نشریه پژوهش های زبان شناسی
سال سیزدهم شماره 2 (پیاپی 25، پاییز و زمستان 1400)

The existing studies have often examined concrete poems in terms of the relationship between verbal text and image or with respect to de-familiarization. This article assessed the evolution of the phenomenological and discursive semiospheres in a concrete poem entitled "The Train Moved Again" by Afshin Shahroudi. In the text, the relationship between verbal text and image was not fixed but "spectral". Due to the process of content level, this relationship showed a continuum in the form of discontinuity -balance-fusion at the level of expression. Sign levels also transform from an index to an icon and then to a symbol. The results showed that at the phenomenological level, the Enunciator tried to use the prelinguistic capacities of the verbal phonemes to motivate the discourse. The Enunciator attempted to influence the Enunciate through his sensory system. By responding to the enunciator's invitation by the enunciate, a discursive atmosphere was formed. It was a reciprocal movement and created the process. The phenomenal space of the text required the re-segmentation of the verbal and visual layers in another process. In the re-segmentation, an "evolutionary metaphor" was identified, according to which the relationship between verbal text and image was not fixed but "spectral" and a discontinuity-balance-fusion relationship was established.

Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) provides a workable mechanism, namely “interclausal relations hierarchy”, for the analysis of complex constructions. It is used as a general rule for interlinguistic studies. This hierarchy consists of "semantic continuum" and "syntactic continuum" and is based on iconicity, which means that constructions with high semantic correlations are expressed in the form of stronger syntactic relations and vice versa. In this hierarchy, causative constructions are also included, which were the focus of the present study. In this research, causative constructions were divided into 3 types: causative [type 1] or direct causatives, causative [type 2] or indirect causatives, and jussives. We first examined their syntactic semantic forms and interactions in causative constructions. The juncture-nexus relations and semantic hierarchy were discussed in the syntactic and semantic dimensions, respectively. The findings indicated that the direct causatives were in nuclear co-subordination relations, while the indirect causatives and jussives were in core co-subordination relations. We also proposed a constructional scheme for direct causation in Persian. The interaction of the two levels of syntax and semantics in causative constructions was also explained in the form of linking algorithms. Finally, it was found that Persian language acts in a way that it confirms the "interclausal relation hierarchy" and thus, its explanatory adequacy could be corroborated.

In addition to grammatical and intrinsic aspects, aspectual readings may also arise from other factors like tense. Past Participles (PP) consist of the root of the verb and the suffix “-de/-te”. The suffix represents the anterior tense, which is the common semantic-grammatical core function found in all paradigms containing PP. Historical studies, on the other hand, show that PPs are originally made up of transitive verbs and their function has been to remove the subject from the argument structure of the verb and serve as the foreground of the object instead. They are well-known as “sefat maf’uli” (lit. accusative adjectives) and this arises from the fact that they participate in passive constructions and merely refer to the object of the underlying transitive verbs in some of their functions. The omission of the subject has made the transitive verbs similar to un-accusative ones in terms of their argument structure. For this reason, in addition to transitive verbs, PPs are derived from un-accusative verbs and analogically from the un-ergative ones. Removing the subject has another consequence too: The interaction of the anterior tense and subject omission has subsequently created an aspectual interpretation called “established stative”. There are two reasons why we consider this aspectual concept to be the fruit of the aforementioned features: First, when the underlying verb represents an event, creating an established stative interpretation requires the event to have taken place and secondly, in the absence of the subject, the actionality of the event decreases and subsequently makes the underlying verb (of any kind) stative because there is no actor left to do an action. In this way, the impossibility of deriving PPs from the verbs with the intrinsic aspects of “permanent inherent state” and “point state” can also be explained.

