امید طبیب زاده

Geminacy appears in two ways cross-linguistically: either as consonant cluster or as consonant lengthening. Consonant clusters or doublings happen in languages like English in which geminacy is not contrastive tautomorphemically and therefore can't make any minimal pairs; and consonant lengthening belongs to languages like Arabic and Italian in which geminacy is contrastive and make minimal pairs. Based on the typology of geminate inventories (Gordon 2016) and some phonetic, phonological and morphological correlates of consonant lengthening (Blevins 2005), it has been shown that although Persian has true tautomorphemic geminate, geminacy is a kind of consonant cluster in this language and has nothing to do with consonant lengthening. It has been discussed that there are a few minimal pairs of singleton and geminate consonants in this language, but they can be considered as nothing because they are all very old or borrowed forms used rarely by the native speakers.

In this article, first the distinctive features of Persian phonological system based on articulatory features have been described, then the feature specification of 29 Persian phonemes in two tables of consonants and vowels have been presented. In the next section, the theory of feature geometry and such concepts as feature tree and segment trees have been briefly explained. The final part of this article deals with some incomplete natural classes.

Trubetzkoy (1939) and Jakobson (1941), and especially Jakobson and Halle (1956), spoke about distinctive features for the first time. They introduced these features mainly based on the acoustic characteristics, but due to the poor technologies of the sound analysis devices at that time, they could not do the job as they should. About a decade later, Chomsky and Halle (1968) replaced acoustic features with articulatory distinctive features and presented the first table of articulatory distinctive features. With the improvement of the level of acoustics studies, some researchers again tried to adjust these tables according to acoustics features, but articulatory distinctive features also maintained their importance and underwent many developments and changes (for example, see Gussenhoven and Jacobs 2017: 64-75).

In early distinctive features tables, the order of presentation of features was not very important and these features were presented in any arbitrary order, but during the research that resulted in feature geometry, features were included in a tree-like hierarchical structure called feature tree (Clements & Hume 1996: 245). Now, based on this hierarchical structure, for which several forms have been introduced so far, it is possible to determine the order of presentation of features within the features tables as well as the matrices of each sound.

In this article, we try to specify the Persian phoneme features based on their articulatory properties, and then introduce the phoneme feature table of this language based on the model presented by Gussenhoven and Jacobs (2017: 64-75). Based on the theory of feature geometry then, we display the feature tree of this language and extract segment trees of individual Persian phonemes from it.

In the last part of this article, by mentioning some examples, we show the use of feature analysis in explaining the natural classes of sounds and the natural classes of features, and then we talk about the natural class of long and short Persian vowels. We will see that these two natural classes in Persian have some characteristics of natural classes, and lack some others, and therefore we call them incomplete natural classes. In this part, I introduce two natural segment classes of the so-called long and short vowels in Persian, i.e., /i α u/ and /e a o/ respectively. Natural segment classes are groups of phonemes with two characteristics: firstly, that the language has the same behavior with them, and secondly that the number of features necessary to describe each class must be less than the number of features necessary to describe each member of that class. I will show that /i α u/ and /e a o/ are natural segment classes only based on the first characteristics and not the second one. This contradiction may be related to the historical changes of Persian phonological system, in which quantity used to be a distinctive feature, but today it no longer has such a role. I suggest that such classes having one of the two conditions of natural classes, to be called incomplete natural classes.

In this article, I described Persian distinctive features based on their articulatory properties, then included those features in the hierarchical structure of a feature tree according to the theory of feature geometry. I determined the order of presentation of features in this table, based on a feature tree, and based on the same tree, I displayed segment trees of all Persian phonemes. Describing the natural segment and feature classes is another topic of this article. In the final part of this article, I talked about the importance of feature analysis in explaining natural segment and feature classes with some examples, and at the end, I talked about the possibility of incomplete natural segment classes versus complete natural segment classes in languages.

