دکتر امیرسعید مولودی

The pervasive presence of metaphorical conceptualizations in human everyday life has long been a subject of interest for cognitive linguistics researchers. This study investigates the use of the source domain “up/down” in a multimodal medium like cinema, drawing upon Lakoff and Johnson's (1980a, 2003) conceptual metaphor theory, Forceville's (2006, 2008, and 2016) theory of pictorial and multimodal metaphors, and Kövecses's (2020) views on visual metaphors. The goal is to explore the application of orientational metaphors with this source domain not only in verbal but also in visual forms. To achieve this, the Persian-language feature films, “Dancing in the Dust” and “Fireworks Wednesday,” were analyzed. The findings reveal that the filmmaker employs visual representations of up/down concepts as a metaphorical source domain to convey abstract concepts through conceptual metaphors. In both films, these metaphors are often employed solely in the visual mode to ensure the audience's unconscious understanding of the characters' abstract situations. The widespread presence of conceptual metaphors related to this source domain in Persian-language films indicates their inherent familiarity and primacy in the minds of Iranian viewers, allowing directors to frequently use them for character development and plot progression, and effectively convey their intended messages which the audience likely grasps subconsciously.

This research aims to study the effect of gender, age and education of Arabic-Persian bilingual speakers on their frequency of use of code-switching types (Inter- sentential, Intra- sentential & Tag) in Nakhle-e-Taghi city. To this end, 80 male and female Arabic–Persian bilinguals were selected as research subjects through a non-random convenience sampling method. They consisted of two age groups, 20 to 40 and over 40, and belonged to two levels of education, one under diploma and the other diploma and higher than diploma. Then, their conversations were audio and video recorded, out of which the research data were extracted. The research data, containing 1022 cases of code-switching between Arabic- Persian languages, were analyzed in accordance with Poplack (1980). The frequency of use of code-switching types was enumerated and registered based on gender, age and education. Finally, the numerical data were analyzed in SPSS.27 software, using the test of chi- square 2. The results show that gender, age and education have effect on the frequency of usage of code-switching types.

The present study, as a data-based and diachronic one, has been done in order to investigate different types of pragmatic meanings belonging to the discourse marker “ya’ni” on thetical grammar level, and development of these meanings over time (centuries 4 to 14 A.H.). This study is based on Traugott and Dasher’s view (2002) on “subjectification spectrum” (non- subjective > subjective > intersubjective meanings). To collect research data, two literary books from each century were chosen. Then, all the occurrences of “ya’ni” in those books were manually identified. Finally, they were analyzed based on the paper’s analytical framework. The research data show that the discourse marker “ya’ni” acquires new pragmatic meanings such as textual, subjective and intersubjective ones on thetical grammar level, and moves away from its propositional meaning. It indicates that after pragmaticalization and transferring to thetical grammar, this discourse marker acquires new meanings through grammaticalization. The more it moves away from its propositional meaning, the more it is grammaticalized. There is also an order in forming these meanings so that textual meanings are formed at first; then subjective and intersubjective meanings appear in this discourse marker respectively.

Phase predicates describe each of the beginning, continuation, or end phases of an event and are expressed in the form of verbs such as start, continue, end, and so on. In this regard, we call the structures in which there is a phasal predicates "phase construction" and discuss them. We believe that Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) with its approach to the analysis of complex constructions can be used as a theoretical framework for the present study. Based on this, we first analyze the syntactic and semantics aspects of phase constructions, then explain the interaction of the two levels of syntax and semantics. Finally, we will present the “constructional scheme” of phase constructions in Persian language. In the syntactic dimension, various types of "juncture-nexus" relations are considered, and in the semantics dimension, various properties of predicates will be the focus of discussion. Syntactic-semantic interaction in phase constructions will also be justified in the form of linking algorithms. It is worth mentioning that the data of the present study are taken from the corpus of Hamshahri 2.

