والی رضایی

Object omission construction is a valency-reduction process in which a transitive verb appears without its object and is used as an intransitive one. However, the addressee can still understand the meaning of the objectless sentence. The type of object omission considered in this paper is context-independent, in which the referent of the omitted object is not mentioned in previous context and the context does not provide any clue to recover the unspecified object. Among different factors which can affect object omission, in this research aims to find out the discourse-pragmatic factors which can facilitate this construction in Persian.

Object alternations involve different realizations of arguments, and are represented in three forms, including locative alternation, dative shift, and object-oblique alternation. Objects in object-oblique alternation are expressed in two different structures without fundamental changes in meaning. The second participant, in a transitive predicate, is either stated in a direct object position or in a preposition construction. The present paper investigates object-oblique alternation in Persian Aktionsart, based on Role and Reference Grammar. The objective of this study is twofold; firstly, to determine the im/possibility of object-oblique alternation in different classes of verbs, and secondly, to specify various readings of this alternation in verb classes consisting of states, activities, achievements, and accomplishments. The data are extracted from Persian newspapers, websites, and daily conversations. Data analysis denotes that some state verbs, including cognition, emotion, and possession verbs can be represented in object-oblique alternation. The alternate forms of cognition and possession verbs, refer to the kind of object in question. Alternation in sub-classes of activity verbs, that is, performance and consumption verbs, display total-partial interpretation. The alternative forms of creation verbs in this class, in the case of having a non-resultative verb, denote the kind of objects in question. Directed perception verbs, regardless of the parameter of object individuation, are represented in object-oblique alternation. Some achievement verbs may also be used in this alternation. Accomplishment verbs are rarely used in object-oblique alternation, except in cases where depending on the context, total-partial interpretation is intended. Generally speaking, the predicates that undergo object-oblique alternation share some characteristics; they are mostly non-state ones, their subjects are mainly agentive, and the objects are mostly low or non-affected. Furthermore, the verbs, which are more prone to object-oblique alternation, are chiefly non-resultative, and do not lead to fundamental changes in the object.

Flipped classroom is one of the relatively new teaching methods in which teaching takes place outside the classroom and class time is devoted to practice, and learning is established under the supervision of the teacher. Various studies in the world and in Iran have examined the effectiveness of flipped learning in teaching English, but these studies have been done either in the context of schools and institutes or with English language college students. This study examines students’ attitudes towards the flipped classroom, and the effectiveness of flipped learning in General English courses at Farhangian University. Findings show that students are satisfied with the flipped classroom and prefer it to traditional classes. Based on the results of paired and independent t-tests, flipped learning improves students' learning in General English courses. In addition, gender can affect the effectiveness of flipped learning, but students' field of study does not have such a role. Based on the findings of this study, flipped learning can used to increase the effectiveness of General English courses in face-to-face and virtual classes.

This study investigates non-canonical syntax in the Persian language from a non-hierarchical perspective, emphasizing the significant role of information-structural triggers, including topic and focus, in shaping the non-canonical order of left-dislocated possessive constructions. We apply Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993; 2004) to account for the grammatical and pragmatic properties of these constructions. Additionally, we utilize Syntax First Alignment (Newson, 2004; 2010) to explore the constraints and discourse-pragmatic reasons for left-dislocated possessive constructions, particularly those related to left dislocation in Persian.While left dislocation may resemble preposing, it differs in that a co-referential pronoun occupies the canonical position of the marked constituent (Schiffrin & Hamilton, 2008). Dabir-Moghaddam (2005) explains that left dislocation involves moving an item to the sentence-initial position, with a resumptive pronoun taking its original place.

Lexical typology is related to the specific ways in which languages incorporate meaning into words. In this way, lexical typology, which deals with words, can be considered a sub-branch of semantic typology. Recently, studies in cognitive linguistics have shown how body parts act as a source for conceptualizing different experiences such as feeling, thinking, etc., and are represented in different ways in different cultures. Using words that refer to body parts can help us express our feelings more accurately. This study tried to take a look at the lexical typological patterns of the role of body names in expressing the emotions of Persian speakers. This research may be considered the first typological collection of the figurative role of body names in describing emotions. This comparative-analytical study was done based on the studies of linguists in this field. For this purpose, 50 sentences of linguistic evidence were extracted from Persian language database and some written sources and were categorized based on the concept of nouns in expressing emotions. It was tried to examine the samples based on their role in expressing emotions. Data analysis was done on the patterns proposed by Ponsonnet and Laginha (2020) and the most prevalent body names. Moreover, the findings indicated that the words "heart", "eye" and "liver" are used more than other words in Persian to express feelings; however, in order to make an accurate assessment of this opinion, extensive research that combines a culture-specific and cross-cultural approach is needed.

