نشریه زبان پژوهی
پیاپی 49 (زمستان 1402)

The question of whether specific patterns of impairment across different language modalities are isolated, associated, or doubly dissociated has been a major theoretical issue in aphasiology. In this paper, we describe modality- and task-specific language impairments in a Persian-speaking patient (AG) with ischemic stroke. AG’s overall language impairments were evaluated using the bedside version of Persian Western Aphasia Battery (P-WAB-1), which indicated an Aphasia Quotient (AQ) index of 86. Moreover, his performance on the Reading subtests of the Persian Diagnostic Aphasia Battery (P-DAB-3) indicated a Language Quotient (LQ) index of 60. We also evaluated his word reading, sentence reading, and sentence repetition using the subtests of the Persian version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT). Based on his performance on these assessment tools during the chronic post-onset time, AG was diagnosed with transcortical motor aphasia. Notably, he exhibited two striking characteristics, namely, (a) a modality-specific dissociation, with severely impaired reading comprehension in the face of relatively spared auditory comprehension; and (b) a set of task-specific agrammatic symptoms in verbal expression and out-loud sentence reading in the context of relatively well-preserved sentence repetition. The general characteristics of our patient’s grammatical violations also highlight certain universal and language-specific agrammatic impairments. The present clinical linguistic data argue against the existence of monolithic speech-related regions in the brain.

Annually, researchers in various scientific fields publish their research results as technical reports or articles in proceedings or journals. The collocation of this type of data is used by search engines and digital libraries to search and access research publications, which usually retrieve related articles based on the query keywords instead of the article’s subjects. Consequently, accurate classification of scientific articles can increase the quality of users’ searches when seeking a scientific document in databases. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide a classification model to determine the scope of scientific articles. To this end, we proposed a model which uses the enriched contextualized knowledge of Persian articles through distributional semantics. Accordingly, identifying the specific field of each document and defining its domain by prominent enriched knowledge enhances the accuracy of scientific articles’ classification. To reach the goal, we enriched the contextualized embedding models, either ParsBERT or XLM-RoBERTa, with the latent topics to train a multilayer perceptron model. According to the experimental results, overall performance of the ParsBERT-NMF-1HT was 72.37% (macro) and 75.21% (micro) according to F-measure, with a statistical significance compared to the baseline (p<0.05).

Previous studies have demonstrated the efficacy of speech rhythm measures in speaker identification across various languages with different phonotactic structures. In Persian language, in particular, two categories of speech rhythm metrics were examined: duration-based and intensity-based metrics. Building upon these prior works, the current study delves deeper into the discrimination capabilities of the mentioned measurement types—duration-based versus intensity-based—in the context of Persian speakers. To achieve this, a multinomial logistic regression model was employed on a dataset comprising 20 male Persian speakers, each reciting 100 sentences at a normal speaking pace. Findings revealed that, when distinguishing between Persian speakers, duration-based measures outperform intensity-based ones, however, this excellence is very slight. This observation is significant, as it sheds light on the suitability of specific rhythm metrics for Persian speaker identification. I postulate that this discrepancy in performance may be attributed to the simple syllable structure of Persian and the lesser reliance on intensity as a primary indicator of lexical stress. This research contributes valuable insights into the choice of rhythm metrics for optimal Persian speaker identification and underscores the importance of considering linguistic features when developing speaker recognition systems.Top of Form

This article examines the impact of gender, age, and education on the attitudes of Kurdish speakers in Mahabad towards standard Persian and the Kurdish language. Since people’s emotions towards their own or others’ languages are related to their language attitudes, this important component plays a significant role in measuring success in language planning, learning speed, language selection and use, and predicting the extinction or sustainability of a language. The study’s statistical population consisted of 80 Kurdish-Persian bilinguals in Mahabad who were randomly selected. This study is situated within the theoretical framework of sociocognitive linguistics, and the research perspective was measured through an indirect method (matched-guise test). After distributing the questionnaire and conducting the matched-guise test, the collected data were analyzed. The results of the statistical analysis showed that the variables of gender, age, and education in Mahabad had no significant impact on the attitudes of bilingual Kurdish speakers towards standard Persian and the Kurdish language. The Kurdish speakers of Mahabad exhibited numerically positive attitude towards the standard Persian language compared to Kurdish language, but no significant difference in terms of any of the mentioned variables was observed between the two languages under study.

This article investigates the comitative constructions in Persian. These constructions consist of three members named accompanion, accompanee and accompanying setting. Previously, studies considered ‘bā’ (WITH) as a preposition in traditional grammar. All traditional grammarians introduced ‘bā’ as a preposition except those who pointed to ‘bā’ (WITH) in accompanying situations. One of the aims of the present research is to answer this question: Is ‘bā’(WITH)  a preposition in all sentences or  is it a conjunction or both? So, this study attempts to show its syntactic and functional features in Persian. Another goal is to compare coordinated and comitative constructions. The hypothesis is that ‘bā’(WITH) can be considered as a conjunctor and a preposition as well. Thus comitative constructions are divided into two groups: 1) symmetrical constructions in which [ with + DP2 ] is not an adjunct (an argument). The type of the verbs in this group are as follows: collectives, combining, relational predicates and similar comparison.  2) asymmetrical constructions in which [ with + DP2 ]  is an adjunct. The second type does not depend on the type of the verbs. It consists some members named non-collective verbs, instrumental, body organ, transportation. The instrumental type are of mediatory and facilitating. The findings of the present article can be used in the teaching of Persian grammar as well as syntactic analyses.