This study aims to analyze the grammar of linguistic metaphors in Persian based on the theoretical framework of Deignan (2005, 2006). The purpose of the present study is to answer the questions “what role does grammar (part of speech, inflection, lexical grammar) play in the metaphorical representation of hand as one of the members of the conceptual domain of human body?", and "how does each of the three levels of grammar affect the metaphorical representation of the mentioned conceptual domain?" In other words, which level does play the more significant role? The second version of Hamshahri corpus was used to answer the research questions to determine the function of grammar in the metaphorical representation of hand as a source domain. The findings signify that the first level of Deignan’s framework has no influence upon the metaphorical usage of hand. From among the components of the second level, singular inflection in both metaphorical and literal uses is the only significant form. In the third level, the relatively fixed patterns in the metaphorical meanings and the free syntactic patterns in the literal uses show how metaphorical meanings are shaped.

In sexism, the juxtaposition of words forms can elevate one gender above another and unsettle equality between genders. In the present work, sexism is examined in a corpus-based manner through qualitative and quantitative analysis of collocations of the words woman and man in Hamshahri Corpus version 2. In the present research which has been done on the basis of Baker’s (2006, 2010a, 2017) corpus-based approach, the collocations of the words man and woman have been identified using Antconc software functions of collocates and concordance and the data have been classified semantically. The results show the existence of sexism in the collocations of written Persian language; while both of the words man and woman co-occur with collocations having neutral-meaning, qualitative analysis of collocations categories reveals that women, in comparison to men are in lower position. Also, sexism against women is observed in categories like family, job, personal characteristics, art and crime.

In case, based on the theory of conceptual metaphor, we consider the foundation of human thought as metaphorical and consider language as only one of the representations of conceptual metaphors, we should be able to consider conceptual metaphors in other representations such as still and moving images, sounds, music, etc.Accordingly, in this research work, the metaphorical conceptualizations of the Salesman film are examined based on the conceptual metaphorical theory of Likoff and Johnson (1980, 2003) and the theory of Forswell Multidimensional Mkkketaphor (2006, 2008). For this purpose, linguistic and non-linguistic representations of conceptual metaphors are analyzed in different sequences of this work. Examination of the data reveals that conceptual metaphors are widely used in this film. Some of these metaphors, such as the Iranian film “ Salesman” as a play about US made film “ The Death of a Salesman” or Tehran as New York in the 1940s, pervade the entire narrative of the film and conceptualize the similarity of the social conditions of the two societies.  And some, such as Emad as Mash Hassan or Emad as an animal, have been used to characterize the roles.

The present research studies a process involved in the rise of the Persian discourse marker “ya’ni” (meaning that) in the framework of discourse grammar (Kaltenbock et al, 2011) and based on Heine’s approach (2013). Heine believes that the process leading to the rise of discourse markers is pragmaticalization. To him, a process called co-optation is the central mechanism involved in pragmaticalization, and he considers pragmaticalization and grammaticalization as distinct processes. Through co-optation a linguistic unit is transferred from sentence grammar to thetical grammar, acquires new semantic functions based on the complicated network of situation of discourse, and changes to a discourse marker. To carry out the present study based on Heine’s approach as its analytical framework, diachronic data in Persian were collected from the 4th to 14th Hijri centuries by choosing two typical books from each century. Then, all the occurrences of “ya’ni” in those books were manually identified and analyzed. The present diachronic study of “ya’ni” in Persian confirms Heine’s framework, and it shows a growing number of theticals as time passes. In addition, it was verified that the process which plays a role in the development of “ya’ni” is not grammaticalization, but pragmaticalization in center of which there is co-optation.

One controversial issue in embodied cognition is that lower cognitive abilities (e.g. perception) influence higher cognitive abilities (e.g. language). In particular, with regard to this idea, several studies have shown that visual perception and visual imagery share common neural representations. However, it is an open question whether visual perception deficit could influence perceptual simulation during language comprehension. To clarify this issue we carried out a behavioral experiment, using sentence-picture verification task to examine the extent to which children with developmental dyslexia can simulate the shape and orientation of an object implicitly described in the sentence. Seventeen children aged between 8 and 13 years with dyslexia and 17 age-matched control subjects participated in this study. Data analyses showed a significant difference between two groups and revealed that in the typically developed group reaction time for matching condition was faster than mismatching condition, whereas children with dyslexia were less able to distinguish between two conditions. The results showed that perceptual experiences can modify the subsequent processing of perceptual (visual) imagery and also suggest that visual perception and visualization during language processing share common representations. In addition, the finding highlights the influence of visual perception on language comprehension.