The aim of this research is to investigate object omission based on Role and Reference Grammar. Object omission is a valency-reduction process in which a verb which is transitive in nature, appears without its object. This study, will indicate semantic, syntactic and pragmatic representation of the aforementioned construction with respect to the presented concepts in Role and Reference Grammar including the layered structure of the clause, logical structure, semantic macroroles, information structure, activation status of the referents and linking algorithm. Explaining object omission in the framework of RRG, indicates one of the advantages of this grammar. Although RRG attends to the interaction between form and function, it declines the abstract layers or elements in the syntactic analysis. Accordingly, in this grammar the syntactic structure of the clause is represented based on what is explicitly applicable. Therefore, RRG is not faced with any restriction in explaining object omission and regarding what is explicitly presented in the sentence, it behaves with transitive verbs which omit their objects as intransitive ones. The most specific attainments of investigating object omission in the framework of RRG are as follows: In the layered structure of a clause with omitted object, one of the arguments of the core will be reduced and the syntactic representation will be like an intransitive verb with just one argument (subject) in the core. The logical structure of such verbs, likewise, will be represent with just one argument (x), unlike transitive verbs which has two arguments (x, y) in logical structure. Regarding the aktionsart type of the verbs, the findings indicate that activities are the most frequent verbs in object omission construction. the reason is that the second argument of activity verbs is not a macrorole and therefore can be omitted. Describing object omission with regard to information structure and activation status of the referents in RRG shows that as in the aforementioned construction the object is omitted, it cannot be a focal or topical element and its referent can be considered as an accessible one. Since it is the hearer’s knowledge of the world that makes it possible to understand the notion of the omitted object. Moreover, in this study, regarding object omission construction, linking algorithm from semantic to syntax and from syntax to semantics has been provided. The bidirectional diagrams show that the linking principles of selecting and linking undergoer in both directions will not exist in the objectless sentences.

In Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), based on stativity, telicity, and punctuality, verbs are classified into six classes named state, activity, achievement, accomplishment, semelfactive, and active-accomplishment. The predicates in these classes can take one, two, or three argument(s) according to the number of participants involved in an event as well as the argument structure of the verb. Three-place predicates need three distinct arguments and they exhibit some abstract or concrete transition or movement in their conceptual structure. The argument in three-place predicates, undergoing alternation, can appear in more than one syntactic format; that is to say, in unmarked structures, direct object is ‘râ’-marked and the indirect object is accompanied by a preposition. This is while in marked or alternate form, the preposition is deleted and the non-macrorole argument receives the role of direct object. In Persian, like many other languages, the frequency of three-place predicates, in comparison with one and two-place predicates, is low, but knowing their behavior is significant for better applying them in related contexts. Employing framework of RRG, this paper, aims to investigate alternation in three-place predicates of Aktionsart in Persian. The data are collected from various web sites, newspapers, books, and also daily conversations. Data analysis shows that state verbs do not undergo alternation; This is mainly because common characteristics of state verbs are their non-action nature and being low transitive or intransitive. Most verbs in this class need one or two argument(s) and low number of three-place predicates in this class, shows no alternation due to stativity and low transitivity. Motion active-accomplishment verbs, however, are more prone to alternation; concrete transition from an actor to a recipient is common among these verbs. Some three-place predicates in achievement class, have alternation; while alternation in accomplishment class, leads mostly to ungrammatical structure. Generally speaking, alternation in three-place predicates is the result of marked selection of the recipient, and is mostly observed in motion active-accomplishment verbs; the reason is non-stativity and high transitivity of this subclass in comparison to other verb classes.       

Object complement construction as one of the most important and challenging categories of grammar has been noticed by linguists and grammarians from past to present. The present study investigates the Object complement construction based on three basic hypotheses: Small Clause Theory, Predication Theory, and Complex Predicate Theory. Most of the linguists and grammarians who have studied Object complement construction in the Persian language have presented a similar view of the Predication theory. The findings of this study revealed that the analysis of the Object complement construction within the framework of Predication Theory is incompatible with the principles of the Government and Binding theory and Minimalist Program, such as the Theta criterion, Projection principle, and Uniformity of Theta Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH). The analysis of the mentioned construction based on the complex predicate theory on the one hand ignores the principle of linguistic economy and productivity process by increasing the number of compound verbs in Persian, and on the other hand, it ignores the propositional relationship between the Object complement construction and the preceding noun phrase. In the following, based on small clause theory and arguments such as argument alternation, selection restriction, the ambiguity of the interrogative complex sentences, occurrence in different syntactic contexts, idiom chunk, agreement, paraphrasing, sentence fragment, scrambling, gapping pronominalization, and the distribution of NP-types as subjects of small clause construction was shown Object complement together with the preceding noun phrase should be considered a single constituent as a small clause.