Syllabic meter is formed by the regular repetition of syllables, pauses (caesurae), and hemistiches. The quantity of syllables as well as their weight have no functional role in the structure of syllabic meter, therefore this meter is substantially different with the Persian quantitative meter in classical poetry and Persian isochronous accentual folk meter which are based mainly on syllable weight and metrical accents respectively. Although the syllabic meter is usually current in such syllable-timed languages as French in which syllables have equal quantities, sometimes, for some historical and or cultural reasons, evidences of syllabic meter have been observed in languages such as Persian in which syllables have different quantities. Syllabic meter, as it has been mentioned already, is not current in Persian at all, but this meter has been used by some poets in Persian from the ancient times to the present day. This paper deals with the structural analysis of such poems. In this article, after a brief discussion on the classification of different meters in world languages, Persian syllabic meter has been introduced and it structural characteristics has been shown as follows: 1. Persian poets, when composing in this meter, make use of mostly long (heavy) syllables; 2. The pauses in this meter are always of caesura types, i.e. it appears always after a phonological word (or prosodic constituent) break; 3. Although the end part of each pause in this poem is accompanied always by a stress, this stress is not a metrical one, but a pitch accent, and this point shows clearly that stress has just a secondary role in the main structure of this meter in Persian. In this article a method has been also introduced for representing and classifying all kinds of Persian syllabic meter.

This paper deals with two narrative poems: "Zohre and Manouchehr" by Iraj Mirza, and "Venus and Adonis" by William Shakespeare. It has been shown that "Zohre and Manouchehr" has been composed based on a complete translated version (perhaps in Frech) of "Venus and Adonis". It has also been discussed that Iraj Mirza has taken a look at an incomplete Persian Translated version of "Venus and Adonis" by Lotf-Ali Souratgar. This paper deals with two narrative poems: "Zohre and Manouchehr" by Iraj Mirza, and "Venus and Adonis" by William Shakespeare. It has been shown that "Zohre and Manouchehr" has been composed based on a complete translated version (perhaps in Frech) of "Venus and Adonis". It has also been discussed that Iraj Mirza has taken a look at an incomplete Persian Translated version of "Venus and Adonis" by Lotf-Ali Souratgar.

Cyclic meters in Persian Poetry are generally consisted of two half-lines or hemistiches, but this paper deals with cyclic meters consisting of more than two hemistiches. This paper deals with such poly-hemistich Persian meters which totally belong to contemporary poets. These meters have been introduced and analyzed based on numerous evidences taken from Panahi’s corpus (2016-2020).

This study draws on both quantitative and qualitative findings from corpus analysis to define the language in Bābā Ṭāher Quatrains. The present article uses Bābā Ṭāher Quatrains as a linguistic evidence and contributes to the knowledge about it, especially in the field of historical grammar and typology. The article reviews and updates recent research to clarify the language origins, using comparative and historical linguistics methods. The first part of this article is devoted to the stratification of dialectal features of Bābā Ṭāher Quatrains. The second part focuses on the role of particular characteristics in Bābā Ṭāher Quatrains, the language of Jews in Hamdan and other Fahlaviyāts of Hamadan in reconstructing the former vernacular language of Hamadan.

An alternation is defined as a pair of sentences with more or less identical structures and the same meaning. These alternations are sensitive to the meaning component of verbs. Therefore, it can be used as a criterion for classifying verbs in an effective way. Levin classified English verbs into 49 broad semantic classes and 192 subclasses, introducing 79 argument alternations. She believes that various aspects of the syntactic behavior of verbs are tied to their meaning. Moreover, verbs that fall into classes according to shared behavior would be expected to show shared meaning components. The present study aimed to examine a type of alternations introduced by Levin called “Reciprocal Alternation”, which itself includes several types of alternations. One of these alternations, known as “Understood Reciprocal Object Alternation”, is a type of “Transitive Alternations”. Transitive alternations include alternations involving a change in a verb’s transitivity. The other types of Reciprocal Alternation are the alternations that occur without a change in a verb’s transitivity. These alternations include “Simple Reciprocal Alternation”, “Together Reciprocal Alternation”, and “Apart Reciprocal Alternation”. A corpus-based study of 3070 Persian verbs revealed that all these alternations are also found in Persian. Furthermore, two new types of these alternation named “Reciprocal Chaining Alternation” and “Reciprocal Collective Alternation” were introduced in the present study.