Linguistic representations of conceptual metaphors have been studied in numerous Iranian and non-Iranian researches; however, few studies have been devoted to visual representations of metaphor. In the present research, based on the theory of conceptual metaphor and metonymy as well as multimodal theory of metaphor, the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualizations of the film of "the Snow on the Pines" were studied. To this end, all the scenes and dialogues were analyzed and the metaphors and metonymies, which were directly or indirectly related to the main theme of the film, i.e., infidelity and love, were scrutinized. The findings showed that some metaphors like SADNESS AS DARKNESS and EMOTIONAL RELATIONSHIP AS NUTRIENT were mainly mono-modal and only represented via the visual signs. On the other hand, some metaphors like LOVE AS JOURNEY, CONTROL/POWER AS UP, and LACK OF EMOTIONAL RELATIONSHIP AS SNOW were multimodal and represented by a combination of visual and spoken or visual and written signs. Moreover, in the present film, the metonymies of EFFECT FOR CAUSE and POSSESSED FOR POSSESSOR played a significant role in forming metaphorical conceptualizations.

This study aims to use cognitive critical discourse analysis in analyzing the first statements of the recent presidents of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the General Assembly of the United Nations. It seeks to capture how each discourse makes antagonisms through applying metonymy-producing relationships. The main question is how identity and its otherness are articulated in the context of the Iranian presidents’ statements in the UN’s General Assembly and which factors and signs in the metonymy-producing relationships serve this representation. The theoretical framework of this study is composed of Hall’s (2011) approach to discourse analysis based on cognitive linguistics, Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) Discourse Theory, and Radden and Kövecses (1999) conceptual metonymy. The findings show that each president through using metonymy-producing relationships, profiles some vehicles that both negatively foreground some aspects of the other’s identities, and avoid explicit other-making and overt antagonism with them. On the other hand, all the discourses apply similar metonymys; this behavior denotes their common root as subdiscourses of the Islamic revolution’s metadiscourse.

A key finding in embodied construction grammar (ECG) is that brain areas related to action and language are interdependent. Specifically, with regard to this idea, several studies have shown that action execution and observation influence subsequent language processing, in that action verbs processing elicit activation of effector-specific regions in primary motor and premotor cortex. However, the relationship between motor skills impairment and action related language processing is still a controversial issue. In order to clarify this issue, we designed image-verb matching task (Bergen et al., 2003) to examine motor imagery ability of children with dyslexia during action verbs comprehension. We used Persian verbs expressing hand and foot actions that were either congruent or incongruent with the images that had been presented.

Thirty four children from grades 2 through 6 (aged between 8 to 13 years old) participated in this study. A group of 17 children with surface dyslexia with mild to moderate degrees of reading disorder (12 boys and 5 girls; mean age= 10.6, SD= 1.51) and a group of 17 typically control children (12 boys and 5 girls; mean age= 10.3, SD= 1.41) were selected. In both groups the children were matched pairwise on chronological age and gender. Children with DD were recruited for participation through rehabilitation centers and special centers for language and learning disabilities. The TD group consisted of a subset of children who were recruited from state primary schools in the city of Shiraz. The diagnoses for dyslexics were based on several sources of information as 1) assessment by psychiatric specialist or teacher report, 2) intelligence test: Persian version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV), subjects with IQ level below 80 were excluded, 3) Bender Visual Motor Gestalt test, and 4) informal interview with children and their parents. Potential subjects both in DD and control groups were screened to ensure they didnchr t have any history of neurological and psychiatric disorders that could contribute to motor impairment. In addition, subjects underwent reading examination to evaluate their reading skills and children who had severe reading disability were excluded. All participants were Persian-speaking monolinguals. Ethics approval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee (IR.SUMS.REHAB.REC.1398.021) at SUMS. Before beginning the experiment, parents gave written consent for their children to participate in our study, which was approved by ethics committee at SUMS and they were all paid for participation.