Adverbs are among those complicated subjects different aspects of which have been investigated throughout history. However, linguists have not reached an agreement on the diverse issues related to adverbs, from its definition to the fact that whether it should be considered as a lexical category in addition to nouns, adjectives and verbs. This research is aimed at determining the place of Persian adverbs based on the typological prototype theory. Hence, according to the typological criteria, a number of adverbs used in everyday speech of standard Persian speakers as well as adverbs used in various Persian texts were analyzed. On the basis of the research results, considering the adverb as a lexical category, the unmarked adverb place in the Persian language was defined in the Croft’s semantic map of parts of speech in the lexical class of property the same as the unmarked adjectives, and it was shown that despite of the unmarked adjectives denoting the propositional act of modification within reference, the unmarked adverbs describe the propositional act of modification within predication. Moreover, the places of PPs on verbs and converbs, both of them as marked adverbs, were determined as words of object showing the propositional act of modification within predication and words of action showing the propositional act of modification within predication, respectively, in the Croft’s semantic map of parts of speech.

Object omission construction is a valency-reduction process in which a transitive verb appears without its object and is used as an intransitive one. However, the addressee is able to understand the meaning of the objectless sentence. The considered type of object omission in this paper is context-independent, in which the reference of the omitted object is not mentioned in previous context and the context does not provide any clue to recover the deleted object. Among different factors which can affect object omission, in this research we attempt to determine the nature of the deleted object based on some important typological hierarchies such as animacy, referentiality, definiteness and number which can be used to determine the tendency of language in choosing the prototypical object in the sentence. It seems that an object is omissible when it has different features compared to the present object in the sentence. The findings prove this claim and reveal that the reference of the omitted object is located in the lower levels of the aforementioned typological hierarchies. Moreover, the findings indicate that an element such as 'number' which makes no difference in morpho-syntactic presentation of the direct object in the sentence has no effect on the possibility of object omission.

Evidentiality is the linguistic encoding of the source of information. The present study, focusing Aikhenvald's framework seeks to investigate the strategies of evidentiality- grammatical constructions and lexical means which their primary meaning is not evidentiality- in contemporary Persian. For the purposes of this study the required data were collected from TV serials, novels, and daily newspapers. The results depict that evidentiality strategies used by Persian speakers to convey information source are present perfect structures, modal verbs, verbs of speech in impersonal constructions, verbs of perception and cognition, compound verbs in subordinating constructions, verbs related to the five senses, evidential adverbs and reported speech. Contrary to others' belief, passive structures cannot acquire evidential overtones in the Persian language. Among these strategies, only the verbs related to the five senses express firsthand evidentiality and the other strategies express non-‌firsthand evidentiality.

Discourse marker is a functional-pragmatic category, not affecting truth conditions of the sentence. These linguistic elements encode procedural rather than representative or propositional meanings. Discourse markers have been the subject of increasing attention in recent years, and have been investigated in different theoretical frameworks. Among the vast variety of approaches toward interpreting the role of discourse markers, one major approach is rooted in Grice's suggestion. By elaborating the concept of conventional implicature along the previously well-known concept of conversational implicature, Grice (1989) treats some discourse markers as being instances of the former. He also conceptualized the concept of non-central or higher-level speech acts to account for the contribution of these discourse markers to the meaning of their host sentence. In this article, we will initially describe the characteristics of the discourse marker "magar" (‘unless’/’but’) in terms of prototypical characteristics of discourse markers proposed by Brinton (1996) and Heine (2013). We then present a diachronic exposition of its semantic development from having a propositional meaning to a word with a textual and expressive function in contemporary Persian. This explanation is in accordance with Traugott’s (1986) analysis of semantic change toward more subjectification. Ultimately, we have applied a Gricean interpretation to this Persian discourse marker, as a higher-level speech act. It is argued that "magar" (‘unless’/’but), in addition to its function as a connective element (which connects two textual units or encrypts the connection between the propositional content of an utterance and its previous context), can help with the performance of a non-central speech act with the illocutionary force of indicating opposition. Given the fact that speech acts, in Searl's terms, are the subject of the quadruple felicity conditions, namely Preparatory, Sincerity, Propositional content and Essential conditions we have shown how these conditions can be actualized (or applied) when it comes to higher-level speech acts.

Researchers have variously investigated Persian in generative, functional, and cognitive frameworks, although, failed to account for some structural changes and the emergence of marked structures such as Left dislocation. The main goal of this article is to investigate left dislocation baded on Optimality Theory. The present research is based on the descriptive-analytical method, and our corpus will include spoken Persian. The present paper aims to show that some constraints can be applied to form left dislocation in Persian, while ranking of the constraints represent the optimal form/forms. The constriants are based on constructional uints of Featurs and Conceptual Units which are properties of grammatical categories such as argument, or discourse-functioal ones, such as topic. The results show that applyind the constraints of precedence, adjacency, and faithfulness on one side, and more features or conceptual units on the other side, the applied theory can bring more appropriate concequenses analyzing the cases of Persian. In other words, Syntax First Alignment has proved to be a promising framework for modeling Persian Left dislocation and can offer an alternative for syntactic frameworks based on hierarchical structure. The results, also, indicates that the features of [NEW], [ABOUT], and [CONTRAST] have key roles in Persisn Argument Left Dislocation. In addition, violating the constraints of Subject and Topic brings about unoptimality.

