فصلنامه زبان شناسی اجتماعی
سال ششم شماره 3 (پیاپی 23، تابستان 1402)

The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of the social variables of age, gender and education of lawyers on the verbal interactions of judges with them in legal events in the framework of forensic sociolinguistics. The statistical population of the research includes lawyers in Mashhad, Iran, and the sample selection method is purposeful sampling until the saturation of information is reached. The research approach is qualitative research, its analysis method is thematic analysis and its tool is semi-structured interview. The subject of the research is to investigate the verbal interactions of judges with lawyers in legal events, such as hearings, interrogations, investigations and trials, in Mashhad, in 1401. For this purpose, the contents and themes of the interviews were coded in three stages. In an interview with 24 volunteers from available lawyers, it was found that superior and subordinate relationships prevail in legal events, and many judges exercise power through language. The results of the research show that the age, gender and education of lawyers have an effect on the way the judge speaks to them, answers and even issues a verdict. Gender has been of special importance and gender stereotypes are very prominent in this field. One of the important issues expressed by the lawyers in the interviews was the importance of the personality of the judge and the personality of the lawyer in the verbal interactions of the judges with the lawyers, which indicates that the personality of the people themselves is much more important and influential than their age, gender and education. In addition, increasing age is also an important variable, and many lawyers stated that the behavior of appeal judges is usually better because they are older, and lawyers also act more mature with increasing age. After all, in general, judges deal better with older lawyers both in tone and type of speech.

Historical geographical manuscripts are crucial for social, cultural, and linguistic research. One such significant text is "Ahsan Al-Taqɑsim fi Maʔrefat Al-Aqɑlim" by Abuʔabdallɑh Moḥammad bin Aḥmad al-Maqdesi, which provides a detailed description of languages and dialects in Muslim communities in the 10th century. We aimed to investigate the significance of this manuscript in understanding the sociolinguistic status of Islamic communities in that era through these research questions: what is the linguistic value of Maqdesi’s reports? How do they aid in recognizing the language usage, distribution and variation in Muslim communities? A descriptive-analytic analysis was conducted on the linguistic reports from a historical sociolinguistic perspective to identify sociolinguistic themes and classify the relevant content for further interpretation. The analysis revealed that Maqdesi has studied the linguistic status of the Islamic world in a systematic and well-thought plan, and, his observations yielded a relatively clear picture of the linguistic landscape, dialectal differences, language choices and usages, and social attitude towards languages, especially in the eastern regions of the Islamic world in the 10th century. Furthermore, this research highlights the importance of comprehensive and well-categorized historical-geographical language descriptions and the necessity of reanalyzing historical-geographical manuscripts to better understand the historical sociolinguistic status of Iranian languages.

An essential factor in the quality of teachers’ teaching methods is understanding duty-shirking behavior in their discourse, which can be analyzed through the culturology of language given the interplay between language and culture. With the overall goal of analyzing the cultuling of teacher duty-shirking behavior, the present article is built on online semi-structured interviews with 101 teachers (66 females and 35 males; from 21 to 58 years old) in Mashhad. They had been teaching at different school levels. The collected data were analyzed in light of the conceptual model of cultuling analysis. The results showed that the cultuling of duty-shirking behavior is mostly found in private and informal situations in order to evade duties, sidestep responsibilities, protest rights and facilities, voice opinions, or exonerate oneself with sarcastic, serious, sympathetic, sincere, and advice tones. Teachers might even be demotivated and seek their own interests. Teachers’ awareness concerning this cultuling is at the stage of involvement and their emotion toward it is negative. Additionally, the cultuling is indicative of negligence, short-term orientations, indirectness, and collectivism in the teachers’ community. Therefore, effective measures should be taken to prevent the spread of these patterns throughout society. The results of the current study will go a long way in helping the officials of the educational system in addressing the concerns of teachers in having a dynamic educational system.

In this research, we investigated the effect of age and gender on the understanding of embodied metaphors in the concrete operational stage in Persian children.Based on two experimental tests (a visual test and an auditory test), we evaluated the development of children's understanding of embodied metaphors in the transition from8 to 12 years of age and examined the role of gender in each of these two ages.The results showed that children in this stage of cognitive development experience significant growth in the understanding of embodied metaphors. The results also showed that although there is no significant difference between girls and boys, 11 years old girls perform better than the corresponding boys in the tasks. The results suggest that during the concrete operational stage, children undergo separate cognitive development based on their genders, which reflects in their understandings of embodied metaphors. Keywords: embodied metaphors, concrete operational stage, cognitive development, gender, age, children development

The role of place is implicitly or explicitly undeniable, in the formation of discourse and the production of meaning. Objectivity and abstraction are two predominant characteristics of places, which each give their place according to their practical context in various discourses. The main question is, how can discourses be the place of spatial challenge and pave the way to pass from the state of action to the state of transcendence and imagination? Dissociation from objective space and place, phenomenal aspect of presence and sensory-perceptual reception of place can take shape to spatial transcendence. By adopting the descriptive-analytical research methodology and relying on the "Paris appeared from afar" as the corpus of research, which is a collection of travel descriptions of Qajar period travelers, the author seeks to an answer to the following question, how does enunciator achieve a transcedental and spatial aspect of Paris by negating the actional aspect of the place and by relying on the co-presence surrounded world and sensory –perceptual experience? This perception of the word and live experience reveals the phenomenological aspect of the place ad gives the reader a new insight of the “other place” and existence.

The present study investigates the effect of the authors’ gender on the speech features of the characters with different genders. In so doing, two stories were selected in which the genders of the authors were different from those of the main characters. The theoretical framework used in the present study was Lakoff’s (1975) theory of gender language which was more in historical harmony with the two corpuses under study. The verbal characteristics of the main characters of the two stories show that despite the authors' awareness of gender differences in language, they have left traces of their gender in the speech of their characters. A comparison of the two stories shows that Al-Ahmad is more successful in using appropriate language in the speech of the main character. The feminine linguistic features in the speech of his main character are: swearing, prayers and cursing, hesitations and doubts, direct quotations, as well as emotional attributes. On the other hands, the same features in Raheem’s speech is not in accordance with his masculinity. Based on the findings of this research it can be concluded that gender language is inevitable and completely cultural-bound.

Persian proverbs are Iranian previous generations’ wise thoughts usually in short melodic linguistic and literary especially poetic form. They often have simple meaning and structure that makes them more memorable and easy to use in oral and written communications. Many articles have investigated Persian proverbs from different points of view. But not enough attention has been paid to the importance of these proverbs in enhancing sociocultural literacy and sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences as parts of Persian learners’ communicative competence. In this article, by the documentary method, it is paid to the role of proverbs in representing and learning some sociocultural features of Persian language (politeness, compliments, collectivism, etc.). Then, two things are suggested, a proverbial categorization from easy to hard, and Richmond’s (1987) revised model for comparing the similarities and differences between Persian proverbs and learners’ mother tongue proverbs. The results of a comparative study between Persian and Arabic proverbs in the Persian class of Arab learners are discussed.