نشریه زبان و زبان شناسی
پیاپی 12 (پاییز و زمستان 1389)

In Persian, focusing triggers scrambling in which the focused element moves to the specifier of focus projection either in spell-out or in logical form. The results of a study which checked this hypothesis showed that first of all contrastive reading is not the only reading of the focused phrase when focusing happens in spell-out; secondly, contrary to what is reported in the related literature, when focusing happens in LF, both the focused phrase and the focused feature are able to move; and thirdly, the movement of more than one non-inherently focused element is permissible in surface structure of sentences in Persian.

This descriptive study examined the use of clause, its word order and its three systems in four thousand written clauses produced by second to fifth grade elementary school girls in Kerman. Bateni’s adaptation of Halliday's functional scale and category to the Persian language was used as the framework of the study. The results demonstrate a hierarchy in the production of written syntactic structure by the subjects. Similar to the spoken language, complex and marked structures such as questions and passives, are produced later and less than simple and unmarked ones. With regard to the advent of complex structures and the increase of their use, the role of education in the development of written language among these students seems to be positive.

This paper reports a study carried out to find answers to the following general questions: Is the analysis utilized in the Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar, concerning different types of themes in particular, fully applicable to Persian primary school textbooks and students’ compositions or not? Secondly, is it necessary to apply the findings of modern linguistics to L1 textbooks and to developing students’ writing skills? For this purpose, a Persian language corpus was analyzed based on Halliday (2004). In addition to answering these questions, this research achieved further findings.

Some speakers prefer or need to keep their words secret. Therefore, they developed a special language variety to communicate with each other without problem. This variety is called argot, and like other varieties has its unique phonological, morphological and semantic rules. To identify the word formation process of argot among Persian teenagers and adolescents, a field research was carried out among the 21 year-old students of Islamic Azad Unversity, Takestan branch. The identified word formation processes were coinage, extension, close interpretation, use of proper noun as generic, borrowing, use of antonyms, abbreviation, phonological segmentation, use of acronyms, compounding, clipping and blending.

The present article reports a study which examined the essence and implication of real name, the relationship between electronic name address and individual identity, and the individual and social value of the nomination phenomenon. The assumption was that the unconscious choice of a theme of nomination partially reveals a user’s view of his/her self and his/her individual identity. To this end, the researcher developed a questionnaire consisting of 10 multiple-choice questions. Based on the results obtained from 222 respondents, 13 themes of virtual nomination were identified and analyzed with the use of descriptive statistics. The results of the study showed that the user’s choice of name in the virtual world can, as a signifying system, provide clues to his/her psychological profile, contrary to the discourse system of the real name which is referential. On the other hand, the user’s personality can, to some extent, influence his/her choice of the virtual name. So, there are some differences in the use and choice of real and virtual names, in that virtual names entail individual and social identity of the internet users, whereas virtual names throw light on their personality.

The main focus of this paper is the study of ellipsis of verbal group in live radio football reports. Different types of ellipsis are classified according to Halliday and Hassan, Quirk, and also from the perspective of cognitive semantics. The data of the study were gathered from two live radio football reports. The findings demonstrated that Halliday’s lexical ellipsis can be sub-classified in Persian into intransitive verb ellipsis, passive verb ellipsis, and transitive verb ellipsis.

Toponymy is the study of place-names, based on etymological, historical and geographical information. This research tries to have a derivational morphology survey on toponyms of Hamedan province. The main discussion proposes a true method to analyze toponyms based on derivational morphology and historical linguistics point of view. This paper gives many applied affixes supported by clear examples. Since toponyms have been subjected to many linguistic changes throughout the history, this paper focuses on the syntactic structure analysis. There is also a new function proposed for the affixes which are found in the toponyms studied in this research.