Aspect is divided to lexical and grammatical types. Lexical aspect is derived from verb meaning and its subtypes are states, activities, achievements and accomplishments; Grammatical aspect is represented by inflection or some auxiliary verbs and includes perfective, imperfective, perfect and prospective ones. The present paper, in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar, studies the interaction of Aktionsart and progressive aspect in Persian verbs. It is usually accepted that states, don’t appear with progressive aspect, while “waxing or waning situations, agentivity and temporary situations”, pave the way for them to be used with progressive aspect. Activities are mostly compatible with progressive as their dynamicity is in accord with progression. Achievements are usually regarded unacceptable, but they can have different readings in progressive aspect including preliminary process, slow motion, iterative, futurate progressive and commentary reading. Accomplishments due to being durative and having stages, are acceptable in progressive aspect.

This paper attempts to examine humorous grammatical innovations in contemporary Persian press in recent years within the framework of Bybee’s language change theory (2015) in accordance with the usage-based approach to grammer. In this regard, by collecting data from satirical press, this research endeavored to understand how and by which process these innovations have been produced, in which constructions they have been used and what characteristics they have. To this end, the humorous grammatical innovations have been classified in three categories consisting of derivatives constructions, fabricated verbs and constructions with “al-“. In this research, we demonstrate that a high number of innovations have been created on the basis of analogical processes. Furthermore the findings suggest that seemingly most of the innovations have the potentiality to enter the formal language but evidently the language enclines to absorb the innovations which have been coined by virtue of the language exigency or the deficits of applicable grammatical constructions.

Aspect refers to “different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation” (Comrie, 1976, p.3) and consists of lexical and grammatical types. Grammatical aspect is represented by inflection or some auxiliary verbs while lexical aspect is denoted by the inherent meaning of the verbs (Rezai, 2012). The aspectual classification of Vedler (1957), has been one of the most influential theories in lexical aspect studies (Tenny, 1987, p.29; Peck et al., 2013, p. 664; Kanijo, 2019, p.73). Vendler (1957) has classified verbs into four classes named states, activities, achievements, and accomplishments based on their stativity, duration, and telicity. Achievements describe the change of state that occurs instantaneously and creates a new situation (Pavey, 2010, p.97), they have inherent endpoint and are usually regarded as not being used progressively. Two sub-classes of achievements are “culminations” and “happenings”. Culminations need some time to occur, for example, to “reach a summit”, we have to walk a distance. Happenings lack this preparatory phase and occur instantly, for example, “explode” occurs in a very short time. In previous studies, Persian verbs have been classified to two classes, “achievement” verbs that occur in a short time and have endpoint and “durative” verbs that entails some time to occur (Jahan Panah Tehrani, 1984). Vahidiyan Kamyar (1992) added the third class, named “achievement-durative” verbs that occur in a short time but don’t end and extend through time. Abolhassani (2011) has also classified achievements to three sub-classes. Other studies have mostly investigated lexical or grammatical aspect in Persian or in a specific dialect (Daneshpazhouh et al., 2013; Abasi, 2015, Dastlan, 2018). The main objective of this study is to describe different readings of Persian achievements along with grammatical aspects in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). For this purpose, achievement verbs, in two subdivisions named “culminations” and “happenings”, were selected in different contexts and their readings were analyzed in different grammatical aspects. Data have been collected from different Persian sites on the Internet and daily conversations.

