مجله زبانشناسی و گویش های خراسان
پیاپی 7 (پاییز و زمستان 1391)

The link between studies in discourse analysis and corpus linguistics has created new fields of research previously unattended. One of these areas is the study of semantic prosody produced through frequent collocation of a lexical item with a collection of words. Semantic prosody is the positive، negative or neutral shade of meaning which a seemingly neutral word adopts after frequent collocation with positive، negative or neutral words. This is an important concept in corpus linguistics which has recently interested the linguists and attracted their attention. The present paper introduces this concept in Persian for the first time، reviews its applications and provides examples in a corpus of Persian texts. The theoretical framework of this study is based on the contributions of Sinclair (1987) and Louw (1993) and later studies following these two. A number of verbal complexes were searched in the internet in order to compile a corpus of Persian sentences containing these verbs and their collocating words. The results indicated that statistically significant differences can be observed in the semantic prosody of these sample verbs، hence the realisation of semantic prosody patterns in Persian collocations

The category of Verb as the nucleus of sentence has a significant importance in grammar. This grammatical category has specific semantic and syntactic characteristics in different languages. In Role and Reference Grammar as a functional grammar، predicates are classified into five classes including states، activities، achievements، accomplishments and active-accomplishments. These five classes are distinguished from each other on the basis of their temporal properties. States are non-dynamic and temporally unbounded; activities are dynamic and temporally unbounded; achievements are temporally bounded instantaneous changes، while accomplishments are temporally extended. Active accomplishments are activity predicates with an end point. This paper explores syntactic and semantic behavior of static verbs in Persian. First، I will establish some diagnostic tests for verb classification in Persian. Afterwards، the characteristics of static verbs will be demonstrated. It will be shown that static verbs are not used in progressive aspect. Moreover، two-place static verbs have no passive form since the object of such verbs is not considered as a prototypical object.

In different linguistic studies, usually only one type of collocations has been investigated and in the classifications that have been introduced for different types of collocations, just formal and grammatical properties of the words within collocations have been mentioned. This study, for the first time, introduces eight criteria such as Pivot word, Feature percolation and separability for defining Persian collocations. Persian collocations are also classified from different points of view such as adjacency, number and type of words and textual and contextual properties of collocating words, in different classes of collocations such as adjacent and nonadjacent collocations, simple and complex collocations, semantic collocations, contextual collocations etc. Regarding different criteria introduced in this paper and considering the size of the linguistic corpus with more than 200 thousand words, the results of this study can be used in different studies on Persian collocations and different types of word combinations. It is also possible to use the achievements of this study in lexicography and teaching special Persian collocations to foreigners learning Persian.

Feature geometry، which is a basic assumption in current phonology، is concerned with the notion that the features are not an unstructured set، but are arranged hierarchically into a constituent structure tree. According to evidences in different languages، various models have been set forth on feature geometry framework. Exploring Persian phonological data and digging up evidences accordingly، this article tries to ascertain the model of feature geometry which would best characterize Persian phonological system.

Bilinguals make up a high proportion of the world population. However, these speakers are facing miscellaneous language learning difficulties throughout the world. The situation would be exacerbated when the communicative role of language is considered. In other words, bilinguals usually feel discouraged once they are involved in a conversation in their second language with others. In this study, some communicative aspects of Kurdish-Persian-speaking students will be analyzed through assessing their narrative production by means of narrating a wordless picture book known as The Frog Story. Results show that these students face various difficulties in narrating the events in the story in Persian. It would also be worth mentioning that many of these problems remain unsolved for some years. These shortcomings might be attributed to the bilingual education system employed in the Iranian educational system, known as the "Submersion Method".

Standardizing Persian alphabet letters in PCs، note books and cell phones is an important issue in Persian writing. Diversity of letters assigned to a given key as well as inappropriateness of the assigned letters to keys in relation to the frequency of letters are the most important issues for the Iranians using Persian keyboards. Although the standard Persian keyboard has been organized in a way that all similar letters stand side by side and they have almost been organized alphabetically، the most and the least frequent letters are not the most and the least accessible ones. To assign letters to keys، the researcher calculated the frequency of Persian letters in a corpus of about 1،270،000 letters. The results showed that there is no significant relationship between the frequency of the letters and the accessibility of the keys assigned to them. The study analyzed the keys organized in each of three rows on the Persian keyboards based on the frequency of letters assigned to them. It was found out that the letters with a high degree of frequency stand close to the letters with low frequency. The researcher designed a keyboard layout based on relative frequency of letters and fingering frequency.