نشریه علم زبان
پیاپی 14 (پاییز و زمستان 1400)

With the spread of coronavirus in Iran, the government cancelled public events and declared the necessity of closing crowded centers, including religious places. Following this announcement, some people in Mashhad and Qom protested by entering the holy shrines. These actions were quickly reflected in cyberspace. On twitter- a social networking Web site- which is possible for the users to debate, A group of users considered the opposition to health orders contrary to religious law. Another group contrasted religion with science. The present study aims to study these debates and the main question is that what strategies each group used to express its beliefs and viewpoints? For this purpose, 170 Persian tweets containing the keywords "religion" and "corona" were selected and examined using the Van Dijk Model. Data analysis showed that the most common linguistic tools used by users to represent their beliefs and ideologies are the two strategies of "distancing" and "cursing". Since the role and the influence of social networks, e.g., Twitter, are undeniable and tweets can shape social actions, the conflict observed in this space can also extend to the community and cause tensions. The results of this study and doing similar studies can help to identify the cause of these conflicts and provide the basis for empathy and the possibility of beneficial dialogue between different ideologies and thus ensure social stability.

Rudaki is one of the poets whose poetry collection has not been found and the The present paper has been written to examine the jokes about the outbreak of Covid-19 which have been circulated in the social media. Linguistic and discoursal analysis of these types of jokes which are sociolinguistically called "disaster jokes", could contribute to elaborating different aspects of this social phenomenon as a means to show the public culture in the socio-cultural framework of the society. The data of the present paper includes over 100 Covid-19 related jokes which have been collected from the virtual networks and some applications such as telegram and whatsapp within 90days from February to May 2020 made and circulated in Iran. The present data in this paper have been analysed and examined based on general theory of verbal humour and xi2 test. Having examined the existing data in this paper, the authors found a meaningful relationship between "Logical Mechanism" and "Script Opposition" as two main knowledge sources. Furthermore, examining the present data depicts that the political, religion, critical and sexual issues have been linked to these jokes to form humour and irony; accordingly, these jokes can be classified under political, religious, sexual, ethic and neutral categories. In addition, a meaningful relationship between these jokes and script opposition can be taken into consideration.

Conceptual metaphors play a pivotal role in understanding different aspects of life. One of these aspects is illness which remained a rich area of investigation in Persian. Current study took a cognitive-corpus approach and adopted the conceptual metaphor model (Lakoff & Johnson,1980; Kövecses, 2005) to examine Corona-related metaphors. The case studies comprised Persian press reports describing Corona-related news taken from newspaper websites over the period spanning almost the three months since the first Corona Virus case was reported in Iran. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were done examining the frequency and metaphoric statements related to COVID-19. 176 metaphoric statements with 8 main mappings (war, human, journey, natural force, wild animal, game, tool, and fire) were identified. The findings showed that “war metaphor” is the most frequent one with almost 60 percent of all metaphor occurrences. The results of the study also verified the direct connection between culture and illness metaphors.

Coronavirus pandemic caused changes in the daily lifestyle, such as reducing social interactions and creating social distancing. In this research, we pursue two goals. One is algorithmic content analysis of comments/posts in Persian related to the Coronavirus on two social media, namely Tweeter and Instagram. To this end, topic modeling is used as a method for content analysis to cluster the data into abstract topics. The other goal is finding the correlation between topics and hashtags in the comments/posts. To this end, we developed a corpus from these two social media. We found 24 abstract topics by algorithmic content analysis of this corpus and they were manually labeled to be comprehensive. According to the corpus and the statistical information of the extracted topics, it can be speculated that about 25% of the comments/posts in this corpus focused on political and social issues of the virus. 10 fine-grained topics which contained 35% of the comments were related to the Coronavirus itself and its pandemic property. This indicates the importance of the attention that has been paid to social media for informing and disseminating information. Furthermore, the hypothesis of existing correlation between topics and hashtags was studied from statistical point of view by using the Pearson correlation coefficient. For 20 topics, a high correlation score between topics and hashtags was found; but this correlation was not found for 4 topics. The outcome of this research can be used to increase the internal coherence of a text and to make the hashtags predictable.

