مجله جستار های زبانی
سال ششم شماره 3 (پیاپی 24، امرداد و شهریور 1394)

As Saussure says, the meaning of the unites is not in the meaning itself, but the meaning is essentially an aspect of differentiation. In this perspective, all values are attributed to the “relationship”, not to individual units or separately of words what happens accordingly for a subject (“I” or “we") and its identity: the subject defines itself by the “difference", and in order to achieve the specified identity, it needs to other one. So Landowski suggests a general pattern that consists of four different strategies about the relationship between "I" as dominant and "other"as dominated. This pattern originates from semiotics square of Greimas. These strategies include assimilation, exclusion, segregation and identity acceptance. The main objective of this paper is to show that this pattern can be used in translation’s domain that is a challenging atmosphere of contact between our language and other foreign language. But the main question is that how Landowski identity pattern can be used basically for a new reading of the translation strategies.

Based on Talmy’s (2000) lexicalization patterns, languages are considered either verb-framed or satellite-framed in terms of the language unit (either verb roots or satellites) that encodes Path of motion. According to Talmy’s hypothesis Indo-European languages except for Post Hellenic and Romans fall into satellite-framed class, since speakers of these languages conflate Manner of motion in the verb roots, while Path appears in satellites. This paper investigates the pervasive pattern Persian pre-school speaker children use to express motion components, namely Manner and Path in elicited narratives based on ten short animated clips simultaneously demonstrating Manner and path of motion. The Children’s narratives have further been compared to those of adults in order to highlight differences and similarities in mapping two semantic components onto language units. In the end, it has been discussed whether or not Persian, as an Indo-European language fits into Talmy’s binary typology. The analysis in this study illustrates that when narrating motion pictures, children follow the same pattern as adults do to encode Manner and Path; both groups employ path verbs with or without path satellites for vertical displacements, and prepositional phrases for horizontal trajectories where boundary crossing occurs. Manner of motion is either conflated in verb roots or not mentioned. Therefore as far as Path of motion is concerned, Persian language within the scope of the present study fits into verb-framed class of languages

ranted that advertisements reflect the dominant mindset of a society, this study intends to scrutinize the use of argumentation speech act in both Persian and English advertisements with the purpose of discovering the underlying conventions of these argumentations. With that in mind, based on Toulmin’s (1958) model of argumentation, one hundred advertisements (50 Persian ads and 50 English ads) were randomly selected from the popular magazines published in both Persian and English languages. The advertisements which were selected in this study were published in the last decade. Chi-square test analysis revealed significant differences between the Persian and English advertisements, indicating that claim outweighs the other elements of the argumentation speech act in the Persian advertisements. However, the English ones employ data more than the other modules of the argumentation speech act. In the end, the cultural reasons causing the differences were discussed.

The study of speech acts in religious texts is one of the ways to shed light on the hidden layers of the discourse and the recognition of its intended effect. This study is the first to compare the speech acts in a selection of Meccan and Medinan Surahs of the Holy Quran. In a random selection of 40 pages, including 20 pages of Meccan and 20 pages of Medinan Surahs, the frequency of the speech acts was calculated based on Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Searl’s fivefold classification. The results showed that the distribution of speech act types in Meccan Surahs is significantly different from those of Medinan ones. In Meccan Surahs, the representative act has the highest frequency and expressives, directives, commissives and declaratives rank next. In Medinan Surahs, however, the frequency of the representative acts has reduced considerably resulting in the rise of other acts. The statistics suggest that the expression of Devine news and teachings has gained the highest volume in Meccan Surahs, while in Medinan Surahs, direction, prohibition, giving good tidings and warnings are of higher priority.

Tragedy and Taziyeh are considered as classical dramatic forms that due to their roots in ritual and their dependence on religion, culture, myth and tone can be studied in a comparative manner. The aim of the present paper is to study the dramatic aspects and capacities of these two dramatic forms in comparison with each other. To achieve this goal, different parameters such as narrative or representation, alike and character, performance style, verbal effects, catharsis and audience impact are compared. In this study, we seek answer to the following questions; how the dramatic capacities of tragedy can be preferred over the Taziyeh or vice versa. It seems that in the light of a semiotic approach and one of its sub branches, the digital and analog semiotics of Louis-Jean Calvet, the extent of dramatic similarities and differences between these two forms can be better investigated. Another objective of this research is to challenge the existing comparative studies in the context of Taziyeh and tragic or epic plays that seems to have ignored the performance style, the most important element of Taziyeh and have assessed its values than other types.

In this study, we attempt to investigate the representation of sexuality in the images of English language teaching books (Four Corners (2) – American English File (2) – Interchange (2)) based on visual - social semiotics according to Halliday’s Functional linguistics and clearly followed by Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006 (1996). Creating text, as an example image, is a discoursal and as a result a social action. This social action on textbooks which have been written for non-English language learners works at higher level. It works in intercultural level. As a result, there is always a constant problem: Is it possible that the central culture (English language society) creates discourse via the texts of the textbooks in which non-English speakers are considered strangers and they themselves are considered natural and familiar? This research via investigating images, texts, verbal titles and the margin of those images searches how English language teaching books portray English culture as evident, natural and inevitable and others as foreigners who only lose their alterity if they are attracted by this culture. The main goal of this research is to analyze English language teaching books and investigate their different discoursal, social and cultural outputs. Also this research tries to investigate the role of images in intercultural discoursal context. Cultural differences and their reflection in English language teaching textbooks with ideological outputs of images and modality in the images of textbooks are other marginal goals of this research.