This paper studies the interaction of achievement predicates with grammatical aspects based on Role and Reference Grammar. RRG has proven to be a very practical framework for the description of aspectual classes. It proposes a linear and layered conception of syntactic organization without placing any underlying forms or movement rules and posits only one level of syntactic representation that is mapped directly into the semantic representation (Van Valin & Lapolla, 1997, p.21).The semantic structure in RRG provides a clear system of lexical decomposition that is an Aktionsart-based method of representing the semantics of predicates and their arguments (Van Valin & Lapolla, 1997, p.91). A predicate is identified as a member of a particular classification depending on some grammatical tests that have been established for English and other languages. The semantic representation is linked to the syntactic structure by means of an algorithm and the semantic roles of arguments are correlated with macroroles. In RRG a sentence is composed of at least one clause and clause of at least one core. Within the clause core are the nuclear predicating element and its arguments. Adverbs modifying the nucleus are not core elements but are placed in positions preceding or following the nucleus called peripheries. In Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & Lapolla, 1997, p.91-92), verbs are divided to four basic classes, including states, activities, achievements and accomplishments as proposed by Vendler (1957). Based on some specific-language tests, each of these classes are distinguished from each other. States are homogenous and involve no action and no final point. Activities, despite states, represent actions and have continuous feature. Achievements occur in a moment and don’t have continuous feature. Accomplishments are change of state verbs but occur in a longer time in comparison with achievements. Among these classes, achievements are change of state verbs; the beginning and end of these verbs are so short that can be neglected. They have final point and since they are considered durationless, they can't be used with adverbs such as "vigorously" and "seriously".  Regarding the grammatical aspect, four main types can be distinguished; perfective, imperfective, perfect and prospective aspect. Perfective indicates a situation as a single whole, whereas the imperfective looks at the situation from inside and the focus is on the internal structure of the event (Smith, 1997, p.3). The perfect is retrospective which establishes a relation between an event at one time and a situation at an earlier time. In prospective aspect, the event is related to some subsequent situation, for example when some event is about to be done (Comrie, 1976, p.64). Based on this framework, different readings of Persian achievements are investigated in different grammatical aspects.Data have been selected from written and spoken resources, including web sites and daily conversations. As aspect is better specified in the context, each predicate has been considered in its actual use and the interaction of lexical and grammatical aspect has been identified.  

The data show that the culmination and happening predicates in Persian can occur with perfective aspect; since these verbs involve the final point, the occurrence of them with perfective aspect shows that the verb has reached its end and has finished.  As achievement predicates describe instantaneous changes from one state to another, the adage that achievements "lack progression" is well-known, but the presented data show that achievements in progressive forms can have five readings based on pragmatic context, including preliminary process reading, slow-motion (camera) reading, iterative reading, future progressive reading, and commentary reading (Gyarmathy, 2015). Culmination-achievements can occur on preliminary process reading that focus on the process before reaching the final phase of the verb. On slow-motion reading, an event described by the achievement predicate, which is regarded durationless, acts as a durative eventuality, that is, we "zoom in" to view it as an extended event. This reading is available to predicates which describe events that are not instantaneous, but take some small amount of time. The iterative reading is most natural with semelfactives. The future reading has prospective interpretation. The last reading or commentary reading, is available when the speaker is conveying the happenings to someone else; this reading is used when the exact timing of the utterance is not important. Achievement verbs in perfect aspect can represent some functions such as experiential, universal, hot news, and evidentiality. Achievement predicates in perfective, imperfective, and perfect aspect can represent some prospective interpretation depending on pragmatic context and existence of some temporal adverb denoting future time in the sentence.

Achievement verbs in perfective aspect denote change of states that occur instantaneously and reach  its endpoint. In culmination verbs, reaching  this endpoint entails some preparatory phase but in happening sub-class, this phase is not applied. Although achievements are regarded as lacking progressive, they can have five readings in imperfective aspect, depending on the context; they include preliminary process reading, slow-motion (camera) reading, iterative reading, future progressive reading, and commentary reading. Achievement verbs in perfect aspect can represent experiential, universal, evidentiality, and hot news functions. In prospective aspect, positive form of the sentence and some temporal adverbs are required to denote occurrence of the action in some future time.

Aspect refers to different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation. It is divided into grammatical and lexical aspects. The focus of “grammatical aspect” is on the event being completed, in progress, or prospective, while in “lexical aspect”, such characteristics as dynamicity, duration, and telicity are considered based on the inherent meaning of the verb. Predicates referring to future are usually different from those denoting past or present; the events related to the past have happened, those related to the present are in progress, and a prospective event refers to the possibility of its occurrence in future, thus being neither true nor false at the moment of speaking. Speakers talk about the events related to future in various syntactic and morphological forms with different degrees of certainty. The objective of this paper was to analyze the prospective aspect of Aktionsart in Persian based on a functional approach so as to determine which aspectual classes could be used in prospective aspect. The data were collected from the spoken and written sentences used in the websites, mass media, and daily conversations. Considering data showed that most state verbs, due to the non-agentivity of their subject, cannot denote prospective aspect, but in some cases context is determinative in representing prospectivity. The distinction between progression and prospective aspect in activity verbs is mostly context-dependent. Progression in achievement verbs usually refers to the events that will happen imminently, while the possibility of the event to happen imminently or distantly from the present moment can be represented in accomplishments with regard to the context. Therefore, perfective, imperfective, and perfect aspects could represent prospective aspect of Aktionsart in Persian regarding some contextual characteristics.