The present study analyzed and described the process of coining new words and terms related to the Corona disease, which has recently been faced by the international community. Official news agencies and websites in both Persian and English languages, such as IRNA, ISNA, Khabar Online, BBC and CNN, were the most important sources of data collection. In addition, some online dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster, Oxford, Longman, Cambridge and Urban were used. The factors of age, gender and level of education were not considered in the present study, and the research method was descriptive-analytical as well. Word-formation processes for the research data, which consisted of 152 words and terms, included derivation, compounding, compounding and derivation, coinage, abbreviation, shortening, acronym, blending, and borrowing. Then the coined phrases (syntactic groups) were classified into two types of noun and adjective. The findings showed that the formation of syntactic groups with 72% and the process of blending with 33% had the highest percentage of occurrence in Persian and English, respectively. The results of the present study can help linguists in measuring the generativity of word-formation processes in the face of natural events and, subsequently, social changes.

semantically, discovering the relationship of some verbal metaphors with the intended message is out of reach of the audience, in which case the presence of visual metaphor to reinforce the message will be necessary. This cognitive phenomenon is called multidimensional metaphor. The emergence and spread of corona as an emerging phenomenon has led some magazines and websites to use cartoons made of multifaceted metaphors to convey corona messages. The message in such cartoons is produced through two visual and verbal cognitive expressions; therefore, it is necessary to discover the interaction of both dimensions. In the present study, based on the descriptive-analytical method and based on Forsville (1994) theory, the selected coronary cartoons of Al-Youm Al-Sabee online magazine are examined. The results show that the cartoons in question contain metaphorical cognitive mechanisms; accordingly, the multifaceted metaphors of the cartoons in question - the most frequent of which (42%) are related to health issues - are in order to reinforce the message and help the messenger to identify the relationship between the origin and destination areas. Also, in none of the multidimensional metaphors in question was the possibility of reversing the origin and destination domains found.

The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak has led to the eye-catching emergence of new words and metaphors in the world. The important properties of languages are productivity and creativity as language users need new words to describe new concepts and situations. Sometimes, due to cultural and social changes, languages should be compatible with new circumstances in order to guide behaviors and construct cultures. The Persian language can also be changed through the emergence of new words and equivalents in such linguistic and extra-linguistic evolution. The emergence of new words and metaphors may shape various behaviors, thus influencing cultural, social, and political aspects. Language, the powerful cultural and social means, should be taken into consideration as its appropriate use may contribute to further the aims of communities. The present research explored various aspects of the selected words related to the COVID-19 outbreak. The results revealed that such words are mostly compound-derivative ones and the result of borrowing, loan blending, and calque.

Idioms are an inseparable part of any language. Therefore, people frequently use them in everyday speech. Since idioms have complex semantic structures, in order to understand their meaning and main message, one needs to use their allegorical meaning depending on the different semantic fields to which they belong. In this research, authors tried to explain the concepts of Persian idioms with the help of Conceptual Blending theory of Fauconnier and Turner (2002). This research method is a qualitative one. Authors consider numerous idioms in Persian language but due to the limitations they had in data analysis, they selected 15 of the most frequent ones among them and used them in this research. The results revealed that we can explain and describe the idioms on the basis of the Conceptual Blending theory; in this way and by conceptually combining the elements of illustration with the figurative atmosphere which exists in the idioms, we can understand their meanings and intentions.