A treebank is a corpus with linguistic annotations above the level of the parts of speech. During the first half of the present decade, three treebanks have been developed for Persian either originally or subsequently based on dependency grammar: Persian Treebank (PerTreeBank), Persian Syntactic Dependency Treebank, and Uppsala Persian Dependency Treebank (UPDT). The syntactic analysis of a sentence in these corpora involves a series of relations introducing each word in the sentence as a dependent of another, referred to as the head. Examination of head-dependent pairs extracted from similar contexts in the above treebanks reveals frequent, apparently systematic inconsistencies observed particularly in the cases of nominal and adjectival heads. This can be explained in terms of the failure to postulate valency structures for nouns and adjectives as well as for verbs, taking for granted that tokens receive the proper labels regardless of such an assumption. When the notion of valency was borrowed from chemistry to refer to the number of controlled arguments, it was meant to apply only to verbs. Later developments of dependency grammar included the proposal of nominal and adjectival valency as well. The significance of the idea seems to have been underestimated, though. It has been highly improbable, therefore, for developers of dependency treebanks to design their annotation schemes otherwise. As far as Persian is concerned, Uppsala Persian Dependency Treebank and Dependency Persian Treebank (DepPerTreeBank, the dependency version of PerTreeBank) have used the Stanford Typed Dependencies. The later version of the former treebank, Persian Universal Dependency Treebank, has used the Universal Dependencies. These are standard annotation schemes that do not recognize valency for nouns and adjectives. Furthermore, Persian Syntactic Dependency Treebank has used its own set of dependency relations, where little attention has been paid to the idea. This paper reported the design process of a scheme for annotation of Persian dependency structure as part of an ongoing project of developing a dependency treebank for Persian. The scheme was based on a comprehensive description of Persian syntax according to a theory introduced as the Autonomous Phrases Theory. The main idea is that the significance of phrases should be appreciated in dependency analyses due to their cognitive reality, and the notion of valency is also extended beyond verbs, on which basis every dependent of whatever head type is classified as either a complement or an adjunct. Moreover, to make the resulting annotation scheme reasonably intelligible to the target audience, the latest standard available annotation scheme, Universal Dependencies (UD), was adapted to suit the requirements of the adopted framework. The outcome was a tag set of fifty-three dependency relations, including fifteen original labels and the rest borrowed from the universal dependencies. Although it provides more detailed annotation than UD does by making finer distinctions, our scheme does not involve too many tags more than UD does, mainly because a large number of the additional relations are shared by two or three head types.