The nonparametric Kruskal Wallis Test showed a significant effect of matching in image-verb verification task, and indicating a better performance of the control children over the dyslexic children; Matching verbs, (DD mean= 3.55, SD= 3.43; TD mean= 2.41, SD= 0.88, p<.001), same-effector mismatches (DD mean= 3.47, SD=1.98; TD mean= 3.32, SD=0.97, p<.001), and different-effector mismatches (DD mean= 4.03, SD=2.92; TD mean=2.43, SD=0.78, p<.001). The chi-Square test showed a better performance of the control children (DD mean=66%, TD mean=87.3%, p<.001) over the dyslexic children. In all verb types, dyslexics scored significantly less than typical children; Matching verbs, (DD mean= 71.8%; TD mean= 88.2%, p<.001), same-effector mismatches (DD mean= 59.7%; TD mean= 75.6%, p<.001), and different-effector mismatches (DD mean= 66.4%; TD mean= 97.9%, p<.001).

The findings reflect different nature of motor imagery used by TD and DD children and support the hypothesis that motor skill impairment affects motor imagery ability during action verbs processing. Furthermore, these findings indicate that action execution and action verbs processing share common representations and lend support to embodied cognition theory in that there is a significant connection between embodied experiences and language comprehension. Therefore, lower ability to simulate the motor representation of action verbs highlights the critical role of embodied experiences on language understanding.

The purpose of this study is to examine the sources of knowledge and strategies of derivation. It means that Persian language learners use Arabic roots when confronted with Persian words. Also, the degree of their success in deriving the meanings of these words and its relationship with the type and number of knowledge sources and semantic derivation strategies used by them in this study has been investigated. For this purpose, 64 Persian words with Arabic roots, first out of the fabric and then, in the form of a short story, were given to 10 Persian-speaking students of the Lebanese language. They were taught to think long and then the resources and strategies used, then the protocol They were recorded, recorded and reviewed based on the knowledge sources introduced by Hastrap (2008) and the strategies provided by Hu and Textile (2014). A comprehension test was taken to determine the level of these individuals. The results showed that these individuals used 18 strategies of semantic inference of words and six sources of knowledge to infer the meaning of Persian words of Arabic origin. In general, the textual context and individual knowledge from outside the world were among the influential factors in derivation, and the degree of success of individuals in inference was related to the type and number of methods of inferred meaning and inhibition of knowledge.

In the present research, based on the Kövecses (1986, 2010) cognitive conceptualization theory of emotions, conceptualization of love in Simin Daneshvar's novels has been studied. For doing so, first the conceptual metaphors of love were extracted from the data by combining two methods of metaphor determination: 1. Machine search of the lexical item(s) of a specific target domain (the word love in our case) by a concordancer program (AntConc (Anthony, 2014), in our case) and 2. Manual search of the whole data. Then, the manual search of the whole data was carried out to find the conceptual metonymies and related concepts of love. In the next step, different types of metaphor, metonymy and also related concepts of love were studied. In the final step, on the basis of the conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies and related concepts of love, the cognitive model of love in Daneshvar's novels was identified. The cognitive model of love has shaped based on 40 conceptual metaphors, 33 conceptual metonymies with the general metonymic pattern of “EMOTION EFFECT FOR EMOTION” and also 11 related concepts of love, some of which are the causes and the rest are the effects of love.

This article aims to analyze Locative Alternation (LA) in Persian based on Croft's (2012) causal approach, Givón's (2001) methodology to calculate topicality and Hamshahri Corpus 2 (AleAhmad et. al., 2009). Croft explains argument realization based on verb's event structure, and that structure is represented through causal chain which, itself, reflects force dynamic relations. The data includes 1112 cases of LA constructions in their natural linguistic context. The relevant results are as follows: the factor involved in LA, that is, choosing between locatum-as object construction and location-as-object construction, is determining the affected element and not the holistic/partitive reading; the affected element is identified with regard to the concept of topicality; topicality is linked to objective construal as opposed to subjective construal.

