مجله جستار های زبانی
سال سیزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 68، خرداد و تیر 1401)

The main question of the present study is that of psycholinguistic reality of Relative Tense in Persian; How Persian tenses are processed? Cross modal lexical decision tasks applied by dmdx software program have been used here to examine relative tense processing during sentence processing. Theoretical framework used here is that of Comrie (1985) linguistically and Shapiro (1990) psycholinguistically. Independent variable is the type of tense used in the verb form and the dependent variable is subjectsˈ reaction times to visual stimuli. 25 university students aged 18-30 participated in experiments who were divided into two groups; male and female participants. The results of the first experiment showed that sentences containing non-finite relative tense verbs, are processed later than the other tenses (present perfect, past perfect, and subjunctives). The explanation is to be found in the un-markedness of non-finites (lacking mood, tense, number). The results of the second experiment also showed that converting simple sentences to the complex ones will erase the meaningful differences in the participantsˈ reaction times.  This shows that the independent variable of sentence type is much more effective on cognitive load than tense type. In these two experiments the gender of the participants is not effective. The findings can be used in curriculum design for non-natives of Persians as it shows the cognitive load of relative tenses across memory.

The aim of this study is to analyze the role of phonological opacity in the phonetic representation of the prefix of progressive aspect in Kermanshahi Persian. In this dialect, when the progressive prefix /mi-/ is added to the verb stem, it changes in form in certain cases, depending on the nature of the first vowel of the verb. In Kermanshahi Persian, the progressive prefix is added to the left side of verbal root - which is, in turn, followed by verbal ending. This research is based on the Optimality Theory-Candidate Chains (McCarthy, 2007) - a version of Serial Optimality Theory. The data of this research have been collected through the conversations with the speakers of Kermanshahi Persian dialect in two age groups of over fifty- and under twenty-year-olds, relying – as well - on researchers' language intuition. The results of this study indicate that what causes the opacity in the phonetic representation of the vowel of progressive prefix in Kermanshahi Persian dialect is the occurrence of counter-bleeding interaction. The Serial Optimality Theory, is more successful in explaining this phenomenon than Parallel Optimality Theory.

In this article, word order in syntactic structures of the mixed Turkish-Persian language of Baft was studied through the 24 correlation pairs of Dryer (1992, 2009 & 2013) to determine the typology of this language compared to Europe-Asia and world genera. Other purposes of this research were to study the efficiency of Head-Dependent Theory, Branching Direction Theory and Cross-Category Harmony Principle to investigate whether they can explain the typological behavior of this language. The findings showed that this mixed Turkish-Persian language compared to Europe-Asia languages had 16 elements of strong object-verb languages (verb follows object) and 15 elements of verb-object languages (verb precedes object). This language in comparison with world languages also had 15 elements of strong OV languages and 14 elements of strong VO languages. These results prove that this language variety compared to Europe-Asia and world languages corresponds with OV genera. Having the elements of strong VO languages compared to Europe-Asia and world languages indicates that this variety is moving toward the strong VO languages and typologically is not a consistent OV or VO language, but a mixed one and this property is for a broad bilingual social environment. Moreover, the evidence of this language showed that Head-Dependent Theory, Branching Direction Theory and Cross-Category Harmony Principle cannot explain the typological word order behavior of this mixed Turkish-Persian language.

Voicing is one of the most important phonological features in distinguishing consonants in many languages. In this study, we investigated the temporal parameters such as constriction duration, voice duration, and vowel duration in stop and fricative consonants of Azeri Turkish language in intervocalic position (VCV). The main purpose of this study is to study stop and fricative consonants in Tabrizi dialect. An attempt was made to answer the question of how the voicing of stop and fricative consonants of Turkish language affects the temporal parameters. Twelve selected words of Turkish common words were repeated by fourteen Tabrizi speakers. They were produced three times in citation form. The results showed that temporal parameters are considered as potential cues in distinguishing voiced and voiceless Turkish consonants. The results related to stop consonants also showed that only voice duration and vowel duration were effective in the voicing contrast. The results for the closure duration confirmed that there is no significant difference between voiced and voiceless stops and this cue can not be used as a distinguishing cue to voicing in Azeri Turkish stops.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the syntactic merging process of the middle constructions in Persian within the minimalist framework proposed by Bowers (2010, 2018). Within this framework, Bowers analyzed the merging of active, middle and passive sentences based on the two categories of 'Predication' and 'Transitivity'. It is worth mentioning that in his latest works, Bowers (2010, 2018) has replaced the transitive phrase (TrP) by 'voice' with its core features intact. The voice category used in Bowers (2010) is a generalization of the transitivity category previously proposed by Bowers (2002). In general, this category enters into a "matching relationship" with objects. Bowers (2018) in his approach calls this node a role of "transitive voice" which is represented as (Vtr). In fact, Bowers goes back from a more general interpretation of this node to a more detailed one. These changes are merely in the name of syntactic nodes and have no effect on the syntactic properties of transitive nodes, because it is evident that Bowers still knows transitive active constructions, middles and passives, including the transitivity category, and unergative and unaccusative constructions without this category