Given the fact that corrective feedback has been proved to have a positive impact on the acquisition and development of second/foreign language, the aim of the present study was to investigate and compare the effect of oral and written corrective feedback on the development of discoursal and metadiscoursal aspects of Iranian EFL learners ‘writing. To this end, a total of 67 intermediate learners were selected, homogenized, and given a pre-test of writing. Then, written and oral metalinguistic corrective feedback on coherence, cohesion, and metadiscourse markers were given to the first and second group respectively. At the end, the two groups were given a post-test. The results of the study showed that the group which received oral metalinguistic feedback, compared with the written feedback group, could have a better writing performance as far as discoursal and metadiscoursal features of writing are concerned. It was also shown that transition markers and engagement markers were the most and the least frequent discourse markers among the two groups. It can be concluded that oral feedback has a significant effect on EFL leaners’ writing ability, as far as discoursal and metadiscoursal features are concerned. This study has implications for language instructors as well as language researchers.

This paper studies the phonetic aspects of vowel reduction in Persian. Vowel reduction was examined in unstressed syllables using duration and F1 and F2 spectral values across different consonantal contexts. Results showed a strong effect of stress on duration across all consonantal contexts, but the results for F1 and F2 frequencies varied with vowel type as well as consonantal context. Most vowels had non-significant formant changes in unstressed condition as compared to stressed condition; however, the vowel /a/ had significant spatial reduction in the direction of the center of the vowel space. The results support neither of the two known articulatory hypotheses concerning vowel reduction, namely, centralization (in unstressed position) by target undershoot, and reduction due to co-articulation with the consonant context. Instead, the results lend support to the dispersion theory of speech perception which argues that vowel systems cross languages tend to utilize the available acoustic vowel space so that maximal auditory contrast is maintained. It is further argued that the position of vowels in the acoustic vowel space is influenced by this dynamical repelling force which has come to be called adaptive dispersion.

Historically, scholars of language teaching have got the advantage of linguistic theories and used their findings to get a better teaching outcome. However as many experts believe, English teaching in Iran has not been successful mostly because of the lack in scientific basis. Many studies have been conducted based on Halliday's systemic functional grammar since it emerged to apply its benefit in language teaching. This research has tried to have a textual analysis on Iranian high school English text books based on the mentioned theory to specify the kind and the frequency of themes in the text reading of these four books. After the analysis of 1303 clauses, the results showed that there is not a definite pattern in organizing the texts based on the kind or the frequency of the clauses and in opposition to our expectations, the frequency of marked themes, which can result in a higher difficulty level of a text, has not increased from lower levels to higher ones. Marked themes are even more frequent in grade one.

Hedging is a rhetorical strategy which speaker employs for lack of a full commitment either to the full category membership of a term or expression (content mitigation), or to the intended illocutionary force of the utterance (force mitigation). Hedging must be considered as an intentional action. The speaker chooses a linguistic device over the propositional content of the message which will affect the interpretation of the utterance; either modifies the content of the utterance or its force. Although hedges have no certain lexical meaning; they have powerful functional and pragmatic meaning. This research has been done by means of descriptive-analytical method with purpose of definition, introducing of applications of hedges based on Fraser(2009), and finally a case study of hedges in political discourse of press conferences of president Ahmadinejad within the framework of critical discourse analysis. The results show that the president (Ahmadinejad) has used hedging as a political language strategy to express vagueness and evasion which are one of the skillfully policies in political speech. He applied passive voice and impersonal pronouns more than other kinds of hedges.

In this article, the formal structure of the Persian relative clauses (restrictive and nonrestrictive) is examined. This study focuses on the possibility of extraposition of the relative clause to the right of its canonical position and it’s adjunction to TP or FocP. In general there are three approaches to extraposition in languages: rightward movement account, late merge analysis by which the relative clause should be late mereged with the constituents which they modify, leftward movement of the non-clausal part of an argument and stranding the clause. Based on some syntactic considerations in Persian such as having multiple clauses at the end of the sentence, movement of result clauses to the final position of the sentence, movement of relative clause with coordinate antecedent; relative clauses can moved to the right of the sentence and the extra posed element would be adjoined to TP or FocP and hence out the c-command domain of its trace.

Idiomatic structures are of the forms which have been investigated to argue in support of some theories in Minimalist Program. In this regard the present study investigates the syntactic structure of Persian Idiomatic Expressions (PIE) in the frame work of minimalist approach. In this study a sample of 200 Persian idioms, selected randomly, have been studied to examine their flexibility in terms of their subjects, tenses and some other structures larger than Inflectional Phrase (IP). The study supported the idea that a phrase is formed by merging head ''X" and its complement, and X-bar with its Specifier to form X-bar and XP respectively. The analyses of the idioms shows that in the smallest form of idioms a verb is merged with its complement to form a "V-bar" and a V-bar is merged with a subject to form a VP. In this way the evidences from Persian support the idea of the Subject Internal Hypothesis. The study also shows that idioms in Persian are fixed in bottom up way in forming Phrase Structure as in V-bar, VP, IP(TP), CP respectively in clause structure level and even in larger ones.

Noun incorporation is considered as a word formation process which is not treated similarly in different languages and has various representations. The incorporated noun is unmarked for features of definiteness and specificity; it does not take definite article, demonstratives or case marking. This study aims at finding an explanatory account for this phenomenon in Persian in order to decide whether a particular structure involves incorporation or not. To do this, incorporation is examined with respect to its relation to transitivity as a prototypical phenomenon. In this regard, it may be analyzed according to the notion of the degree of transitivity and the presence or absence of different transitivity parameters. The results show that the two parameters of individuation of object as well as affectedness of object specifically have role in the occurrence of incorporation. Aspect, also, has some effect through its relation to affectedness. Therefore, incorporation is better to be considered as an instance of transitivity decrease which occurs due to the lack of object individuation and object affectedness in a transitive clause. The deviation from the prototypical transitive clause due to the absence of these features is responsible for the structural differences of the incorporated clauses with that prototype.