In this paper, the formation processes of linguistic idioms were studied using social semiology framework, specifically, the semiotic approach of Theo Van Leeuween: “discourse as the recontextualisation of social practice”. This paper aimed to introduce linguistic idioms as the structures that make the speeches expansive and powerful. The main problem here was to deal with how the linguistic idioms, which were creative structures, were formed from real, common, and specified situations. To solve this problem, we considered 3 questions: 1) According to Van Leeuween approach, what kind of connection was there between social reality and linguistic idioms? 2) According to semiotic approach, which kind of discourses did the linguistic idioms originate from? 3) According to Deleauze’s approach, how did the interaction between verbal texts and linguistic idioms result in meaning formation? The hypotheses of this study were as follows: 1) It seemed that linguistic idioms were discourses, which were recontextualized through social realities; 2) The linguistic idioms were action-oriented discourses; 3) The meaning formation was done due to devaluation and valuation (value transfer), cognition change, and creation of semantic depth and volume. To evaluate these hypotheses, we studied 10 cases of the most widely used Persian linguistic idioms. The results showed that the first and second hypotheses were confirmed partially and the third one was corroborated completely. One of the main achievements of this research was introducing the linguistic idioms as enunciative practices, which originated from discourses related to social practices and that they had rhizomatic function, network function, and puzzle function.

The current paper aims at investigating the strategies of spatial production and representation in the Yārsān religion by focusing on a sacred scripture entitled bārga bārga. To this purpose, firstly the strategies employed for locating a referent in the text are explained according to space grammar as proposed by Levinson (2004). Then, we try to study the strategies of spatial production and representation in the text by applying the geocriticism approach (Westphal 2011). The results show that the text mainly employs three strategies of topology, deixis and motion to specify the location of a referent. In addition, the results demonstrate that the spatial ideas in the text are mainly based on two macro-metaphorical models (Caravan and dyeing). These models make a unified spatial-temporal complex in such a way that any spatial idea associates a temporal epoch (the principle of spatiotemporality). Additionally, the study indicates that the text, by using some strategies, challenges the established and formal spatial boundaries and reconstructs them in a new order to support its ideological intentions. Furthermore, this sacred scripture tries to deconstruct the strict boundary between the real and the fictive (referentiality principle) and also it employs divergent and numerous placenames in an innovative way in order to express its ideological and theological messages. Finally, it should be noted that these strategies are employed to present a new spiritual spatial ideology in the text.

This paper examined the constraints on tri-syllabic loanwords in Persian, which contained three-consonant sequences in the underlying representation, within an optimality-theoretic account. Pulgram and Mich (1965:76) called a series of consonants as cluster occurring in the same syllable, and as sequence appearing in two consecutive syllables. Most of three-consonant sequences are the result of a complex onset placed word-medially in the second or third syllable and the consonants are put in the coda position of the preceding syllable. Having analyzed 9725 simple tri-syllabic words in Persian, a total of 36 words with three consonant sequences in the syllable boundaries were extracted. The results showed that they were all loanwords, except for three of them originating from Old Persian with no usage in contemporary Persian. In Persian, consonant clusters are avoided in onset position; consequently, three consonant sequences of a complex onset origin, when introduced into Persian, are adapted to fit the syllable structure of the target language and undergo re-syllabification. Re-syllabification occurs either with or without a vowel epenthesis and the processes all conspire to avoid a complex onset. Moreover, it is argued that in all these sequences, re-syllabification is subject to meeting the sonority at the syllable boundary and is explained by Gouskova’s (2001) proposal as the effect of the Syllable Contact Law (SCL), i.e., the preference for sonority to fall across a syllable boundary (Murray and Vennemann, 1983).

