نشریه علم زبان
پیاپی 20 (پاییز و زمستان 1403)

Textbooks as the most important educational tools underline the reflection and transmission of ideologies. Research literature on the discourse analysis and analysis of ideologies existing in textbooks indicates that the vast majority of these studies are based on English language learning. Taking the progressive development of Persian language teaching into account, the critical situation of Iran in the world and the learners’ wrong attitude towards it, the present study aims to analyze the textbook Persian language course (Meneghini and Orsatti, 2012) in order to achieve the type and the way ideologies were presented, especially in introducing Iranian identity. Accordingly, based on Van Dijk's approach to ideology and the analysis of its dimensions as well as using three key concepts: “Square of ideology”, “group identity schema”, and “strategy of representation ideologies”, two checklists were developed to analyze the selected textbook. The results show that although this textbook tries not to show any bias in contexts and partly to be neutral, through pictures and exercises, deemphasizes the positive point of “us” and emphasizes the negative point of “this group”. Thus, according to the research framework, the attitude of this book towards Iranian identity is biased and its representation is evaluated in conflict with the objectives of language teaching.

Linguistic typology is the systematic study of linguistic variation and word order is regarded as one of its main topics. In this paper, word order components are studied in the varieties of Kurdish, Laki, and Lori languages spoken in Chardawol area, a geographical region located in the north of Ilam province in Iran. For this purpose, the twenty-four word order components used in Dabir-Moghaddam’s research (2013) to determine the word order status in Iranian languages were employed and examples of the 3 varieties for each component were provided. The results showed a high degree of convergence among the 3 language varieties in the geographical region of Chardawol, which by definition can be considered as a manifestation of 'regional typology'. A comparison of word order components in the 3 varieties with the languages of Europe-Asia showed that all 3 varieties mainly behave like strong verb-medial languages (with 17 components out of 24). Verb-medial status of these languages was also confirmed in a comparison with world languages (19 components out of 24).

This paper aims to study the order of acquiring sense relations in 7 to 12- year- old Persian-speaking children based on the semantic approach and to compare it with the order of applying those relations through six elementary school grades course books Farsi (2018). The method of the research is descriptive-analytic and for collecting data fieldwork and the documentary resources have been applied; in a way that six multiple-choice tests were prepared and asked from 25 participants in each grade and each gender. Furthermore, for comparing each order with the order of applying them within the course books, all words with any sense relation were extracted and documented. Findings illustrate that children perceive the meaning of a word by perceiving its encyclopedic meaning and the context. They use their background knowledge to comprehend the sense relations among words. Moreover, there are major distinctions between the order of applying sense relations in the course books and the order of acquiring sense relations in children which can cause difficulties in comprehending the meaning of words and their sense relations.

There are differences between males and females during language processing, but how the brain functions to support this difference is still controversial. It has been hypothesized that language functions are more strongly left-lateralized in males, whereas they are represented more bilaterally in females. However, insufficient evidence exists to prove it. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of gender on syntactic processing using the analysis of electroencephalography signals. This approach provides the opportunity to identify the difference between males and females in event-related potential (ERP) components associated with syntactic processing. Hence, 22 highly proficient monolingual Persian speakers (11 females) participated in this experiment. Using auditory syntactic violation paradigm, event-related potentials were extracted from the final syllable of Persian sentences in MATLAB software. Then, the mean amplitudes were analyzed using a repeated measures ANOVA in SPSS-26 software. The current electroencephalographic findings revealed that although females exhibited a larger signal amplitude and in ungrammatical stimuli as compared to grammatical stimuli in the 500-700-ms interval, but the difference was not statistically significant (P > 0.05). In addition, the amplitude of P600 was widely detected to be left hemisphere dominant, however, no gender-related differences were found. In general, based on these findings, it can be concluded that syntactic processing in highly proficient males and females is independent of the gender variable.

The present research focuses on a lexical comparison as well as an analysis of the lexical variations between Khalaj and Azerbaijani Turkish. The data and research corpus have been extracted from the Iran Linguistic Atlas database for Khalaj language, prevalent in the Khalaji-speaking populations of the Markazi and Qom provinces which is being compiled at the Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and Tourism. Khalaj language is an independent branch of Turkic languages, with differences and similarities among its family members, and is considered as one of the endangered languages prevalent in Iran. The 1280 words under investigation in this research were first classified based on semantic categories and then were described and analyzed based on the research theoretical framework and were eventually compared with their equivalent in Azerbaijani Turkish. The comparison basis for Azerbaijani Turkish was the native language of the author and Turkic dictionaries. Apart from the phonetic differences and despite several lexical similarities between Khalaj and Azerbaijani Turkish, some lexical differences and formal variations were observed. Meanwhile, the language contact among Khalaj language, Persian, and Azerbaijani Turkish spoken in the neighboring villages in the studied region was examined. According to the explained hierarchy in the research theoretical framework, the mentioned language contact was in some cases of “slightly more intense contact” and in other instances of “more intense contact” type.