This paper aims to investigate postposing in Modern spoken Persian. Persian is a verb-final language; however, some constituents frequently follow the verb and appear in the post - verbal domain. Among the factors motivating this phenomenon, one of them is grammatical weight. The universal tendency proposed by typologists is the “short-before-long principle”; locating the heavy constituents after the light ones in order to ease the process of production and comprehension. Some studies advocate the position of long constituents before short ones in verb-final languages like Japanese and Korean. Based on the Persian spoken corpus, this research analyzes the postposed constituents according to their grammatical weight. It is observed that the heavier constituents are postposed more easily compared with the light ones; supporting the universal trend of placing heavy constituents after the light ones.

One of the fields that has been influenced by the linguistic methodology, and the results of the researches in the interdisciplinary fileds of psycholinguistics and clinical linguistics is the study of speech disorders, like stuttering. Stuttering is a speech disorder characterized by repetition of sounds, syllables, or words; prolongation of sounds; and interruptions in speech known as blocks. An individual who stutters exactly knows what he or she would like to say, but has trouble producing a normal flow of speech. In recent years many studies have examined whether there is a relationship between stuttering and linguistic features of the speech of those who stutter. This study is focused on the lexical domain, namely the lexical density, and lexical diversity that can be considered as the lexical richness. Lexical diversity is usually defined as the range and variety of vocabulary in a language sample. Lexical density provides a measure of the proportion of lexical items (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives and some adverbs) and function words in a language sample. Therefore, this study is aimed at comparing the lexical density and diversity in the narrations of children who stutter (CWS) (aged between 4 to 8 years), and children who do not stutter (CWNS) in the control group. Therefore, it investigates whether children who stutter have limited verbal skills compared to children who do not stutter. Since some theories claim that CWS have poorer language skills, comparing their linguistic performance in different domains to their fluent peers can contribute to the studies in this field through shedding light on the weak and strong points of these children’s language abilities. The sample consists of the narrations of 14 children who stutter (CWS) classified into two age groups: (4-6 and 6-8), and 14 age-matched children who do not stutter (CWNS) as the control group selected through convenience sampling method. They have been asked to narrate a wordless picture book, “Frog where are you?” (Meyer, 1969), and their narrations have been analyzed, and compared according to the lexical density and diversity between children who stutter, and the children in the control group, and also between the two age groups. The percentage of the use of different words in different grammatical classes, i.e. noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and different function words in their narrations was also compared between the groups. Lexical diversity was analyzed through computing MSTTR (Mean Segmental Type-Token Ratio) by Word Smith 6. To measure lexical density, Lexical and functional words in the children’s narrations were counted, and classified. The results were compared between the experimental group and control group in different age groups. SPSS 21 was used to test the significance of the differences observed between the groups. The results revealed that CWNS demonstrated more lexical diversity compared to CWS, but the difference was not significant. CWS used more content words and less function words than CWNS in their narrations and the difference is statistically significant. Comparing different grammatical classes showed that CWS narrations contained more nouns than CWNS narrations, whereas CWNS have used more verbs, adjectives and adverbs. However, the difference in the percentage of adverb usage was the only statistically significant item.

The present sturdy studies the semantic function negative prefixes »na « and »bi « in Persian. The founder of this approach using six semantic features, studies semantic function of morphological items, including affixes and their function in the processes of compounding, derivation and conversion. In the present research, data which is collected from the second version of" Hamshahri" corpus and polysemy of prefixes »na «and »bi «has been studied according to the type and meaning of stem. analyzing data suggests that different meanings of prefix » na «are due to co- indexing principle. This principle, can't explain the negative meaning in some cases and for the elaboration of negative meaning in these cases we need to put away the principle and pay attention to semantic features of stem; although this issue is not correct about prefix »bi «and we can explain all negative meanings conveyed by this affix. Also, it was shown that negative prefixes  »bi « and  »na « are adjective maker; except, in some small amount of cases.