Morphologic adverbs can be syntactically and semantically defined and classified in different ways. They have basically attributive functions. Having various meanings, their structural functions might be expressed via adverbial phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and adverbial clauses. In Persian, noun phrases or prepositional phrases, in most cases, perform this adverbial function. These phrases can have various dependents, including “clauses” starting with nominal or prepositional heads, such as “vaqt.ike” (the time that/when), “jā.ike” (the place that/where), “be mahz.e in ke” (in the instant that/as soon as), “darhāl.ike” (in the state that/whereas), "be xāter.e in ke" (for the reason that/because), “hamchenānke” (the same that/as), and “be goone.ike” (in the manner that). These phrases are usually regarded as “complex conjunctions”, “complex coordinators”, or "complex subordinators” in the grammar books and many other resources. Accordingly, relative or complement clauses inside noun phrases and prepositional phrases are considered to be adverb clauses. However, they are structurally part of noun phrases or prepositional phrases with an adverbial function. Therefore, such a construction cannot be regarded as a complex sentence. Anyway, we call them “strategies of constructing pseudo-complex clauses” when distinguishing between these cases and relativization in the subject and object. In this descriptive research, the adverbial concepts were classified into 19 groups (10 main groups and 9 subgroups). It seemed that there was also a direct relation between the overt expressions of “ke” (that) and the possibility of clause dislocation. Moreover, as the various examples showed, an “infinitive” in Persian could be a “deranked verb” though it was a noun without morphosyntactic properties of a verb. The research data were extracted from 3000 minutes of various television and radio programs of the Iranian National Media in the period of June 2021 to February 2022 with a focus on adverb clauses.

In this study, 7 kinds of Persian analogical sound changes have been detected and classified in 12 analogical patterns in a set of 80 simple verbs. Those changes then have been analyzed based on two different but related optimality theoretic approaches including constraints reranking and input restructuring. It is shown that the analogical changes have basically occurred in the past stems and in a proportional inter-paradigmatic or intra-paradigmatic leveling pattern which is based on present stems. The phonetic similarity between the present stems, is the prerequisite of the analogy and achieving similarity in the past stems. Both kinds of the analogical sound changes are explainable through IDENT-INPUTOUTPUT constraints being dominated by parochial IDENT-OUTPUTOUTPUT ones in the former approach, and relying on Lexical Optimization concept in the latter.

Within the non-lexicalist framework of Distributed Morphology (DM), proposed in the early 1990’s by Halle and Marantz, there is no pre-syntactic generative lexicon in which words are derived and all morphosyntactic elements are subject to competition for Vocabulary Item insertion in the head of functional projections. Based on this formal approach to grammar, the present study investigates the perfect construction and past participle ending in Persian, without resorting to their semantic properties. The past participle ending usually called “-en” since the earliest generative work, is one of the most pervasive functional elements in Persian. The study explores the nature of participle inflection and perfect constructions in two successive parts. From an empirical perspective and beyond the purely theoretical assumptions, in the first part arguments drawn from language data are used to show that “De” realized as “de” or “te” at PF, is the underlying form of perfect suffix and it never appears with subjunctive verbs in past tense. Second, past perfect subjunctive clauses are not found in Persian, although “-en” suffix has a widespread distribution in this language. The second part discusses some views on syntactic word formation of present perfect verbs, by focusing on the assumptions being made within the framework of DM. Such a strategy, it is suggested, can be generalized to all cases of perfect constructions with some subtle differences in post-syntactic operations. Meanwhile, it will be argued that perfect suffix is inserted in the head of Particle Phrase licensed by Aspect Phrase.

Much of the literature about Persian ‘compound verbs’ has been concerned with their ‘true’ instances. About four centuries after identification of this construction, however, there is yet little agreement on any single definition or conception of it among scholars. The present article aimed to show that this controversy was primarily a matter of terminology rather than conceptology. To this end, after reviewing major authors’ views on so-called "compound verbs", we examined various kinds of constructions involved according to linguists’ received definitions of the two concepts of ‘verb’ and ‘compound’. It turned out that i) there was no good reason for regarding ‘compound verbs’ as verbs and ii) being separable strings, they could hardly be considered as proper morphological “compounds”. We then suggested that all these kinds of constructions could well be subsumed under the rubric ‘complex predicates’ (whether semantic or grammatical), thus making it more likely to reach a consensus on the issue. 