Investigations show that in Persian no significant research has been done on lexical relationships of size adjectives. In this paper, near-synonymy relationship of ‘‘ziyâd and farâvân’’ size adjectives and their inflectional forms has been studied based on Behavioral Profile Analysis approach of Divjack and Gries (2006) and the data of Hamshahri 2 corpus (Alahmad and et.al, 2009). Accordingly in this study, first, by using AntConc software (2011) the data related to ‘‘ziyâd, ziyâdi, ziyâdtar, ziyâdtarin, ziyâdtari, farâvân, farâvâni, farâvântar, farâvântarin, farâvântari’’ size adjectives were extracted from the corpus and then were annotated on the basis of the morphological, syntactic and semantic features. The result of behavioral profile approach which is acquired according to hierarchical cluster analysis indicated that the highest level of near-synonymy belongs to ‘‘ziyâdi, farâvâni’’, ‘‘ziyâdtari, farâvântari’’, ‘‘ziyâdtar, farâvântar’’, ‘‘ziyâd, farâvân’’ and ‘‘ziyâdtarin, farâvântarin’’ groups and the lowest level of near-synonymy is between ‘‘ziyâdi, farâvâni, ziyâdtari, farâvântari’’ and ‘‘ziyâd, farâvân, ziyâdtarin, farâvântarin, ziyâdtar, farâvântar’’ groups. Finally, annotation analysis based on Z-scores has specified all meaningful and meaningless ID-tags of size adjectives.

The durational variability of phonetic intervals is considered as one of the properties of speech rhythm. These intervals include segmental, vowel, consonantal, vocalic, intervocalic, voiced, unvoiced, syllable, and syllable peak intervals. The durational variability measure for some of these intervals, such as vowel, consonantal, vocalic, intervocalic intervals, determines the classification of languages based on their rhythm. Besides, in some cases, the speaker identification is only possible through the person's voice. The segmental and suprasegmental properties of a language can be used to identify the speaker. In this study, the acoustic correlations of Persian speech rhythm in a reading text are calculated by various durational measures. Also, the between-speaker rhythmic variability is considered to find the best rhythmic measures for Persian speaker identification. The results confirm that Persian is near to the syllable-based languages. Moreover, the results from segmental and supra-segmental consideration demonstrate significant between-speaker variability in Persian. Among phonetic intervals, nPVI-VC and V% (percentage of vocalic intervals) best discriminate between-speaker variability in Persian.

The present study investigated the challenges of transliteration of Persian names to English ones, and the impact of these challenges on the recall of web of science’s retrieved results. This study is applied in terms of objectives and quantitative (i.e., survey) in terms of data collection procedure. The population included the names of Iranian authors who had published an English article in Web of Science between 2010 and 2017. First of all, 3110873 names were retrieved. It reduced to 11,242 after homogenization process. Data was collected through Bibexcel and Excel software and Web of Science database. The findings showed that there were three types of challenges (i.e., vowels, consonants, and omitted or double consonants) in transliteration of Persian names to English ones; they resulted in non-homogenous and different written forms. In addition, the results of Chi-square test showed that the frequency of all forms of the mentioned challenges had a significant effect on the recall of the retrieved results. Considering the importance of retrieving the names in retrieval studies as well as research studies’ evaluation, some solutions, such as the using Boolean operators and wildcards between the prevailing typographical forms, creating Persian soundex, and equipping the database with the thesaurus, are suggested

The present study aimed to examine and compare the knowledge sources and strategies used to infer the meaning of Persian words derived from Arabic by successful and less successful Arab-speaking learners of Persian. To achieve this objective, a standard reading test and think-aloud protocols were used to collect the necessary data. At the outset of the study, 10 Lebanese Arab speaking learners of Persian were asked to express the meanings of 64 de-contextualized Persian words derived from Arabic. Then, depending on the number of words whose meanings were unknown to them, each participant was asked to express the meanings of the 64 unfamiliar words in a short story. During this process, they were asked to elaborate on the knowledge sources and strategies they used to infer the meanings of the unknown words. Meanwhile, their voice was recorded, and later transcribed, and coded. Inter- and intra-coding reliabilities were also checked. Moreover, the reading comprehension test was given to the participants in order to categorize them into successful and less successful readers. Results of the study showed that the successful readers used fewer knowledge sources and strategies to infer the meanings of Persian words derived from Arabic compared to their less successful counterparts.