A borderline intelligence student is the one with basic capability for literacy but of a lower rate and depth in learning compared to their peers. Such students have many difficulties in learning the language, reading and writing. The main purpose of this study is to provide a new solution based on linguistic and psycholinguistic theories to increase the development of language recognition in these children. The technique of total image words was used in an innovative method to manipulate all the senses of the child in his learning. The data of this research have been collected in a field and case study. The case is a 13-year-old borderline intelligence girl living in Mashhad. The suggested training program in this research consists of four stages. The first step is to work on reading by using flashcards of total image words and using the child’s visual and auditory senses. The second step is to emphasize the meaning and semantic chain of the words. In the third stage, we try to strengthen the child’s comprehension with short stories, and in the fourth stage, which is the practical stage, the child acquires the ability to make meaningful sentences and short stories. The test of language development (TOLD 3) was used for pre- and post-tests. The results show that the total image word technique has a positive effect on the language cognitive development of the borderline intelligence student and except in sentence imitation, all other subtests show an improvement of 18 to 66 per cent.

Political apologies, are among special type of apologies, which the politicians state to protect their own faces and to fulfill the communal need. But apologizing has its own strategies. Kempf (2009) introduces some verbal strategies such as Using lexical and syntactical means, omitting or blurring the gent, denying responsibility, selecting a specific victim, undermining the existence of the victim, and apology for a component of the offense (and not for the entire occurrence), etc. by the use of which the politicians avoid sincere apologies. Through Investigation of 100 utterances of apologies by politicians as broadcasted in the national and local media, the present article claims that these apologies are insincere. The results indicate that these insincerities have their roots in the Iranian cultural Memes of collectivism, overstating and truth avoiding.

this paper aims at an examination of Alireza Rowshan's poems based on the Conceptual Blending Theory put forth by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), investigating their semantics structure by drawing on the conceptual means the theory provides, and thus classifying his poems into a couple of stylistic categories. This is conducted through a qualitative research method, in a descriptive and analytic manner, so that, first, four select typical poems are explored throughout using the conceptual means provided by the Blending Theory, such as integration networks, blends, vital relations and so on, and, then, the resultant outcomes get extrapolated statistically into the rest of the poems contained within two of his most famous collections. In the process, according to the application of the foregoing conceptual means, Rowshan's poems turn out to be clearly and systematically classified into four major groups in terms of their semantic structure, while the details of each of these semantic structures are formulated through the conceptual means of the foresaid theory. What comes about through this analysis reveals that, by applying the newly emerging linguistic theories to the analysis of literary works, it is possible to enhance the conducted analyses in precision and order, thus advancing literary criticism one step further.

The process of Reduplication, due to its importance, has attracted very much attention from linguists in recent decades The present research aims at describing and analyzing total reduplication processes including added medial and final total reduplication and echo reduplication (changing the initial consonant or vowel of reduplicant) in Ghayeni dialect based on Parallel Optimality Theory (POT), in particular Stratal Optimality Theory (SOT). To this end, the considered reduplicative data were gathered based on Shaghaghi reduplication model (2000, 2018). To analyze some data, we need to predict the correct output through some levels to consider the morphological derivation correctly. Since POT has a one-level (input and output) nature, it is unable to explain some reduplicative data. So, SOT, with no limit on the number and kinds of levels, is used to analyze the medial and final added total reduplication. In the present study, the final added total reduplication is considered in two stem levels in which ONSET is on the top of constraint ranking. Since the final consonant of the base undergoes germination, in the medial added total reduplication using enclitic /o/, two levels of stem and word are required. In the medial added total reduplication, the constraint ranking is only different in stem level (a) because the type of reduplicant (echo or non-echo) is determined in this level. But in the next levels, stem level (b) and word level, which undergoes germination and resyllabification, constraints have the same ranking. The results show that SOT presents a more obvious analysis of the mid-levels in the medial and final added total reduplication.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of the addressee’s power and gender on the choice of the type and number of encouragement strategies employed by Persian male and female university students based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory. A number of 60 M.A. students (30 males and 30 females) from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan participated in this study. Discourse completion test and role play technique were utilized as two data gathering instruments. The data were analyzed using the Chi-square and Independent-T test (p<.05). The results indicated there was a significant relationship between the addressee’s power and the type as well as the number of encouragement strategies employed by male and female university students. The most frequent strategy type was the “negative politeness” giving deference for the addressee with higher power (the professor). As to the number of strategies, the most and less frequent ones were the combination of two and nine strategies, respectively. The addressee’s gender had an effect on the type of the strategies used by male students in three situations; while it didn’t have any effect on the number of strategies used by male students and also on the type and number of strategies employed by female students. The most frequent strategy type used by female students was the “positive politeness” and the combination of three strategies for male and female addressees; by male students: “positive politeness” for male addressees and “negative politeness” and the combination of two strategies for female addressees.