The commonalities of meta-analytical literature on “compound verbs” in Persian can be summarized as follows:Taking for granted the existence of ‘compound verbs’
Examining and evaluating the current definitions of ‘compound verbs’ according to their own conceptions
Endorsing one or more previous opinions (with some minor modifications) without dealing with the nature of disagreement among scholars in recognizing the instances of ‘compound verbs’.

The variety of strings referred to as “compound verbs” covers a vast range. Having reviewed and compared representative opinions of authors and their definitions of these strings, we can sum up their viewpoints as follows:Incorporational verbs (like γazāxordan ‘to eat food’, lit. ‘food eat’) and verbal phrases (like azdastdādan ‘to lose’, lit. ‘from hand give’) were regarded as ‘compound verbs’ only by Dabir-Moghaddam, and experiencer-subject LVCs[1] (like dard-am gereft ‘it pained me’, lit. ‘to me pain took’) only by Khanlari.
Dabir-Moghaddam and Abolghassemi considered (some of) the auxiliary verb constructions (present perfect, past perfect, and passive) to be ‘compound verbs’.
Khayyampour and Dabir-Moghaddam regarded prefixed verbs (like bar-dāštan ‘pick up’) as ‘compound verbs’.
Vahidian did not believe in ‘compound verbs’ to exist in Persian at all.

Looking at the above-mentioned definitions by the authors, it was noted that their conceptions of ‘compound’ simply meant an expression that was not simple, i.e., not having more than one element, which is usually called ‘complex’ (as opposed to ‘simplex’) in English. A ‘complex verb’ is a verb with more than one element. The additional elements could be the result of various kinds of affixation (including personal endings or other inflectional or derivational affixes) or compounding. A proper ‘compound verb’, however, is a verb that is formed specifically through the morphological process of compounding, in which two lexical items (typically verbal roots) join together to form a lexeme.
Therefore, if by ‘compound’ we mean ‘complex’, i.e. by ‘compound’ consisting of two or more elements, then, a ‘compound verb’ would be certainly complex. Terminologically speaking, however, morphological criteria like inextensibility could not be excluded from compounds, including alleged ‘compound verbs’, which do not meet such criteria. For example, although kār(hā) kard ‘(s)he did thing(s)’, lit. ‘work(s) did’ despite its extensibility, is undoubtedly complex, to regard it as a morphological compound requires us to revise the concept of ‘compound’.
As for ‘verbness’ of a ‘compound verb’, given the linguists’ received definition of a verb, according to which ‘verb’ is the locus of indicating tense and often aspect, mood, and agreement, ‘verbness’ of so-called ‘compound verb’ was highly arguable because most of them were split by inflectional affixes intervening their two components. Thus, before referring to any of these strings as a ‘verb’, we needed to make clear in which sense their preverbal elements were parts of the verb.
It seemed that what the authors, such as Khanlari and Dabir-Moghaddam, meant by ‘verb’ in a ‘compound verb’ was a ‘predicate’ rather than a verb as such. This terminological confusion was rooted in the term ‘predicate’ having at least the following two senses:In semantics and formal logic, it is an element of a proposition, which express some property of, or relation between, argument(s). This kind of predicate can be called ‘semantic predicate’.
In traditional grammar, it is a part of a proposition, which does not include the ‘subject’. This type of predicate we can refer to as ‘grammatical predicate’.
Based on what we said about the terms ‘verb’ and ‘predicate’, it should be clear that what was referred to as ‘compound verbs’ in the literature was in fact a (semantic) complex predicates of the clauses involved. Thus, regarding them as ‘verbs’ as mentioned was a result of i) a confusion between the terms ‘verb’ and ‘predicate’ and ii) the fact that (semantic) predicates are typically verbs, while the verbs often consist of predicates of the sentences, in which they occurr.
To conclude, different kinds of strings, only a few of which were considered ‘compound verbs’ by some authors (and for which we questioned this designation), could well be included under rubric ‘complex predicates’ in spite of their structural variety.