Understanding the way that abstract information has been expressed in the different languages is one of the attractive subjects in cognitive linguistics. In this regard, Idioms as a part of cultural and national identity of speakers can play an important role in understanding concepts and linguistic materials. So in the present study we have tried to examine the representations of image schemas in two languages; Persian and English, within the framework of cognitive semantics and based on Johnson's Schematic Model (1987). Therefore, we selected the data from the “Common Persian Idioms and Phrases: Persian-English” which was provided by Bateni (2013) and have studied them in a descriptive-analytical way. This paper explores the conceptual image schemas of idioms in Persian and then compares them with their English equivalent. The results show that the mental coding process of idioms in these two languages can be divided in 6 ways and in most cases this process was similar between these languages. Moreover, English has the most schematic similarity between their information and messages. The pass and force schema are the most common in English and Persian, respectively. Due to the conceptual schemas are dynamic patterns in cognitive semantics which are not studied thoroughly the idioms of these Languages in past; so the importance and the objective of this study was the analysis of this phenomenon in the context of conceptual schema and also explain the relationship between the speakers language and mind.

The present article examines epistemological markers in socio-political forums on Iranian TV channels from the critical discourse analysis point of view based on Hyland (2005) and Fairclough (2001).  In this study, 20 selected socio-political panels of 1,2, 3 & 4 channels have been selected, which are samples have been analyzed in qualitatively and quantitatively way in the form of all of them using targeted sampling. The variables studied in this study to be determined by this factors, the gender of the experts, using the live or recorded programs, the number of experts in each program, whether the experts are academic or non-academic. The distribution of epistemological elements in live and recorded programs and the presence of male and female critics and the presence of academic and non-academic factors is different?  Also the distribution of elements in the recorded political and social panels is different with the presence of one or more critics? How the differences between the distributions of elements justified are based on Fairclough discourse analysis model? The results showed that the distribution of hedges, boosters, Attitude markers in the programs of socio-political panels in the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting based on the gender of experts, alive or recorded programs, academic or non-academic experts or the presence of one or more experts in each programs are different. Also, based on discourse analysis patterns, can be justified type of using of epistemological tools in the discourse of experts.

Culture is an inseparable part of education in all respects. One of the fields in which culture plays an important role is second language acquisition. English language has become the language of science and technology and that of disseminating knowledge. Hence, English for Specific and General Purposes (ESP and EGP, respectively) is now a subfield in applied linguistics, helping English learners communicate their knowledge through English. The issue of communication leads the field to have a special connection with culture. That said, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the cultural content and cultural elements of the EGP and ESP textbooks used to teach ESP in economic and management, accounting, and psychology in Iranian universities. Using Cortazzi and Jin’s (1999) framework for cultural content, and Adaskou, Britten, and Fahsi’s (1990) framework for their cultural elements, the ESP and EGP textbooks were exqamined. The results indicated that there were statistically significant differences between the cultural content and elements included in the EGP and ESP textbooks; the EGP textbooks contain more cultural content and elements. Thus, it can be concluded that the ESP textbook designers need to pay more attention to the inclusion of cultural content and elements in the ESP textbooks if they want to improve the disciplinary abilities of the ESP students in communicating about the disciplinary notions of their majors.

Functional Discourse Grammar presented by Hengveld and Mackenzei (2008) as one of the newest Functional Grammar. This theory is mainly based on Dick’s Functional Grammar (1970s). According to Dick, every perfect Grammar should have Pragmatic, Psychological and Typological adequacy. FDG considers a top-down procedures for making speech for the sake of psychological adequacy. For acquiring Pragmatic adequacy, Speech act is considered as the basic element of studying in this approach. Furthermore, In FDG, language is studied in four separated levels in a top-down manner. The order of levels reveals the governing notion of functional and pragmatic units on formal and syntactic ones. Furthermore, FDG introduces a new approach for constituent order which has 84 positions in contrast to Greenberg (1963) 6 positions theory. In this paper, the general principles of FDG and different steps for making speech act is presented by giving Persian examples. Alongside this presentation, some typological behavior of Persian based on FDG and analyzing some Persian grammatical and discoursal phenomenon are discussed.