By “broken form” we mean the written form of a colloquial Persian word, affix or clitic which firstly reflects the colloquial pronunciation of that form, and secondly has an equivalent formal form with different pronunciation in formal Persian. Here are some examples of Persian broken forms and their formal equivalent forms: اگه/اگر; می تونم/می توانم; رو/را. Broken forms were introduced firstly into Persian modern literary works such as novels and dramas especially to show the actual and colloquial dialogues of their characters. This paper deals with Persian broken forms in Persian dictionaries. We try to answer such frequently asked questions as follows: 1) Are we allowed to enter the broken forms into dictionaries as independent entries? If yes, then why? and 2) Which forms have to be entered in dictionaries? Based on a detailed corpus prepared from real Persian literary texts we conclude that there are just a few words that necessarily have to be entered into dictionaries. We also discussed about the way these items have to be entered into general Persian dictionaries. The present contribution aims to portray a descriptive analysis of “broken forms” in Persian, a Persian-specific category which should be described in its own terms. Therefore, the explanation being argued here seems to be superior to framework-bound analyses and is presented in a framework-free manner. It has been discussed and suggested that all broken forms used in Persian Novels and dramas must be included in Persian general dictionaries as independent entries. The independent entries may be  reduced ones, in the sense that the reader may be referred to the formal entry for all the related information including meaning, example, part of speech, and so on…), however  two points are strongly expected to be included in the reduced entry: 1. The stylistic label, and 2. The pronunciation. Generally-speaking, there are three types of broken forms: 1) Stylistic free forms; 2) Verbal Forms; and 3) Clitic Forms. It is proposed that the stylistic free forms are the most current broken forms which are produced by some more and less productive phonological rules. Based on our corpus they are as follows:آ/ آقا sir؛ آتیش/ آتش fire؛ آروم/ آرام rest؛ آق/ آقا sir؛ ابرام/ ابراهیم Abraham (proper noun)؛ اروا/ ارواح ghost؛ امبر/ انبر clamp؛ الان/ الآن now؛ اوس/ استاد master؛ اوسا/ استاد master؛ اوسا/ استاد master؛ بادام/ بادوم almond؛ بام/ بوم roof؛ باهار/ بهار spring؛ البت/ البته of course؛ برا/ برای for؛ پمبه/ پنبه cotton؛ پوس/ پوست skin؛ په/ پس then؛ پیرن/ پیراهن shirt؛ تموم/ تمام all؛ تو/ توی in؛ تومن/ تومان tuman (Iranian Currency)؛تیکه/ تکه part؛ جاهاد/ جهاد sacred war؛ جمبه/ جنبه Friday؛ جیگر/ جگر liver…The verbal forms are divided into two types :a)verbal endings; such as بخوابه[1]/ بخوابد orبخوابین[2]/ بخوابید  or بخوابن[3]/ بخوابند…and b)stylistic alternations of present verb stems, such as بینم[4]/ ببینم; بدم[5]/ بدهم … and finally the clitic forms being just a few but highly frequent are clitic broken forms in Persian language which may be divided into four groups: a) Endings of the verb to be (بودن); b) forms of topic marker را; c) types of pronominal clitic; and d) adverbial clitic  هم/ م (also/ too). None of the four clitic forms can have an independent entry in dictionaries because they are not free morphemes, therefore they are briefly introduced in explanatory tables in dictionaries. Our analysis is based upon a corpus of 11200 broken forms (tokens) extracted randomly from the dialogues of 112 contemporary Persian published novels and dramas (1917-2017), i.e. 100 broken forms from each work. Looking up the extracted forms in some general Persian dictionaries, we noticed that nearly not a single broken form has been entered the dictionaries as an entry. The pertaining and significant   hindrances arise when foreigners learning Persian language need to find the meaning of these actual forms but cannot find them in any general Persian dictionary, however Persian lexicographers, editors and grammarians are biased to ignore such forms so that they usually don't take them into consideration. Notwithstanding such old and strong negative attitudes, Persian novelists and playwrights make use of the broken forms vastly and freely. We discussed and suggested here that all the broken forms used largely in Persian contemporary novels and dramas should be entered into general Persian dictionaries with a stylistic label such as 'COLLIQUIAL' or 'BROKEN' or so on. In this paper, based on our limited corpus discussed previously, we attempted to extract a list of Persian broken forms. “Broken forms” are written forms of a colloquial Persian words, affixes or clitics. A broken form, therefore, reflects the colloquial pronunciation of each form, and has an equivalent formal form with different pronunciation in formal Persian. Broken forms were introduced firstly into Persian modern literary works such as novels and dramas especially to show the actual and colloquial dialogues of their characters. It has been discussed in this paper that broken forms, especially those used vastly in Persian modern literature, must be recorded in Persian general dictionaries. Based on a detailed corpus extracted from real Persian literary texts we conclude that there are just a few words that necessarily have to be entered into dictionaries.

[1]. He sleeps

[2]. You sleep

[3]. They sleep

[4]. I see

[5]. I give

Metonymy is one of the most important processes of semantic change in the language, which besides receiving a high degree of attention by rhetoricians and historical semanticists, has been, at least for three decades, considered by cognitive semanticists as a process at work in everyday speech. The theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models (LCCM) proposed by Vyvyan Evans in 2006 in the form of an article and within the framework of cognitive semantics explains how the meaning functions in the language, especially based on metaphoric and metonymic processes and how the speakers understand these processes. Based on this theory, words don’t have ‘meanings’ in and of themselves and the meaning of a word is subordinate to the utterance in which it occurs. The present article studies this theory with data in the Persian language, evaluating the process of metonymy within LCCM framework. It concludes that first, distinguishing absolute meaninglessness in words, in a word-based approach, is essentially considered a methodological problem. Second, one cannot synchronically distinguish a process called metonymy, especially in its traditional definition; instead, it should be considered a process based on ‘decreasing’ on the syntagmatic axis, not a process based on the proximity of two concepts on the paradigmatic axis. Thus, words can be considered as units that have meaning when decontextualized, but are not ‘meaningful’. Such a view liberates us from the troublesome framework of word-based approaches.