ابوالفضل علمدار

The purpose of the present article is to provide a new and practical definition for idioms and collocations, based on syntactic criteria, not merely semantic. One of the important criteria for distinguishing these two types of phrases (idioms and collocations) is the flexibility of their constituent elements. Idioms and collocations have not yet been studied within a syntactic approach. According to Construction Grammar, idioms were analyzed based on four syntactic tests: "passivization", "clefting", "dislocation" and "interrogation". Construction Grammar is a set of cognitive grammars that considers construction as a symbolic unit consisting of form and meaning poles. Two hundred idioms were analyzed. These idioms were collected from two main sources, namely The Colloquial Persian Dictionary (Abolhassan Najafi, 2008) and The Two-volume Dictionary of Kenayat-e Sokhan (Hassan Anvari, 2019). The four constructions of each idiom were judged syntactically by 15 people as research participants. The meanings of some of these constructions showed that the syntactic flexibility of all idioms is not the same. Some idioms were flexible to syntactic changes and therefore behaved similarly to collocations. The flexibility of idioms led to the introduction of a new definition of these types of phrases based on syntactic criteria. Thus, such phrases were considered a kind of collocation, not an idiom. In other words, those lexical phrases were called idioms which were inflexible to these syntactic constructions.

Idioms and collocations are part of lexical phrases which are of high importance in lexicography. One of the criteria for distinguishing these two types of phrases from each other is the inflexibility of their constituent elements. Idioms, unlike collocations, are not flexible in terms of word order and are always used in a fixed and specific form. The purpose of the present article was to show firstly whether all Persian idioms are inflexible against syntactic changes or some are flexible; secondly, to indicate how a new lexical phrase is created as a result of converting an idiom into a collocation. To illustrate this phenomenon, a new and practical definition for idioms and collocations, based on syntactic criteria not merely semantic, was provided. According to Construction Grammar, idioms were analyzed based on four syntactic tests: ‘passivization’, ‘clefting’, ‘dislocation’, and ‘interrogation’. Two hundred idioms were collected from two of the most up-to-date and comprehensive sources, namely Farsi Amiyaneh Dictionary (Abolhassan Najafi, 2008) and the two-volume Dictionary of Kenayat-e Sokhan (Hassan Anvari, 2019). Some idioms were flexible to syntactic changes, and behaved similarly to collocations. The flexibility of idioms led to introducing a new definition of these phrases based on syntactic criteria. Thus, such phrases were considered a kind of collocation, not an idiom. The result showed that converting an idiom into a collocation always creates a lexical phrase or lexeme with a new meaning. Finally, a plan was introduced to represent such idioms practically in Persian dictionaries.

The purpose of the present article was to describe and study the agreement system typologically in Ayaski dialect based on Comrie's pentagonal system (1978). This language variety is one of the subgroups of the Tuni dialect, which is spoken in the north of South Khorasan province, and belongs to the southern western branch of Iranian languages. The data of the current research has been collected by field method such as observation and interview with Ayaski speakers. All collected sentences were obtained with the participation of at least ten Ayaski speakers aged between 34 and 71. The analysis of available data showed that the agreement system in this dialect is split, and is sensitive to aspect, time and person. In sentences with present tense, both with intransitive and transitive verbs, the agreement system was from a nominative-accusative type. This agreement did not depend on the intransitive or transitive verb, so the agreement system in the present tense was not sensitive to the transitivity of the verb. In sentences with past tense, both with intransitive and transitive verbs, the agreement system was from an oblique-accusative type. In the nominative-accusative system, the subject in half of the cases was formed as an agreement inflectional suffix in the verb. In the oblique-accusative system, agreement were also manifested by oblique clitics, and were of neutral type.

The present study analyzed and described the process of coining new words and terms related to the Corona disease, which has recently been faced by the international community. Official news agencies and websites in both Persian and English languages, such as IRNA, ISNA, Khabar Online, BBC and CNN, were the most important sources of data collection. In addition, some online dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster, Oxford, Longman, Cambridge and Urban were used. The factors of age, gender and level of education were not considered in the present study, and the research method was descriptive-analytical as well. Word-formation processes for the research data, which consisted of 152 words and terms, included derivation, compounding, compounding and derivation, coinage, abbreviation, shortening, acronym, blending, and borrowing. Then the coined phrases (syntactic groups) were classified into two types of noun and adjective. The findings showed that the formation of syntactic groups with 72% and the process of blending with 33% had the highest percentage of occurrence in Persian and English, respectively. The results of the present study can help linguists in measuring the generativity of word-formation processes in the face of natural events and, subsequently, social changes.