نشریه علم زبان
پیاپی 16 (پاییز و زمستان 1401)

Linguistic research carried out in formal theoretical frameworks, such as Generative Approaches, often show high degree of falsifiability due to their precise data observations and mathematical foundations. Combining these qualities with the psychological reality of typological studies will result to more reliable conclusions. In this paper, I tried to show that having an eye on the typological facts of a language (Farsi in this case) might end up into a more precise and realistic conclusion of a formalist linguistic analysis. Two papers are used here as sample of formalist approaches - Generative Linguistics in general and Minimalist program particularly- one on the functional head position of sentence in Persian and the other one on topicalization in Persian.

This article studies the spatial interpretation of the left-right and front-back axes in Persian in the theoretical framework of Levinson (2003) and Danziger (2010). On the horizontal plane, there are three main Frames of Reference. Of these three, the Absolute FoR is not used routinely in Persian. The other two, the Relative and Intrinsic FoRs, can potentially be the interpretation of the two main axes of the horizontal plane. In order to obtain real data from the native speakers, the “Ball & Chair” game (Bohnemeyer, 2008) was used. Data analysis shows that in all the cases where the speaker’s description caused misunderstanding for the listener, the speaker’s intended interpretation has been relative, while the listener has understood them intrinsically. For the left-right axis, whenever the speaker has considered “[az negah-e] ma” redundant and has had it decreased from the sentence and used phrases such as “chap/rast-e sandali”, there has been a possibility of misunderstanding for the listener. However, when they have used it even in its decreased form of “chap/rast-e ma” the listener has well understood the intended relative meaning. According to the data, in Persian the absolute dominant usage of left and right is relative and only in special cases are they used intrinsically. The front-back axis is also used in the relative sense but with small dominance over intrinsic.

In this research, teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers (AZFA) is considered as a discourse and its sociocultural dimension is studied under the light of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and critical classroom discourse analysis (CCDA), with a focus on culture and cultural teaching. The main goal of this analysis is to resolve common challenges on culture and cultural teachings in the AZFAs discourse and many of the common beliefs and impressions on the topic in question and these untrue, based beliefs are reviewed and by the critical attitude of this research are denaturalized and demythologized. The core data of this research are prepared by the survey method, which means to interview and talk with subjects and participants of AZFAs discourse. In this paper, based on 23 objective data, a deep gap between judgments and mental Propositions of the executives and agents of the AZFAs discourse has elucidated. This gap is in contrast with the truth about the culture and cultural teaching. Therefore, to provide a critical insight at teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers and to create a discourse-based framework on culture and cultural teachings, it is essential to make a fundamental change in our intellectual infrastructure, and fundamental revision about the issue of culture. This change is effective, when it comes to fairness and logic, and equally lies on actual and objective data which is extracted from the AZFAs discourse. Based on these data, solutions are provided in a comprehensive framework to solve mentioned gap and its related damages.

Relative construction is one of the complex syntactic constructions involving various structures depending on the different language typologies. Studies in several languages have shown that subject relative clauses (SRCs) are easier and faster to process than object relative clauses (ORCs). Some studies have proposed the topichood hypothsis to account for the ease and faster processing of the subject relative clause. However, based on this hypothesis, when the embedded noun phrase in a relative clause is a pronoun, the difficulty in the processing of object relative clauses is reduced. In the present study, the speed of the processing Persian subject and object relative clauses with full NP and pronoun were investigated on fourtu 20–30-year-old monolingual normal subjects using self-paced reading (SPR) experiment, one of the online experiments in psycholinguistic studies. The experiment was presented in a linear, noncumulative (i.e., moving window) SPR procedure with region-by-region segmentation. Each of the 16 sentential stimuli had 4 syntactic forms and collectively, 640 reading time data from the subjects were recorded. The findings indicated that the processing speed of the regions within relative clauses, i.e., the regions containing relative clause noun phrase and relative clause verb, were faster in pronominal ORCs, pronominal SRCs, full NP SRCs and full NP ORCs, respectively. However, the processing speed of the main clause verb region was a bit different in the various sentences containing relative clauses. The conclusions, in line with the results of a number of research in other languages, confirmed the topichood hypothesis with respect to the processing of Persian relative clauses.

