پژوهشنامه زبان ادبی
پیاپی 1 (بهار 1402)

Scholars of mystical poetry believe that a great number of Persian mystical Mathnavīs, especially the three wonderful works of Persian literature, namely Sanai’s Ḥadīqah al-Ḥaqīqah, ʿAttar’s Manṭiq al-Ṭayr and Mowlana’s Mathnavī Maʿnavī, have a common narrative structure based on their main plot and design. However, the Ilāhī Nāmah, Manṭiq al-Ṭayr and Muṣībat Nāmah of ʿAttar, which are considered as spiritual travelogues, in addition to having a main plot, benefit from different micro-narrative structures. In the present research, adopting a descriptive-analytical method and narratological approach, the goal of which is to discover a comprehensive model of narration, attempt has been made to decipher the anecdotes-allegories and their main function by exploring the narrative structures of the three Mathnavīs mentioned above. We came to the conclusion that ʿAttar, in addition to the unity-plurality structure based on the main design of these Mathnavīs, has also deployed the narrative structure of travelogues, the Arabian Nights and the Holy Scriptures. The main secret of his anecdotes-allegories is that he measures the history of his time with the narrative pattern of the history of prophets and does not refer to the historical events of his time.

Persian texts of the earlier period, can be selected as a good case study in the field of linguistics. It is possible to look at the texts of this period through the window of functionalist frameworks and to describe its linguistic features in such a way as to become a stylistic research tool for further ado. Investigating the order of the elements in a sentence and information structure, and then communicating these two categories together allows the linguist to better understand the meaning (function) relationship with the linguistic form, and can also be a tool for identifying the stylistic features of each period. The present study attempts to consider information structure in the fifth century within the framework of Holliday’s systematic functional grammar, and also to statistically describe the order of the elements in a sentence and the syntactic structure throughout this period. The body of work contains 1,200 sentences from works such as Kashf-ul-Mahjub, Bayhaqi's History, the Qeshiriiyya treatise, al-Tafhim, the Qâboosnameh and the Ala'i encyclopedia, and then after, the patterns of ordering the main structures were identified in these texts. It was also determined whether the following sentences matched each of the patterns of information structure. This research showed that in the fifth century, the basic or unmarked form of the main elements of action statements, regarding their order, obeys the SOV pattern, and in the whole body of sentences, it corresponds to the head-final structures. The number of marked sentences was only ten percent of the whole body, which can be inferred as the flexibility of the texts in this period, in terms of the word order of the sentence. Investigating the state of information structure in this period also demonstrated that only 5% of sentences were under the marked patterns of information structure.

Culture and its components play a very important role in creating mental structures and patterns of thought, speech, behavior, and actions of individuals in society as they form the collective identity and social personality of individuals in society. In particular, the beliefs and rituals of creation and resurrection are the foundation of most human beliefs, thoughts, speeches, and actions. Poets are the inheritors and carriers of culture and thought. Great and popular poets, such as Ferdowsi, Rumi, Sa'di, and Hafez, are the main mediators of the transmission of culture and the greatest architects of thought, speech, and action of not only Iranians but also many neighboring and even distant nations. We have no choice but to study ancient cultures, beliefs, and rituals to recognize our identity and the foundations of our thought. With the approach of cultural linguistics, this study examines the role of culture in the processing of love metaphors in Rumi's works to identify and introduce the function of love in the theory of Islamic mysticism and its cultural foundations and basic epistemological format. According to the analysis of metaphors of love, the main functions of love according to Rumi are life-giving, beauty (goodness), cultivation (liberation, shelter, and promotion), and agency in knowledge and connection to the truth. These functions are taken from Islamic culture, ancient Iranian culture, and Greek culture and are reflected in the metaphors of love.

Linguistic research is more complex than research in other literary fields, and it will be much more complicated if the research is done on a great poet like Mīrzā Abd al-Qādir Bidel, who rewrote his earlier poems and made corrections to them during his poetic maturity. This study seeks to show his poetic trajectory through the investigation of lexical metamorphoses in his poetry by considering the Ganj Bakhsh's manuscript as a source in which Bidel's lyric poems have been included up to the time he was 53 years old. The text of the poems in this manuscript were compared with the readings of the same poems in later-dated manuscripts. Attempt has been made to use descriptive-analytical method to highlight various types of linguistic metamorphoses in Bidel's ghazals in four general categories: metamorphosis through elimination of words, metamorphosis through change of words, metamorphosis through addition of words, and metamorphosis through complete change in a hemistich (mesraʿ). The necessity of studying the linguistic issues in Persian literature and the prominent position of Mīrzā Abd al-Qādir Bidel in the Indian style of poetry point to the necessity and importance of this research. Findings show that most of the metamorphoses in Bidel’s lyric poems has been through change of words, and the elimination or addition of words have not been very frequent. It was also found in this study that Bidel, by changing his attitude towards poetry, words and poetic images, was able to free himself from the shadow of the great poets of the Indian style poetry and secure a special place in Persian literature.

In Persian, compound words that are produced by the structural pattern of “word + and + word = word” are called vāzhahʿaṭf, and naming the word as such emphasizes the compound nature of this type of construction in contrast to combination and coordinate syntactic group. In view of the linguistic and grammatical studies that form the background of the present study, which have investigated the structural and semantic features of this compound structure and explained the relationships between its coordinate constituents from various aspects, vāzhahʿaṭf often has a compound meaning and creates a clear mental image, and it is used for the purposes of neologism and categorization in Persian. The present research, while paying attention to these features, describes and qualitatively analyzes the applications of this grammatical construction in a corpus consisting of several literary texts. Findings show that the constituents of this compound construction, due to its syntactic construction, have lexical collocation and performative independence. These features has led to the widespread practice of displacing, separating and changing such constituents and their order in the narrative literary texts. Nizami has frequently used the conjunction type in his Khamsah, Mowlana has distinctly made use of the itbāʿī compound and phonetic conjunctions in his poetry, and the phonetic conjunctions are frequently employed in Nīmā’ī and contemporary lyric poetry. In addition, the similarity of the structure of vāzhahʿaṭf and coordinate syntactic constructions in literary texts in such works as Saʿdi’s poetry and Hafez’s ghazals, and the syntactic arrangement and distribution of words in order to create proportion is such that the distinction between conjunctions and coordinate syntactic group is blurred.

Istikhdām is a rhetorical figure of speech based on double entendre or polysemy.  The ambiguity that exists in defining this figure of speech in Persian rhetorical books has led to inaccurate or wrong understanding of this figure and its examples. In this article, the author intends to offer a comprehensive definition of this figure of speech by investigating the existing definitions, and classifying and summarizing them in such a way as to prevent misunderstandings and inaccuracies. In this fundamental research using library research tools, the main elements in the use of istikhdām, such as the deep structure of the phrase, semantic relationships between the words and some related grammatical features were investigated in order to define an exact method for the identification and understanding of this figure .For a better understanding, several examples given in Persian rhetorical books were analyzed to determine their components. The types of istikhdām defined in rhetorical books were also reviewed and an attempt was made to provide a coherent classification. It was found that identifying “ellipsis” in the surface erstructure of the phrase is an exact way to identify and understand istikhdām. Moreover, the relationships between some rhetorical devices and istikhdām were investigated, and it was found that they either reinforce or overlap each other.