From the perspective of the sociology of language, identity-cultural issue is one of the most important issues that can be raised through textbooks, including English language textbooks. Due to the importance of the topic, the researcher decided to measure the presence of this topic through the English language teachers’ points of view in the newly authored English language book and to compare it with the previous book as well as making a list of the most important strengths and weaknesses of the new book. The statistical population of this research includes all the teachers working in education across the country. In this descriptive and analytical research, the sampling method is a multi-stage (geographical) cluster method. To select a sample of teachers from all the provinces of Iran, five provinces were considered based on the geographical region, and in the next step, 40 teachers were randomly selected from each province. The research showed that 74% of the teachers strongly believe in the need to pay attention to the cultural and identity elements in the newly authored book and only 3% of the teachers gave a low or very low answer. 69% of the teachers said that the success of the new book in introducing the identity and cultural elements has been highly evaluated. In addition, 55% of the teachers evaluated the success of the textbook of the former system to a very low extent, and this indicates that the former book paid less attention to the cultural issues of identity than the newly authored books.

In the books and courses of “Oratory Art and Announcing”, announcers of radio and television are taught how to pronounce each sound accurately from its place of articulation in order to respect their authenticity. Over the past decade, the writer has carefully observed and recorded examples of insistence on following these teachings in the news sections of the radio and television. In this article, we discussed the issue of careful pronunciation on the basis of its necessity and optionality regarding different cases. In addition, it is investigated whether resisting processes such as assimilation is possible, and if possible, does this resistance lead to the desired result, i.e. careful pronunciation of words? The concept of “natural pronunciation” in this article is inspired by Milanian (2005). The research method was “documentary” and the method of data analysis was “qualitative content analysis”. According to this study, following careful pronunciation is necessary in some special cases, but in most cases, it is optional and depends on the performance variables such as “speaking rate”, and “style of speech”. This research shows that speakers who resist processes such as “assimilation” do not actually achieve their goal of careful pronunciation. They just change the place where the “assimilation” occurs and, in fact, they change the “assimilation” of “progressive” to “regressive” or the assimilation of “regressive” to “progressive”.

Labeling is one of the microstructure capacities a lexicographer benefits to introduce formal and semantic features of a word. If an entry is assumed as a form-meaning pair, those labels that are related to syntactic and structural information of the word are of the form type and those labels that concern the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the word are of the meaning type which are called “usage labels”. The present descriptive-analytical study, based on Atkins and Rundle's (2008) nine categories, investigates usage labels in three Persian general monolingual dictionaries (Mo’een, Moaser and Sokhan Comprehensive Dictionary). Research findings indicate that in all three dictionaries, “field” is the most efficient label to provide pragmatic information highlighting culture-bound elements. In contrast, “register”, which refers to the degree of formality of the lexical items, has not been used in aforementioned dictionaries, and the degree of formality should be perceived through other labels. Regarding multiple usage labels, it is important to insert them systematically, so that the dictionary user can easily receive the necessary practical information. Studying multiple usage labels in assistance with computational linguistics can provide recurring patterns in their insertion method, meaning that some types of usage labels increase the probability of other types’ occurrence. This can lead to significant facts in sociolinguistics.

Conceptual metaphor is defined as the understanding of one conceptual domain in terms of another. This phenomenon is not purely lexical but is examined through the mapping of one domain onto another. In discourse, new metaphors can emerge from conventional mappings, stabilizing both the source and target domains. Functional linguistics views text as a semantic and pragmatic unit, introducing tools to measure formal coherence. They also see coherence as a process in which topics and events are logically and culturally connected within discourse. On the other hand, cognitive linguistics defines semantic coherence as “related to the compatibility of [textual] semantic relations”. This research addresses two key questions: 1) To what extent does cognitive metaphor impact the semantic coherence of a specialized text? 2) What is the relationship between semantic and formal coherence according to cognitive and functional linguistic analyses? Various discourse analysis methods were employed in this study. A corpus of 640 instances of conceptual metaphors from Art History textbooks was collected and analyzed using coherence tools. The research shows that the semantic coherence resulting from conceptual metaphors is reflected in the structure of the text. Furthermore, it explores the relationship between semantic and formal coherence from both cognitive and functional perspectives.

Grammatical gender is a syntactic distinction that is manifested in nouns and adjectives. In Pashto, grammatical gender (feminine and masculine) exists. The specific research questions of the present study are as follows: “how is grammatical gender preserved in Pashto?”, and “is it limited solely to the noun category or it exists in other categories of the language as well?”. The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of grammatical gender and the way it functions in Pashto. The research method is library-based, and in the data analysis section, the syntactic features of sentences in this language are examined. The results indicate that grammatical gender is preserved in Pashto, and gender agreement can be observed in various syntactic categories of the language, namely noun, adjective, number, and pronoun. Animate and inanimate nouns are also categorized based on gender. Furthermore, noun-adjective agreement is observed in this language. To distinguish masculine gender from feminine, there are specific rules in the language. The gender of most nouns can be differentiated based on their suffixes. Additionally, by adding a specific suffix, a masculine noun can be turned into a feminine noun.