Idioms and collocations are part of lexical phrases which are of high importance in lexicography. One of the criteria for distinguishing these two types of phrases from each other is the inflexibility of their constituent elements. Idioms, unlike collocations, are not flexible in terms of word order and are always used in a fixed and specific form. The purpose of the present article was to show firstly whether all Persian idioms are inflexible against syntactic changes or some are flexible; secondly, to indicate how a new lexical phrase is created as a result of converting an idiom into a collocation. To illustrate this phenomenon, a new and practical definition for idioms and collocations, based on syntactic criteria not merely semantic, was provided. According to Construction Grammar, idioms were analyzed based on four syntactic tests: ‘passivization’, ‘clefting’, ‘dislocation’, and ‘interrogation’. Two hundred idioms were collected from two of the most up-to-date and comprehensive sources, namely Farsi Amiyaneh Dictionary (Abolhassan Najafi, 2008) and the two-volume Dictionary of Kenayat-e Sokhan (Hassan Anvari, 2019). Some idioms were flexible to syntactic changes, and behaved similarly to collocations. The flexibility of idioms led to introducing a new definition of these phrases based on syntactic criteria. Thus, such phrases were considered a kind of collocation, not an idiom. The result showed that converting an idiom into a collocation always creates a lexical phrase or lexeme with a new meaning. Finally, a plan was introduced to represent such idioms practically in Persian dictionaries.

The study of request speech act has been considered by many researchers in various cultures and communities. In line with the goals of these studies, the cuurent article aims to extract and categorize the request speech act strategies used by Iranian teenager students (ITS) based on Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) coding scheme proposed by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) with regard to the relationship between the social dominance (power) of the addressees on the type and number of request strategies. The data were collected via Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and role-play filled and performed by 100 Birjandi high school students of Persian (50 girls and 50 boys). The results of the Chi-square test and also the two data collection methods employed showed that there was a significant relationship between the addressee’s social dominance and the type and number of request strategies used by ITS. In addition,“Alerters”, “preparatories” and “grounders” were the most employed strategies by the participants in both DCTs and role-plays. Besides, the lower social dominance of the speaker towards the addressee resulted in the application of complex strategies. So, it seems, with regard to politeness, Iranian cultural system to be hierarchical. Moreover, regarding the use of the request strategies by ITS, the findings didn’t show any difference between the two corpora, i.e., the data gathered via DCTs and role-plays.

This research has been done to investigate the relationship between verb comprehension and verb production of Persian learners in Persian language writing as a second language, based on the processes of ideational metafunction in Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. The statistical population was the Persian learners of the international center of teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers in Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. The data collection method was based on field study and random sampling method. The data were gathered through tests, interviews and essays which were divided into two parts: verb comprehension and verb production. The results of the tests were analyzed for verb comprehension, while the outputs of compositions were used in verb production. The collected data then were analyzed by SPSS. The results indicated that there was a positive correlation between comprehension and verb production of mental process at elementary levels. On the other hand, no correlation was found between Persian learners’ verb comprehension and verb production at intermediate level. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between comprehension and production of the behavioral process at intermediate level and the comprehension and production of the material process at the advanced level. This showed the effect of three factors on creating a positive and negative correlation between processes in foreign Persian learners: 1) the objectivity and subjectivity of processes, 2) the versatility of processes, 3) Persian learners’ language level.

In the present study, we attempted to specify the constructional schemas relevant to the compounds made by the present stem ‘sāz’ in Persian within the framework of the construction morphology (Booij, 2010). To this end, 150 compounds were brought together from numerous sources, such as the Persian Corpus of Bijankhan, Persian novels as well as some Persian websites. Having collected the data, we tabulated and categorized them on the basis of the preverbal elements. Afterwards, a comparison was made, as a result of which it was indicated that there can be a general constructional schema inside which 5 sub-schemas can be placed. Certainly, the broad schema denotes the construction by which a noun (preverbal element) is combined with the verbal element (present stem sāz) to create an adjective that implies the agent of an action, namely the agent of building or making an object. However, there were two exceptions among the whole dataset: a compound in spite of resembling the other compounds regarding its construction denotes the semantic role of patient: dastsāz (handmade), referring to an object which is made by hands as well as the compound ʤāsāz (embedded object), whereas in other compounds, the stem means the agent that builds, creates or makes. Consequently, as might be expected, two broad constructional schemas have been obtained: one relevant to the agents and the other relevant to patients.

Metadiscourse is an essential component of academic writing, as it helps authors better communicate their ideas and engage their readers. It is through the analysis of the text's metadiscourse that one can explore academic writing and compare the rhetorical traits and preferences of various discourse communities (Hyland, 2005). To this end, this study examined the differences in the use, type, and frequency of interactional metadiscourse markers in the discussion and conclusion sections of political science and religious studies articles written in English language. The corpus of this study consisted of 45032 words extracted from fifty research articles, twenty-five articles in the field of political science, and twenty-five articles in the field of religious studies published between 2019 and 2023 in the top one high-impact factor and peer-reviewed international journals.To analyze the data, one Eta and two Chi-square tests were run. Considering the interactional resources of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model, the researchers uncovered that despite some subtle differences in the use, frequency, and types of these metadiscourse markers, “hedges” were the most and attitude markers were the least frequently used metadiscourse markers employed in both political science and religious studies disciplines. The findings have some educational implications that shed light on the need to encourage English language teachers, university professors, and publishers in the fields of TEFL and ESP to provide EFL learners with appropriate sources and settings to increase their familiarity with various metadiscourse markers, especially the category of interactional MDMs that aids them write coherently and establish genuine interaction with audiences.