The present study aims to analyze the process of homonym morphemes interpretation in Persian on the basis of a Perceptual approach. There have been two dominant approaches in the history of word meaning studies namely Word-based and Morpheme-based approaches which have been used by many researches in word and morphemes meaning studies until now. This research first studies the disadvantages of each of the two approaches, then with the help of 20 homonyms taken from farhang-e fešorde-ye soxan and by interviewing 50 non linguistics graduates using the Perceptual approach framework introduced by Safavi concludes that Persian speakers interpret the meaning of homonyms based on word meaning. According to this issue, unlike what has been introduced in the traditional studies of meaning known as meaning 'compositionality' (part - whole), the meaning of morphemes is interpreted by using meaning 'decompositionality' (whole - part) with the help of contextual information including perceptual context A (Linguistic context), B (The present situation in which the context A is produced), and specifically context C (The background information) based on the Perceptual approach. In fact, not having accessibility to contextual information makes language speakers confused in interpreting the morphemes in these words. So, homonym interpretation in Persian relies on the word interpretation by means of the present contextual information inside the words based on meaning decompositionality.

This study aimed to measure the articulation of the floating signifiers considering the master signifier of the discourse of "Cloud Years" novel using Ernesto Laclau’s and Theon Van Dijk's theories based on structuralist perspective. This novel written by Ali Ashraf Darvishian is a meaningful collection of linguistic and metalinguistic signs. Considering this issue, in order to explain the discourse of this novel, the authors analyze its components and described the relationship between the floating signifiers and the master signifier; then examined the transformation of "social inequality" into the master signifier and consequently the growth of socialism discourse. The main question of the present study is that how the floating signifiers of the discourse have been formed based on the master signifier with the aim of stabilizing and giving meaning to it? Based on the descriptive-analytical method, the authors have examined the novel in question at three levels.  The findings show that in this work, social inequality is considered as a master signifier in the formation of its discourse elements. Also, the floating signifiers, that the discourse of this novel is filled with, are articulated in the form of concepts such as "Social equality", all of which serve the master signifier. According to Theon Van Dijk's theory, polarization, irony, implication, metaphor, modality, comparison, agent, dramatization, explanation, repetition, and distancing are the most salient categories of ideological analysis in this discourse.

The purpose to do the present research is the identification of the type and the number of noun modifiers in Persian students’ texts (students (10-12) in grades four, five and six) in which the number 9 area of Tehran was selected in purposive sampling and also 6 schools were selected by cluster random sampling. Then, the corpus of texts written by students in grades four, five and six was collected in these schools. In total, 9 classes in grade 4, 10 and 9 ones in grade 5 and 6 respectively were involved in this research and there were 889 students. According to Morgan table, 300 texts were randomly selected in which 2203 noun phrases were analyzed according to Dependency Grammar. Based on the findings, students (10-12) have produced noun postmodifiers (6/62%) by far more than noun premodifiers (2/45%) which indicates that the production of postmodifiers is much easier for the students in these grades and they have produced the genitive modifiers in eighth position (4/03%), attributive adjectives in seventh position (1/39%), in particular, numeral and superlative adjectives in third position (1/22%) respectively more than other positions. While the index in the sixth position (0/01%) has had the lowest average percentage. Students in grade 6 have had the highest average (12/44%), showing the older the students become, the more complex noun phrases they produce. The findings of this research along with identifying the amount of  syntactic complexity of the children’s noun phrases shows the view of their language enhancement.

Languages symbolize identities. They are used to signal identities and even sometimes societies are categorized due to the language people speak. Thus, language plays a crucial role in constructing identity and its loss means the loss of certain identities. The aim of this article is to investigate the relationship between language identity development and language loss among the residents living in Kurdistan province. This work is quantitative and applied in terms of survey methodology and purpose, respectively. The Taylor (2010) Standard Language Identity Questionnaire (2010) and the UNESCO Linguistic Death Questionnaire (2003) were used to collect data. For this purpose, 407 questionnaires were distributed among the statistical samples. Sampling was done by proportional classification method. The analysis of the findings showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between language identity development and its dimensions with language loss among the citizens living in Kurdistan province. It also revealed that among the various dimensions of language identity development variables, the expectation of others has the most explanatory role. The findings of this study also showed that although the dimensions of language identity affect language loss with an almost moderate intensity, It has left the way open for cultural activists and policymakers because the variables are manageable.

