مجله جستار های زبانی
سال چهارم شماره 1 (پیاپی 13، بهار 1392)

Revealing the unequal relations of power, which lead to hegemony in media and make audiences aware of it, has been in the center of attention for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for a long period of time. Van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic network of social actors is considered as a competent framework for linguists and discourse analysts to do so. In this article, we study 50 hard news and articles published in leading international news agencies and newspapers about Iran’s nuclear program during November and December 2010 to analyze the way the social actors of both sides of the quarrel have been represented in the media. The results showed that although the international news agencies and newspapers claim to stay neutral in representing the events, some linguistic mechanisms to represent Iranian social actors differently from the western ones are obvious and Iranian social actors playing role in this case are shown as irrational hardliners while western counterparts are introduced as logical peace seeker ones.

The current paper arose from the following thought: “What are the methods and techniques used in the translation of Culture-based metaphors?” The data used in this article is the result of a comparative study on the translation of Mathnawi by Reynold Nicholson. We used Harvey 2000 model to advance the research. In accordance with the needs of the study, metaphoric significance is presented. Six different types of significations are recognized here; than a sextet significance pattern, is presented, which might be used for any two languages being source and target for translation. As the final outcome of the research, different suggestions for these different signification types have been presented, which are based on the nature of the metaphors. Having these suggestions in hand, translators have a model to follow, so that they can overcome the translatability problems they may face in translation of metaphorical expressions. In the other words, applying this newly-born significance into translation practice and, finally, presenting a model for the translation of culture-based items are two main achievements of the research.

This paper suggests the use of new branches of stylistics along with appropriate devices for the analysis of Persian texts. As a step in this direction, stylistic properties of Jashn-e Farkhonde, a short story of Jalalal-e Al-e ahmad, were analyzed with the approach of Critical stylistics answering these major questions: “What is the ideology behind the text?”, “What stylistic features discover this ideology?” and “What is the function of the ideology behind the text?” It is assumed that, in this short story, ideology is a mechanism for struggle against domination. To provide an answer to these questions, narrative and textual macro-layers of this short story are examined along with an analysis of focalization, focalization continuity (shifting focalization and multiple-focalization), facets of focalization (the perceptual facets including tense, order, duration, frequency and space, an overall and eye-bird’s view or a partial and close-up view, cognitive facet and ideological facet) and micro-layers of lexicon, syntax, and rhetoric in connection with the outer layer (the situational context of the text). It is assumed that the awareness obtained from focalization and analysis of micro-layers will result in the discovery of ideology and power relations in the text. The reslts showed that characteristics of text from contrasting personalities and contrasting discourses that reach unity to the narrator's father. Too much use of swear words and his imperative sentences indicate the hidden ideology of the text; that is dissatisfaction of author, as a critical intellectual that represents groups of community from both social and political currents mentioned in the story.

In cognitive linguisics, the concept of perspective has an essential role to construe scenes. How to construe each scene is dependant upon what perspective a speaker and viewer of that scene have adopted towards it. This is why there are different utterances in language to express the same subject from different perspective. In other words, different speakers conceptualiz them different linguistically because different viewers conceptualize each scene differently. On the other hand, perspective has a determining role in narrative. It is worth mentioning that perspective includes some factors such as viewpoint, vantage point, orientation, figure and ground, subjectivity and objectivity and deixis, which in this research four of them have been taken into account. In this paper, the goal is to study the concept of perspective in three narrational categories of story and adopted filmscript and the film from the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics based on the theories of three outstanding cognitive linguists: Langacker, Talmy and Stockwell. The results showed an interaction among these three categories. The findings also proved that linguistic aspect is a dominant factor of perspective in story. It was also shown that the perspective is not a constant phenomenon, rather it might change through onfolding events in the story.

The purpose of this article is the comparative analysis of correlation of plot between two narrative stories: “The Prayer Dealer” (narrated in One Thousand and One Night), and “The Cittern” by Jalal A. Ahmad. We believe that the narration of “The Cittern”, from figurative point of view, is very similar to “The Prayer Dealer”. However, there is an element or word in “The Cittern” that has created a conflict in narrative coordination from plot point of view. We try to know what this element is. This question is the result of a comparative analysis between these two narrations. Analyzing the two narrations, we have found a question that was constantly preoccupying the author’s mind: “Why, in “The Prayer Dealer”, there is internal solidarity and harmony among the figures? In addition, why in “The Cittern”, we witness a conflict in the internal narrative structure and there is no such solidarity as the first one? Here is the theory based on which the author is going to answer this question: In the story of “The Prayer Dealer”, the narrative operant, “Namaz Forush” (the prayer dealer) uses his own imagination to see through the future. However, the narrative operant of “The Cittern”, a young musician goes back to his past to find answers. In the first case, seeing through the future puts the narrative plot in a very solid position, but going back to the past puts the operant in the terminal part of the narration (but the plot has lost this character in “The Cittern”). This terminal position is a potentially destructive power for a new narration. That is why the plot for “The Cittern” is not a complete one and only shows a minimal narration.