Stress assignment in Kurdish is generally considered to be very simple and systematic. All the derivational affixes and most inflectional suffixes have affected the stress position and attract the lexical stress. Exceptional cases are some of the inflectional affixes and clitics that are called Prosodic Word Adjoiners (PWA). PWA and their hosts combine as host + clitic constituent to create Clitic Group (CG). This paper proposes a unified analysis of CG in Kurdish as one of the constituents in Prosodic Phonology that divide the representation of speech into hierarchically arranged units. Phonological Processes analyzed to confirm CG are Stress Assignment Pattern, Vowel Deletion (VD), Consonant Insertion (CI) and Glide Weakening (GW). VD is applied in phonological word level, while CI is limited to Clitic Group. GW is applied in both phonological word and Clitic Group level, but it is banned in phonological phrase level.

State verbs, with the characteristic of non-dynamicity, denote no action and usually describe internal feelings, possession and place. They lack internal structure, stages and end point. The present study, within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), investigates the interaction of state verbs and different grammatical aspects in Persian to see whether the interaction of subdivisions of state verbs with the grammatical aspects is the same. The subdivisions of state verbs in the current paper include Existence, Cognition, Emotion, Possession and Perception verbs. Data are gathered from the Internet, books, newspapers and daily conversations. Considering data indicates that the behavior of these subdivisions with different grammatical aspects is not the same. In perfect aspect all these verbs can be used without limitation. Although in most cases the progressive form of state verbs is regarded impossible, in cases such as “waxing or waning situation, agentivity and temporary state”, some of them can be used in progressive form. State verbs in perfective aspect, show functions such as experiential, universal, evidentiality and hot news. Positive form of the sentence and temporal adverbs denoting to some future time, pave the way for some state verbs to be used in prospective aspect.

This article is an attempt to illustrate a comprehensive functional-typological study of two perfect constructions in modern Persian. In regard to these forms, there has been a kind of intricate complexity and difficulty that have occupied the minds of the grammarians and linguists. Regarding the complexity of the perfect constructions, what can be seen is the consistency and heterogeneity of these constructions with the past, on the one hand, and with the present, on the other hand, as well as the characteristics of tense and aspect, and their functions with adverb expressions. In addition, since the nature of the sentences are not directly determined by grammatical tenses, the various features of textual, linguistic, and meta-linguistic features play a great role in this regard. Accordingly, the motivation for writing this essay is to provide an explanation of the various aspects and functions of the present perfect and present perfect progressive in the contemporary Persian language, especially since their uses are widespread in their entirety compared with other perfect structures so that we can assume present perfect "the prototype" of these constructions. Therefore, we provide an explanation of these two perfect constructions, whose common elements are the past stem of the main verb plus the perfect aspect morpheme –e-, or the so-called “past participle. Also, the amalgamation of present perfect with the past tense, and its relation with definity, on then one hand, and the behavior of temporal adverbs towards the limitation of the perfect uses, along with aspectual and temporal nature of this construction and other perfect constructions as well as their relationship with the category of evidentiality on the other hand, have made this research more impressive.

This paper is conducted based on the framework of the functional-typological approach. In this approach, the structure of language depends on its role, in particular the role of communication. In other words, the most prominent principle in this approach is that the fundamental purpose of language is communication between human beings, and this role forms the structures in which the languages take. The claim of the role-oriented views is that, since language is a tool from the foundation, it is wise to think that language structures are best suited to refer to roles that they accept. Givon (2001, 293-297) puts forward that language and grammar are neither explained nor described as a separate device. He considers perfect structures the most complex and delicate categories in grammar. This linguist considers language a direct reflection of the human communication needs. He considers perfect constructs for an event that either occurred before a point of reference or at least before the speech time. He believes that perfect aspect is the most complicated grammatical category, giving it four characteristics of anteriority, perfectivity, counter-sequentiality and lingering relevance. A number of other authors also take benefit of the views of linguists such as Comrie (1976) and (1989), Bybee et al. (1994), Kyparsky (2002), Aikhenwald (2004), Vanvalin (2005), Duhan (2011), Craft (2012), and Haddlestone (2012, 1984).

To attain the goal of the study, the present authors have taken benefit from the application of functional-typological approach. The research data is collected mainly from current spoken Persian texts together with the content of television series, movies, talk shows, newspapers, periodicals, and in particular, the Bijankhan linguistic corpus, as well as classical Persian literature, in some cases, to support the claims. After evaluating the data, based on the phonetic, morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic criteria, the functions of the four perfect constructions are presented one by one, and their relationship with tense and aspect is presented. Also, the relationship between the evidentiality and the perfect constructions is determined.