In recent years, a constraint-based framework adapted from Optimality Theory to describe and [1]analyses Speech language disordes. This article describes the syntactic structure of student “A” who is a persian male deaf student, based on violation nucleus constraints in the syntactic phrases. In this paper, we first briefly discuss about of Optimality Theory and then, some of sentences that has been obtained from this student by Speech Language pathologist analyses and describes. We find that, we could described and analysed syntactic disorders by Optimality Theory. Analasys and explaining the student’s sentences give us depper understanding of his syntactic structure. By this presuposition, we must supress markedness constraints by working on the faithfulness constrains. The faithfulness constraints education, the mentioned syntactic structure will closer and closer to a natural person. It is suggested that in order to fulfill this important point, in the subject of education, the nuclei of each phrase should be taught to the student first, and in the next step, complement should be gradually added to the nuclei.

Recitation of the Holy Qur’an has its own phonological features. This paper discusses the two types of partial nasal place assimilation known as ‘Ikhfaa’ and ‘Iqlaab’ in Arabic. Ikhfaa occurs in the environment where the nasal alveolar /n/ precedes fifteen oral obstruents, including /z/, /ẓ/, /s/, /ṣ/, /t/, /ṭ/, /d/, /ḍ/, /q/, /f/, /k/, /ʤ/, /ʃ/, /ð/ and /θ/. ‘Iqlaab’ occurs in the environment in which the nasal alveolar /n/ precedes the bilabial obstruent /b/. Since ‘Iqlaab’ also involves partial nasal place assimilation, it can be considered a type of Ikhfaa. This research aimed at identifying the constraints whose interactions cause different processes of partial nasal place assimilation in the recitation of the Holy Qur’an within the framework of optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004). The results indicate that ‘AGREE [place]’ is the key markedness constrain accounted for partial nasal place assimilation in ‘Ikhfaa’ and ‘Iqlaab’. In addition, *[-long N]Obs is the markedness constrain responsible for nasals before an obstruent..

A Linguistic typology is a field of linguistics that studies the systematic similarities and differences between the different languages ​​of the world and compares the morphological and syntactic structures between different languages ​​without considering their background. The present study, in the framework of Dryer article (1992), examined the order of words in the Kholosi language. The method of data collection was through recording the answers of informants to the questionnaire that was prepared in this regard and interviewing them. The results showed that Kholosi in comparison with the Eurasia languages, by having 14 verb-final criteria and 14 verb-medial criteria have a balance between the criteria and in comparison with the languages of the world, by having 15 verb-final criteria and 17 verb-medial criteria, like Persian language, shows a tendency towards the  verb-medial group. Considering the values of the criteria in both groups of languages, we find that Kholosi has undergone fewer changes in terms of word order compared to Persian language.

This article studies stative, activity, accomplishment and achievement lexical aspects based on evidence from Persian and represents aspectual tree diagrams for them. Data analysis shows that events have various stative-dynamic interpretations. Internal argument does not play any role in stative aspectual events and collocation of these events with durative adverbs indicates their atelic and lack of aspectual interpretation domain while internal argument contrary to external one plays a role in aspectual interpretation of dynamic activity, accomplishment and achievement events. [±quantity] of internal argument against definite or indefinite argument has an effect on aspectual interpretation of events. Aspectual projection and [±telicity] of an event are located on predication phrase and external argument is out of aspect and domain of aspectual interpretation. Activity events have only the aspectual feature while the achievement and accomplishment events holds both and aspectual features. These events contrary to stative events have no aspectual features.  The and aspectual features of accomplishment events are located on different nodes having structural dominance on each other while the and aspectual features of achievement events are located on one node and they have no dominance on each other. The variability of lexical aspect between dynamic and static events and the ambiguous aspectual interpretation of activity-achievement and activity-accomplishment events proves that lexical meaning of verbs does not play a role in determining lexical aspect. Moreover, the existence of two different structures for the same meaning confirms that lexical aspect is syntactic.

The present research describes and analyzes the Grammatical Metaphors of modality in the listening module of the TOEFL official books. The present descriptive study used a qualitative content analysis approach, and data were collected via documentary method. In this regard, three official TOEFL iBT books, printed and endorsed by ETS, including a total of fourteen tests were selected: The official guide to the TOEFL test (2017), and Official TOEFL iBT (Vol.1, and Vol.2). In the listening module of each test, there are six texts in the form of conversation and lecture. First, each clause of the texts was separately examined. Then, modality metaphors were compared and analyzed in terms of type and frequency. In total, 31 conversation texts and 53 lecture texts were analyzed. Finally, a total number of 264 modality grammatical metaphors were identified. The results indicated that: 1- Modality metaphors entail a higher frequency in lecture texts than the texts of conversations, 2- The frequency of explicit subjective metaphors has a higher frequency than explicit objective metaphors. Therefore, all types of modality grammatical metaphor were found in the TOEFL texts. Considering this concept and teaching it to language learners can help them have a better comprehension and production of scientific texts..