The semiotics is one of the scientific instruments for analyzing the discourse system, which studies the components of meaning structure and creation in texts. In semiotics, the gnosilogical characteristics of literary works will find the chance to appear clearly by surpassing mere constructive semiotics to phenomenology semiotics and showing the signs path of moving towards higher and more perfect signs. The beautiful poems of “Oghab” by Khanlari and “Arash Kamangir” by Kasrayie are the narrative oriented kind of poetry, which have the narrative characteristics due to having situational identity and various actions and nourishing precious mythos actions at the end of the story. Therefore, these two masterpieces are worth being studied and analyzed for semiotics analysis and discourse system. The prescriptive discourse system and manipulative ones are flowing at the beginning and in the middle of these two stories. Later on, proceeding the discourses and appearance of the narratives, two value systems are shaped, which through their conflicts, the dynamic semiotics discourse is provided, leading to tensional system, which is analyzable based on the expansion and pressure values. This research studies these texts by means of Greimas comparative approaches, passing through semantic square to tensional square while analyzing the type of discourse systems including prescriptive, manipulative and incidental ones in these two poems. This research Further tries to find out up to which point Persian narrative poetry is cable of analyzing the discourse systems ruling over it.

The purpose of the present article is to make a comparative study of theme markedness in Persian and English medical texts. It aims to determine the similarities and differences of Persian and English with regard to markedness. The study has been done based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and is concerned with the textual metafunction of this approach. To accomplish the purpose of the study, several books and articles were selected in the field of medical sciences. The corpus contained 1000 randomly chosen clauses of written texts, the data were gathered in both Persian and English and the research method was descriptive-analytic. The restults indicated that in Persian medical texts, circumstantial adjuncts in the subject position have a high frequency, representing that such an occurrence sounds unmarked to Persian native speakers and Persian has a different word order rather than English in medical texts. It does not completely conform to the concept of Halliday’s theory with regard to markedness. This research also illustrates that the properties of being pro-drop and having non-fixed word order distinguish Persian from English regarding the notion of markedness. In addition to language differences, theme markedness is closely related to some factors such as authors’/writers’ style differences, writing form types, text-clause relationship, emphasis, contrast, and specific genre. Since, the above mentioned factors in Persian and English effect theme markedness, they are regarded as their similarities, while language structure refers to their differences.

The aim of this article is to study the phonological processes of Bala-Gueriveh Luri in Khoram Abad (Lurestan, Iran) and to compare these processes with those of Standard Persian. The data were collected through a four-hour interview with four Lur informants. Furthermore, one of the authors is a native speaker of this dialect. The data were transcribed according to the International Phonetic Alphabet and analyzed descriptively. The phonological processes studied here are: consonantal processes such as assimilation, dissimilation, neutralization, lenition, elision and metathesis. In this dialect, lenition and elision are more active than other processes.

Fair assessment of language proficiency and use is one of the challenges language assessment experts have faced. In Iran, according to the parliament’s ‘Act of Student Admission to Universities’, University Entrance Examination (UEE) should be gradually substituted by the students’ schooling backgrounds mostly reflected in their high school exam performances. In spite of this upcoming change, however, various English language exams students take during high school have not been assessed in terms of their ethical effects. In the present study, 80 students who had graduated from high school determined the degree to which teacher-made exams in the second grade and pre-university level, national third-grade exam and English part of UEE can be regarded as fair. The data obtained were analyzed by ANOVA. In addition, the contents of students’ essay-type responses to the items of another questionnaire were analyzed and qualitative data were collected. The results showed the extent to which students could remember cases of unfair assessment associated with each type of high school English exam. It was finally concluded that the English part of UEE and national English exam are perceived as the most ethical forms of assessment. It also seems that authentic assessment of the language, which is the most noticeable in the pre-university English examination can contribute positively to fair assessment. The findings can be utilized for filling the fairness gap after UEE is removed from the educational system.

As a component of grammar, information structure is concerned with the degree of felicity (appropriateness) of a given linguistic form with a given communicative situation (Lambrecht, 1994). In other words, from a set of linguistic forms with a similar propositional or analytic meaning, the issue here is, “which one is more appropriate (felicitous) in a specific communicative situation?” In this study, an attempt is made to elaborate on some of the implications of the theory of information structure for a translator. To achieve this goal, a questionnaire was devised in which the subjects participated twice in a pre-test and post-test with a treatment in-between. Morphological and syntactic codings of English and Persian were the focus of the included questions. A matched T-test was then run to analyze the data. The results, in connection with syntax, revealed no significance difference in the performance of the subjects. However, the results were different as far as morphological performance of the subjects was concerned. The matched T-test showed that the attested difference in morphology was meaningful. What these findings imply for a translator is twofold: First, a literal translation works as far as syntax is concerned, while literal translation of morphological elements of SL has a less chance of success. Second, it seems that a formal training of information structure is becoming more urgent for a translator.