In this paper the authors focused on two perfect constructions in Persian and tried to find out their tense and aspect relations, along with their different functions. As to the nature of tense or aspect regarding perfect constructions, it is concluded that, contrary to the claims of the grammarians and some linguists that placed these structures in the tense category, one can not draw the boundary between the two because both the nature of tense and nature of aspect can be seen in these constructions. Regarding the functions of the perfect constructions discussed in Farsi, it can be argued that for the present perfect, at least the functions of current relevance, hot news, resultative, experiential, mirativity, expression of the future event, tense projection, and dependence on the present and the past, for the present perfect progressive, as a combination of past and past continuous tense, functions of continuity, repetition, and habituation and evidentialty, and for the past perfect, actions preceding the past, the occurrence without precedence over the past, the continuous functioning and expression of the future can be mentioned. In addition, in the case of present perfect progressive, especially the first person and the second person do not have much use, and regarding the relationship between the two constructions and the category of evidentiality, it has been shown that both constructions show the function of the evidentiality. Furthermore, present perfect in the Persian language is one of the controversial grammatical constructs and is complex in terms of both form and semantics. In measuring other perfect structures, this construction is one of the most prominent grammatical categories: on the one hand, it relates to the past, and on the other hand, to the present. In addition, the reason why this complexity should be searched is for this feature, which can be used to construct a transcendental past to the entire period of time we talk about or link to any part of it.

In this paper, in the framework of the functional-typological approach and with the help of formal, phonetic, historical, semantic, applied, and function criteria, we have studied the functions of the present perfect, including indirect information or evidentiality, tense projection, resultative, hot news, and mirativity in Farsi, and discussed its behavior in relation to the tense, on the one hand, and to the past tense, on the other hand. We have also found out that the feature of current relevance locates on the top part of a hierarchical structure of present perfect functions and entails other functions. Regarding present perfect progressive, we came to this point that evidentiality is the most important function this form is used for in modern Persian.

The current study will be focused on the analysis of modern Persian conditionals based on a cognitive-pragmatic approach. The study proceeds to answer three questions: 1) Can Sweetser's (1990) theoretical model elucidate the different cognitive and pragmatic dimensions of Persian conditionals? 2) What are the conventional readings of agar (‘if’, the common particle in Persian for the conditionals) in Farsi, and in which conditionals are they most present? And finally 3) Can we draw a relationship between subjectivity / intersubjectivity and conditionals? The study assumed a pure and descriptive research whose data were largely derived from contemporary spoken Persian over a period of three months. To answer the questions, the investigation is comprised of three parts. The first part includes the analysis of triple classification of conditionals (e.g. content, epistemic, and speech act conditionals) in Persian sentences based on Sweetser's model (1990) and upholds the efficiency of this model to a great extent. The second part deals with the ways in which 'agar' construes several readings in Persian conditionals and classifies them as necessary and sufficient condition, topic marker, and concessive readings. Finally, the discussion focuses on the subjectivity and intersubjectivity aspects in relation to hypotheticality of conditionals and it argued that the hypotheticality of conditionals can be fairly explained in terms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Accordingly, we can propose the grammaticalisation of agar in Persian conditionals. Moreover, this paper furthers the issue by looking at the ways in which conditional insubordinate clauses are triggered by cooptation (in Heine’s term); this happens by foregrounding the components of discourse situation, in particular, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In fact, it can be asserted that subjectivity and intersubjectivity can account for the various conditional sentences applications in Farsi

This paper investigates intonational characteristics of yes/no questions in contrast to statements in Persian. Based on Tilt model, acoustic variables including duration, pitch amplitude and tilt are compared between these two sentence types. Since studies (Eslami, 2000; Mahjani, 2003; Mahootiyan, 1997; Sadat Tehrani, 2007) have shown the difference between yes/no question and statement is in the last intonational event, the goal is to determine which acoustic parameters are conceptually important in identifying the type of the sentence. To achieve this, at first, in the production stage, we used statistical analyses in relation to different levels of duration, pitch amplitude and tilt in questions and statements. Then, in the perception stage, first, we manipulated   acoustic variables (duration, pitch amplitude and tilt), then perceptual tests were used to measure the success of work. In the production stage, 40 yes/no questions and their corresponding and statements were read by five Persian speakers, and then through Praat software, the data were analyzed and the acoustic parameters measured. In the next step, by means of Student's t- test, we compared the mean of different variables in the questions and statements. The results of our statistical analyses showed that the average of duration and pitch amplitude except tilt variable were higher in final peak in questions. In the next stage, we manipulated the target points, including: edge f0, final peak, rightmost valley and penultimate valley in order to change the question to statement. Perceptual salience of these acoustic cues was investigated through questionnaire identification tests. The perception tests indicate that only the utterance-final edge F0 is a strong perceptual cue to make a distinction between question and statement. And simoltaneovs manipulation of all target points showed greatest effect on identifying the type of sentence.

