نشریه مطالعات زبان و گویش های غرب ایران
سال نهم شماره 35 (زمستان 1400)

The current research aims to investigate mood and modality in Sorani Kurdish within the Systemic Functional approach (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014). Specifically, the present study is an attempt to explore the nature of mood markers and the formalization of modality in Sorani Kurdish. The primary data has been collected using the Plank Questionnaire, administered to 442 participants. To explore mood-marking, the mood constituent in Kurdish clauses will be delineated, with the subject, finite, and mood adjuncts identified as the three main components of the mood constituent. Then, system of modality in Kurdish, modalization, and modulation will be discussed. Data analysis suggests that finite in Kurdish does not stand on its own and needs to be conflated with the predicate. The main grammatical categories used in Kurdish to represent modalization and modulation are modal verbs and pseudo-grammaticalized modal clauses. Statistical data also shows that mood adjuncts are only sporadically used in Kurdish to describe modality. Moreover, the morphological subjunctive mood will be analyzed as operative over verbal categories and hence not part of the mood constituent.

Perception verbs as important category of verbs are used to represent perceptual events related to human and other conscious creatures. This article examines the argument structure of the most important perception verb in Persian, i.e. “didæn’ (to see), within the framework of Goldberg's Construction Grammar (1995, 2006). The data includes a collection of 500 Persian sentences extracted from the Hamshahri corpus. The results show that the subject of “didæn’, semantically, plays the role of senser and its object plays the role of phenomenon that sometimes appears as a nominal phrase and sometimes as a subordinate clause. The verb "didæn" has a high degree of polysemy and in this study 17 different meanings have been detected. In each meaning, the argument structure differs in terms of formal or semantic properties of the object and/or the number of complements. Therefore, it can be argued that, in contrast to the projectionist approach, the argument structure of “didæn” is not dependent to the verb itself, but to a particular construction in which the verb occurs. This conclusion is in line with the constructionist approach that posits that a construction by itself has independent form and meaning.

The aim of this paper is to study dative and locative alternations in Persian based on Wood & Marantz (2017) within Distributed Morphology. We attempt to investigate the extent to which argument structure alternation can be reduced to the syntactic and semantic properties of a single head, labeled i*. The notion of possession transfer in double object construction (DOC) and locative relation in ditransitive construction (PPC) can be accounted for by assuming the ability of a verb to occure in DOC and PPC involves the ability to select D*P and p*P respectively. If i* combines with DP, it projects D*P and takes a DP specifier. If i* combines with pP, it projects p*P and introduces a DP specifier. Semantically i* assigns to the DP specifier the theta-role of possessor and figure respectively by contextually determined interpretive rules. Therefore, the interpretation of external arguments in double object construction and ditransitive construction is derived from structural environments and the conceptual content of roots.

Abdolmaleki is spoken by a tribe in coastal part of Miankaleh, Behshahr. This dialect is somewhat different from other Orami dialects, common in Kermanshah, due to remoteness from its origin, Horaman. In this study, after describing syllabic structure of Abdolmaleki dialect, some of its most important phonological processes in common words with standard Persian have been examined. After analyzing each process, specific rule is presented. Applying a descriptive-analytic method, the data is analyzed within generative phonology and optimality theory. Some of the results are: 1. The syllabic structure of Abdolmaleki dialect consists of eight syllables; 2. At the beginning of the syllable, there may be a consonant cluster; 3. Various phonological processes such as assimilation, dissimilation, deletion, insertion, weakening, and metathesis are active; 4. The sequence of two consonants / n / and / d / is not used in the speech; 5. In analyzing the metathesis process, three limitations of linearity, SCL, and SSP are involved; 6. In the weakening process, lazy restriction has priority over all restraints.

This study aims to investigate the polysemy of the Ilami Kurdish verbs “xesen” “to drop” and “kæften” “to fall” in light of cognitive semantics theory. Categorization, image, schema, and metaphor are used to analyze the polysemy of the verbs “xesen” and “kæften”. The data is collected from native speakers of Ilami Kurish through observation and interview. The findings show that the different meanings of the verb “xesen” and “kæften” have special semantic frames including “to fall”, “to decrease”, “to humiliate”, “to replace”, “to put” and “to throw”. The findings also depict the verb “kæften” is not used as the intransitive form of all meanings of the verb “xesen”. Based on Speakers’ attitude and by using their objective experiences, abstract concepts are conceptualized in containment schemas, path schemas, and force schemas. Path schemas have the highest frequency of occurrence according to the nature of the verbs “xesen” and “kæften”. Totally the findings confirm the systematization of the polysemy of the verb “xesen” and “kæften” in Ilami Kurdish in light of cognitive theory.

The present study aims to study the elements of the worlds of text in the story The ancient story or historical novel by Hedayat. This study was conducted using Text World Theory (1999) to identify the elements of the worlds of text based on three semantic layers of the discourse world, text world, and sub worlds. The results revealed that the writer has used the element of "time" to create suspension and narrates the story at different times so as to keep the audience in suspension, despite the fact that characters, places, and objects are completely clear and no suspension is observed; also demonstrated that role-advancing propositions used in the text world of this story are mainly descriptive since the writer must describe in order to induce the image and the addressee must illustrate for the purpose of communication. Also, in terms of the sub worlds, the locative hint is not so bold; instead, the writer focuses on the time. Findings showed that we can analyze hidden aspects and layers using the model of the worlds of a text.