Iranian Journal of Language Issues
Volume:1 Issue: 2, 2016

The purpose of this study is to investigate the change route of Persian address terms in a period of two hundred years, divided into three distinct historical sessions including Qajar (1170/1791-1304/1925), Pahlavi (1305/1926-1357/1979), and Post Islamic Revolution (1357/ 1979 -up to now). Data was extracted from a corpus of 24 novels and travel notebooks which were selected from the three periods under study. Data analysis indicates that Persian address terms and types have changed through time in line with changes in society. They have shown to change in different ways of deletion, addition and change in frequency, in all three historical periods of Persian language. Increase in the use of three categories of “personal names”, “intimacy terms”, and “zero address terms”; and decrease in the use of “honorifics”, “educational/cultural titles”, and “teknonyms” in all periods reveal that the use of Persian address terms has moved from more formality/less intimacy to less formality/more intimacy. Increase in the use of formal and informal religious titles in Post Islamic Revolution period is the logical result of establishment of an Islamic government. Also, changes in address terms and types are to a large extent affected by different social factors, the most influencing of them are; religion, politics, education, gender-equity, social situations and interpersonal relations.

This study was conducted to examine EFL learner's use of help-seeking strategy in their writing process under two individualistic modules (individual and emailing classes) and two collaborative modules (collaborative and wiki classes). This research included a sample (N= 100) of undergraduate university students enrolled in EFL writing courses during a single semester. The data were collected separately in each module, employing online feedback for wiki and emailing modules, and conventional pen and paper type of feedback for individualistic and collaborative classroom modules. The results of the study showed that emailing module had the highest level of help-seeking among wiki, collaborative classroom, and individualistic classroom modules. In the present study, various factors that may have contributed to learner's willingness to seek help in emailing context are discussed and implications for further research and practice are also presented.

In this article, we analyze different anger metaphors and metonymies in Ilami Kurdish. Indeed, it is believed that, through examining the anger (idiomatic) expressions (including metaphor and metonymy) taken from Ilami native individuals, we can probably figure out how anger may be conceptualized in Ilami dialect. By analyzing our data, we noticed that Ilami anger metaphors and metonymies are diverse, as we found different source domains like “animal”, “razor”, “irritating smell”, and many more. Greatly affected by cultural factors, many of these expressions may not go beyond Ilam‟s linguistic map, as some of the expressions are about the local people who live or lived in the region some time ago, although, as indicated throughout the paper, other expressions may overlap with those of other cultures. Another facet of the research is devoted to representing the roles body parts‟ names play in some of anger expressions. Regarding this part, it was figured out that taboo words related to body parts are productively used in these expressions, which potentially intensify the degree of anger emotion in the given metaphors/ metonymies.

The social state of the Sikh‟s society and their language(s) in Zahedan, located in southeastern Iran, are studied in this paper. The study communicates general information about the Sikhs in this city such as the formation of this society and their population in Zahedan, their social life, and the languages they speak; some of them resulted from the language contacts. The data was gathered by interviewing eight middle-aged Sikh males and from the Documents Center and National Library of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Zahedan. The investigation reveals that almost a large number of Sikhs have migrated from India to Iran, for a better life, during the early years of the 20th century, and that different factors have gradually caused their population to decrease severely. The Sikhs have been prosperous sellers, and their social communication has been highly limited among themselves. Sikhs, who were already multilingual, have added the languages of Persian, Balochi, and the Sistani dialect, all spoken in Zahedan, to their list of multilinguality. Among these varieties, they can speak Persian, the dominant language, more fluently. The phenomenon of language contact has had a lexical influence on the Panjabi spoken by the Sikhs in Zahedan.

This article aims at contrasting the use of metadiscoursal markers in English and Persian Newspaper Editorials as persuasive text types. The mentioned markers are linguistic constituents in the text which do not enhance the propositional content of it, but they fulfill Halliday‟s (1985) textual and interpersonal functions of language. The main research question was related to the existence of any difference between English and Persian newspaper editorials in their use of metadiscoursal markers. Initially, some of the most frequent markers from five subcategories of Text Connectives, Illocution Markers, Hedges, Emphatics, and Attitude Markers were found in both English and Persian newspapers. Subsequently, the frequency of occurrence of these markers in both English and Persian corpus consisting of 44 randomly selected editorials (18,000 words in each) from several English and Persian newspapers was recorded. Then, using a two-way chi square analysis, the overall x2 obs was proved to be highly significant. So, the null hypothesis of no difference was confidently rejected. Finally, in order to reveal the contribution of each subcategory to the overall x 2 value, one-way chi square analyses were applied to the subcategories. Our findings revealed that only two of the markers‟ subcategories were statistically significant. This difference is mainly due to the differing spirits existing in the communities considered. Concerning the minor research question (Is Persian a reader or writer- responsible language as compared and contrasted with English) it was revealed that, as opposed to English writers, Persian writers are more likely to be writer-oriented in their works.

The present study investigated the role played by gender in comprehension of culturally familiar and unfamiliar texts. One hundred university intermediate TEFL students (50 males and 50 females) participated in this study. These students were given an Iranian (culturally familiar) and an English (culturally unfamiliar) story to read in two separate sessions. After reading these texts, they went through two reading comprehension measures. First, they were asked to write down in their mother tongue anything they could remember from the texts immediately after they finished reading them. Then, they completed a set of reading comprehension questions at the end of the study. The results of this study showed no significant effect of gender on reading both the familiar and unfamiliar texts. The findings are discussed and pedagogical implications are provided.

This study tried to take a step in analyzing the speech act of ordering as a distinct case in the researches done about speech acts. It aimed at investigation of students‟ performance of speech act of ordering and its similarities and differences between English native speakers and Iranian EFL learners. To this end, a DCT consisting of 20 different situations was distributed among 150 participants in Iran and the United State. Data were analyzed by employing percentage and chi-square. The results revealed both similarities and differences in using speech act of ordering in such a way that both native speakers and Iranian EFL learners used almost the same strategies for ordering but differed in the frequency of applying them.