One of the main challenges in teaching Arabic language is teaching the phonetic system in a systematic method Because language learners need to understand different phonetic levels through practical training in order to establish communicate purposefully and interact properly with native speakers, so that in addition to acceptable and comprehensible pronunciation in their interactions, they can provide correct verbal and non-verbal reactions to the spoken word. Therefore, the present study intends to study the task-based approach in teaching the Arabic sounds with a descriptive-comparative method. The results indicate that main difference between Persian sounds and Arabic is in the fourth level of difficulty (θ /ħ /ð /sˤ /dˤ /tˤ /ðˤ /ʕ /ɣ) and then in the third level (z /s /ʃ /dʒ /k /q /w). the task-based approach with the “pre-task phase” makes the learner cognitively aware of these differences as well as the level of Suprasegmental and creates the necessary preparations, then in the stage During task with emphasis on all aspects of language at the level of Segmental and suprasegmental of speech and behaviorally reinforce them by engaging the learner in applied tasks based on their needs in communication situations, emphasizing pivotal interaction. So that by using real tasks and in the context of the audio text, in addition to placing the learner in areal communication situation, the challenge of changing the properties of sounds, is solved by accompaniment, and by stabilizing the cognitive dimension and repetition of tasks in quasi-real situations in the post-task phase. In creases the communication ability of language learners. Therefore, it can be said that the task-based approach is quite suitable for use in teaching the phonetic system of the Arabic language.

This research is an attempt to investigate the interactional metadiscourse markers in the inaugural speeches of the U.S. and Russian presidents (from 1991- 2018) within the framework of Hyland’s interpersonal metadiscourse model. The data were collected from the transcription of the speeches of the respective Presidents and quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze the collected data. To analyze the data statistically and to calculate and determine the significance of the differences Chi-square test was used. The result of the analysis showed a significant difference in the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in the inaugural speeches the Presidents of the two countries. With a closer analysis, this point also was made clear that there was a significant difference in the use of boosters and hedges. Also, statistical calculations showed that there is a significant difference in using engagement markers; this significant difference was seen especially in the use of self-mention markers..

This study investigates the uniformity of Persian and English inflectional affixes based on Natural Morphology Theory to show how the uniformity of inflectional affixes of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs can be explained. The present research has exercised mixed (qual-quan) and descriptive-analytical method. Research data were selected from both Persian and English corpora by the means of a random sampling method; afterward, the data were analyzed according to Dressler and Mayerthaler’s approach considering uniformity. In terms of frequency, the results identified uniformed forms in both languages and indicate that in the Persian corpus, 526 inflectional affixes of verbs, and all affixes of adjectives (185) are uniformed, although inflectional affixes of nouns lack uniformity. While in English corpus, inflectional verb affixes (89) represent uniformity, 172 inflectional noun affixes and 23 adjective affixes lack uniformity. Generally, the more frequency in uniformity of affixes shows they are less marked and more natural. Therefore, tense affix, negation, and subjunctive mood in the inflectional system are more natural than optative mood, past tense affix-ad, and imperative affix. Person and number markers are more natural than imperfect aspect in English. It is worth mentioning that all portmanteau morphs, suppletions and fusion forms reduce the naturalness of both languages due to the fact that there is no one-one relationship between their forms and meanings. The achievements of the current study can be useful in the field of translation studie

Fundamentals of Linguistic Typology by Vali Rezai and Fatemeh Bahrami is written based on the curriculum of the linguistic typology course for MA degree in linguistics, and aims at presenting basic concepts of this field to students and other interested audience. The book is organized in 10 chapters, which, apart from those devoted to the history, methodology, and applications of typology, have self- contained topics and content, so they can be read in any sequence. After mentioning the main topics introduced in each chapter the book and its advantages, this review sets out some of their deficiencies and shortcomings. These were discussed in several subtitles presented respectively as organization, inaccuracy in expression, inaccuracy in quotations, inappropriate examples, terminology, and less intelligible statements. In spite of aforementioned points, Fundamentals of Linguistic Typology can serve as a useful, informative introduction to this field.