The abundant use of prepositions in Persian has led the present study to choose the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a structural-functional theory of grammar, in order to investigate the logical structure representations of some sentences containing the preposition ba meaning 'with'. This is to find out the semantic and structural motivations of this preposition assignment to Persian NPs. This article concludes that the preposition ba, is a basically locative preposition and a radial category with senses related to the central, primary maning of 'togetherness' and 'having'. As a consequence, it can be shown that one cannot be restricted solely to the primary preposition assignment rules stated in RRG, and must focus on the semantic motivations to represent the logical structure of the sentences containing prepositions, in a better way. In this way, we avoid the problems and issues in RRG primary logical structure representations. In addition, the analysis presented in this study is able to justify the various uses of the Preposition ba in Persian, such as adverbial, commutative, theme-marking and, instrumental ba.

The most basic elements of a language which play a key role in majority of syntactic theories and morphological analyses are “parts of speech” including “adjectives”, the subject of the present contribution. The sources of Persian traditional Grammar have divided adjectives into various categories such as subjective, objective, ability types and the like. However, a considerable challenge for defining and categorizing adjectives relates to the fact that the parts of speech (henceforth, POS) have extended marked grammatical functions besides their unmarked functions. Therefore, to describe and explain POS, we should resort to a theory positing that the members of a category are not equal. The present research seeks to provide answers to the following questions:1.How are ability adjectives associated with subjective and objective patterns?
2.Which feature(s) of prototypical adjectives do subjective and objective adjectives lack?
3.Which part(s) of speech result(s) from the categorical shift of subjective and objective adjectives and how do these adjectives differ from other types of adjectives? This research has been conducted within the framework of Typological Prototype Theory (henceforth, TPT), which is a theory about categorization and has arisen from cognitive linguistics. Cognitive grammar posits that language is relative, and as Langacker (1987) puts, the linguistic system is not an all-or-nothing matter. The prototype theory was developed in the works of Brent & Key and also Rosch in the 1960s and 1970s, however it was Lakoff who first used it in relation to linguistic categories.
In line with Cognitive Grammar, Croft (2001) developed the Radical Construction Grammar in the form of a theory based upon Typological Prototype Theory, according to which the prototypical function of POS occurs in unmarked functions, and the POS may also appear in non-prototypical or peripheral functions through structural coding. This point of view states that each grammatical category has central and peripheral members, with the central members having higher frequency, being less structurally coded, and showing a complete potential behavior. 
By structural coding, we mean the use of morphemes to make a lexical category marked. Croft (2001) uses two criteria of structural coding and potential behavior for typological markedness. According to the former criterion, the marked value of a grammatical category has equal or greater morphemes than its unmarked value, while according to the latter criterion, one value of a conceptual category is grammatically more 'versatile' than the other. The grammatical behavior of the unmarked and the marked POS can be differentiated using the sub-criteria of behavioral potential criterion including comparability, function in attributive and predicative positions, and frequency of occurrence.
According to Croft (2001), there are constructions in all languages of the world for predication, reference and modification, which express the propositional acts needed by languages. We can use these propositional acts to identify the POS. Words that can fill in the positions of predication, reference and modification can be divided into semantic classes, and the basic propositional act functions of strengths of the prototypes include action, object and property. This is a descriptive – analytical research conducted using the content analysis method. The adjectives used as the raw data were collected by the researchers and the frequency of their occurrence were examined both in the Persian Language Database (PLDB) and Bijankhan Corpus. Considering the diverse texts and words used in these corpuses, it is expected that they are appropriate representatives of the texts and words used in Contemporary Persian. It is noteworthy that considering the practical limitations and the impossibility of analyzing all the selected adjectives, the researchers selected and analyzed a limited number of action adjectives and tried to select basic adjectives which are more frequently used and do not belong to a specific colloquial or written style. The present research showed that subjective and objective adjectives belong to the <modification, action> class of adjectives and are non-prototypical or peripheral adjectives. Examining the semantic and syntactic features of ability adjectives and comparing them with the subjective and objective adjectives, the researchers concluded that ability adjectives can be placed within either subjective or objective types of adjectives depending on their construction. This research also revealed that subjective and objective adjectives cannot be considered prototypical adjectives based on the structural coding criterion and the comparability sub-criterion. This conclusion was strongly confirmed through the frequency of these adjectives in the PLDB and Bijankhan Corpus. The present contribution also exhibited that the categorical shift of the Persian subjective and objective adjectives is toward the lexical category of noun and that the changes of these adjectives are different from the adjectives denoting a property or object. This research demonstrated that the TPT is able to account for the behavioral differences of the adjectives denoting property, action and object, but is incapable of explaining the behavioral differences of the sub-categories of these classes of adjectives. To reach more reliable conclusions, a typological- functional theory is needed to differentiate between all members of a category by considering all morphological, syntactic, semantic, stylistic and pragmatic criteria.
Further research can analyze other types of Persian adjectives including those denoting object and property within the framework of the TPT and determine the degree to which they are close to or distant from prototypical adjectives. It is also suggested that future researches examine other POS within this framework to specify the degree of prototypicality, thereby taking a step toward bridging the gaps in relation to the POS in Persian.