Loan words, as one of the consequences of language contacts, can be widely used by native language speakers. The expansion of loanwords varies depending on many linguistic and non-linguistic factors. The present study, based on a descriptive-analytical method, aims to investigate the usage of loanwords in spoken Persian from three different perspectives: semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics. For this purpose, 600 minutes of spoken Persian corpus of Al-Zahra University, including 14000 sentences in Persian for 100 different situations and subjects, used by 240 female speakers and 80 male speakers, have been extracted and studied according to loanwords’ “semantic fields”, “abstraction and non-abstraction”, and “usage frequency” as well as two sociolinguistics variables (“motivation” and “gender” of the speakers). The results of comparing the variety of loanwords and their usage frequency in different semantic fields show that the highest frequency of use belongs to the semantic fields of basic actions and technology, language and speech, and social and political relations. Moreover, research data indicate that loanwords are more related to abstract concepts and phenomena comparing to concrete ones. The research results, from the sociolinguistic view, also reveal that more women than men use loanwords with a common Persian equivalent. “Filling communication gaps in recipient language” and “social, cultural, political and scientific credibility of donor language” are the most important motivations for Persian speakers to use loanwords in their speech.

Frequency of compression process in Bybee Approach plays a vital role between different characters in dialogues of Persian films. In various historical periods, considering her social status, “woman” less likely has used non-standard Persian language compared to “man”. The main issue of this study is about the frequency of compression process in Bybee approach between two male and female sexes in Persian Movies. Which one of Persian language’s elements has been shown more in studied movies in opinion of Bybee? How the language can challenge the system of feminine and masculine relationships in performances? What is the cultural function of identity in this field? This study was conducted to analyze the phonology of phonetic changes caused by compression in Persian language within two different cultural and social fields. Such differentiation is well revealed in dialogues of movies associated with abovementioned historical periods. In fact, this study indicates that compression has a cultural origin as a social issue and such cultural origin that indicates itself in linguistic or discursive styles of individuals with different social classes. Moreover, study of compressed forms is not just limited to making decision about summarization so that the differences between compressed forms are not just structurally a morphological phenomenon; sometimes, it depends on some functional and social considerations such as gender type.

Researchers have variously investigated Persian in generative, functional, and cognitive frameworks, although, failed to account for some structural changes and the emergence of marked structures such as Left dislocation. The main goal of this article is to investigate left dislocation baded on Optimality Theory. The present research is based on the descriptive-analytical method, and our corpus will include spoken Persian. The present paper aims to show that some constraints can be applied to form left dislocation in Persian, while ranking of the constraints represent the optimal form/forms. The constriants are based on constructional uints of Featurs and Conceptual Units which are properties of grammatical categories such as argument, or discourse-functioal ones, such as topic. The results show that applyind the constraints of precedence, adjacency, and faithfulness on one side, and more features or conceptual units on the other side, the applied theory can bring more appropriate concequenses analyzing the cases of Persian. In other words, Syntax First Alignment has proved to be a promising framework for modeling Persian Left dislocation and can offer an alternative for syntactic frameworks based on hierarchical structure. The results, also, indicates that the features of [NEW], [ABOUT], and [CONTRAST] have key roles in Persisn Argument Left Dislocation. In addition, violating the constraints of Subject and Topic brings about unoptimality.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the procedures of persuasion of judges by lawyers in the Iranian criminal and legal courts based on the critical discourse analysis approach. The methodological nature of this research is descriptive-analytic and the authors have collected the data by referring to courts, Tehran courts, and lawyers' offices, by studying hundreds of cases and observing dozens of interrogations in 1397, then analyzed 50 excerpts of conversations of participants (10 cases) based on Laclau and Mouffe's approach (1985,2001,2002). The main features of this approach are: signifier and signified, restlessness, antithesis, hegemony and fixation of meaning, power, myth and social imagination and metaphor, subject position and political subjectivity. According to the discourse of lawyers, it can be said that they use from the establishment of the semantic system of discourse including such words as client release, mitigation of punishment, proving the guilt of the accused, and seeking punishment for the accused, each of which establishes its own signifier with specific concepts, as influential cognitive and behavioral factors for persuasion. The main question of the present study is how the concept of persuasion is reflected in the conversations of lawyers in court discourse. The results showed that lawyers express their client's strengths and rival's weaknesses using backgrounding and foregrounding. So, in order to persuade judges to defend their client, lawyers use backgrounding to express rival’s weakness with the negative bias, and also they use foregrounding to provide theirs clients strengths with the positive bias.

