structure and using the concepts of “consonantal strength” and the “preference laws” for syllable structure. Thus, the assimilation process has been analyzed with justification to the synchronic maxim and other processes with justification to the diachronic maxim. More than 2000 middle and modern Persian words from different Pahlavi dictionaries and authorsʹ linguistic intuition as Persian speakers were gathered to do diachronic and synchronic analysis. Some of the research findings are: 1. The mentioned processes have occurred based on the preference laws to improve syllable structure. 2. The consonantal strength has a driving role on occurring these processes diachronically and synchronically. 3. There are less preferred structures in terms of the preference laws in middle Persian language based on diachronic maxim.

Cognitive Grammar is the first linguistic theory which deals specifically with grammar and describes the structure of language as a product of cognition and social interactions. In Cognitive Grammar, the fundamental idea is that grammar is meaningful and could only be described in relation to its communicative role; therefore, this grammar is a part of functionalism tradition. The gap of writing a work in order to introduce this theory in Persian thoroughly and the most important of all, the analysis of Persian constructions according to this framework in order to understand this theory better was felt, until the book Cognitive Grammar: Theoretical Foundations and Application in Persian was published in the winter of 2019 by Sahar Bahrami Khorshid (PhD) and Samt Press . In this paper, we have introduced and criticized this work.