The present research aims to investigate the place of noun in Persian language based on cognitive approach under framework of Lanckager’s cognitive grammar (2008). To achieve this goal, authors have selected 150 Persian simple nouns from Sokhan Dictionary (1382) accidentally. The method of the present research is descriptive-analytic and data collecting is based on library studies.  After the study of collected data of research, authors concluded that in Persian language, the discussion on being countable or non-countable of noun doesn’t make much sense and unlike cognitive approach mass nouns are the same as countable nouns, which receive plural –s morpheme and together with proper nouns, they constitute a different class of nouns. Also in Persian language as well as cognitive approach, pronouns can replace nouns.

Three types of meaning i.e., propositional (conceptual), textual and interpersonal were acknowledged for language in the tradition of functional studies. In light of such appraoch, this study aims 1) to describe different types of meanings of in (this) and ân (that) in Persian and, 2) to show that how basics of grammaticalization can be applied to provide a synchronic survey of the semantic variety of the aforementioned dectic expressions as discourse markers in Persian. Based on Traugott & Dasher (2002), this paper examines the different uses of these elements by looking at their propositional (conceptual), textual and interpersonal meanings. The analysis indicates that in & ân are used in their propostional meaning and also used in the bridging contexts. Moreover, the investigation shows unlike ân, the semantic changes of in extends beyond the bridging contexts. So in (this) as a discourse marker, textually has a function in changing the topical trends and creating a pause to formulate the upcoming discourse. It is subjectively used to designate and emphasize the upcoming discourse and to create a contrast and inter-subjectively functions in speech acts such as requesting, asking and advising. Grammaticalization of the deictic expressions supports Traugott & Dasherchr('39')s clines. However, Traugott & Dasherchr('39')s semantic cline, should be modified in way of impersonal subjective > personal subjective > inter-subjective. In sum, using a descriptive-analytical methodology, it indicated that these elements have different uses which grammaticalization (Traugott and Dashar, 2002) provides a solid theoretical framework to describe and study these expressions in Persian.

The matters in spoken morphology and speech processing can explain by acoustic evidences. The morphological complexity and diversity in this area can describe by acoustics features. The present study by Persian prefixes derivational words investigate the degree of parsability in process, understand and receive the meaning indicate by the acoustic evidences. For this reason, the derived words of the «nɑ», «ham», «farɑ» prefixes and their bases extracted from the Institute of Humanities and in the Complexity-Based Ordering framework (Hay and Plag 2004) the parsable and non-parsable words of each prefix determined by scatter plot and the trend line. From each prefix two parsable and non-parsable derived words chose and put them in carrier sentences. Then, the acoustic features such as duration, pitch, formants, intensity, duration of maximum intensity and clarity of transition point survey by using 72 sentences and 3 Persian language speakers. The results show that relative duration of parsable words is more than non-parsable words. The degree of co-articulation in pitch frequency, first, second and third formant frequency of non-parsable words in transition points of affix and base and in statical position of affix is more than parsable words because of incorporation and without potential pauses. In non-parsable words the relative maximum duration of intensity is more and the process of it is more smooth. So, the lesser co-articulations in parsable words cause the clarity of formants in transition points is more than non-parsable words in spectrum.

This research aims at studying the conceptualizations and linguistic encodings of smell sense in Persian and Russian from Cultural-Cognitive Linguistics point of view, using Sharifian’s (2017) and Kövecses’ (2018) frameworks. Research data have been gathered through the internet from different weblogs and sites, but for extracting the synonyms and collocations of the word “smell”, dictionaries of these languages have been used too. The results show that in both languages the smell sense is applied both as the source and target domain in metaphors and both the higher and lower senses are used as the source domain in their synesthetic constructions. Two macro-metaphors , GOOD IS SMELLY and BAD IS SMELLY can be seen in both languages. "Suspecting, finding out/knowing, vanishing, filling, representing(something) and getting into trouble/occurring a difficulty are some of shared conceptualizations in these two languages. Apart from conceptualisations, some similarities and differences can be seen in the linguistic encodings in these two languages. Similarities confirm Kövecses (2010) in his belief that some conceptual metaphors in the sensory domain of languages are nearly universal because of the common experiences of all human beings. Differences reflect the Sharifian’s idea (2017) that says the origin of concetualisations is cultural cognition which is not totally the same, because of the asymmetric distribution, even in one community.