amir ghorbanpour

Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live by, written by the British linguist and ecologist Arran Stibbe, is the second edition of the book that was first published in 2015 by Routledge and was one of the most prominent works focused on this relatively new interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics. The book, in its second edition (Stibbe, 2021), is organised in eleven chapters and, together with the appendix of the sources of data and the glossary of technical terms at the end of the book, contains a total of 260 pages. The present article will first give a brief overview of the background of the term “ecolinguistics”, and the advent of this field and the scope of its studies; that is because, as is often the case with many scientific disciplines, this cover term and its other related terms have been used in various senses since the emergence of the field. The content of the book in its second edition will then be looked at in detail.

“Impossible Languages”, written by the Italian linguist and neurologist Andrea Moro, and published in 2016 by the MIT Press, includes themes that were also covered in parts of Moro’s previous book, “The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages” (Moro, 2015; translated from Italian into English, with a foreword by Noam Chomsky). The book is organized into eleven chapters, and, together with the list of references and an index, contains a total of 145 pages. In this book, the author explores what makes human language unique and different from any other communication system — the so-called fingerprint of human language, as referred to in the book — and presents interesting theoretical and empirical evidence in favor of a biological interpretation of human language structure, which includes some of the latest findings from neuroimaging studies in the last two decades. The present article will briefly look at the content of the book.

A few 2-aryl-1H-phenanthro [9,10-d] imidazoles were synthesized and assessed for their cytotoxicity against MCF-7, HepG2, and AGS cell lines using MTT assay. Cellular assessments showed that phenanthroimidazoles were extremely potent cytotoxic agents (sub-nanomolar IC50s). Maximum effect was recorded for para-N-phenyl acetamide containing derivative against AGS cells (IC50 0.07 nM). It was also revealed that phenanthroimidazole derivatives showed better cytotoxicity against MCF-7 and AGS cells when compared to HepG2 cells. Minimum cytotoxicity was reported for para-methylphenyl derivatives within HepG2 cancer cells (IC50 7608.07 nM). Structure-activity relationship studies indicated that incorporation of nitrogen/oxygen-containing polar groups such as N-acetyl or nitro into para/meta positions of phenyl ring significantly enhanced the cytotoxicity against AGS cells. A similar trend was observed in meta-nitro derivatives vs MCF-7 cells. It was revealed that even the least potent compound exhibited cytotoxic activity in the range of low micromolar IC50. Results of this study proposed 2-aryl-1H-phenanthro [9,10-d] imidazoles as privileged structures for further in vivo studies.

The purpose of this study was to predict organizational agility through job motivation and self-efficacy of the staff of the Education Office. The statistical population of this study included all employees of the Bardaskan Education Office in the academic year 2015-2016, of which 300 were reported. 170 Subjects were selected through voluntary sampling method and responded to job motivation questionnaire of Hackman & Oldham with Cronbach’s alpha=0/88, General Self-Efficacy with Cronbach’s alpha=0/85 and Organizational Agility questionnaire with Cronbach's alpha=0/85. Pearson correlation and multiple regressions were used simultaneously in version 20 of SPSS software for data analysis. The results showed that there is a direct and significant relationship between job motivation and organizational agility (P < 0.0001, r = 0.637), as well as between self-efficacy and organizational agility (P = 0.0001, r = 0.752). The results of regression analysis revealed significant beta coefficients for prediction of organizational agility on job motivation (P <0.001, β = 0.453) and self-efficacy (P <0.0001, β =0.445) was significant and these two predictors can explain 77% of the variance in organizational agility scores (P <0.0001, F = 230.37). The higher levels of job motivation help organizational agility by effectively orienting employees into organizational goals and self-efficacy by creating a sense of the effectiveness of employee behavior. The findings of this research are discussed in the context of the organization.

The present study aims at exploring head position in Persian syntactic phrases within the Optimality Theory framework. Making use of syntactic alignment constraints proposed by Grimshaw (2002), which is alternatively notated in this paper as Align-Left/Right(X, XP) (McCarthy, 2008), the study seeks to arrive at a consistent ranking of the relevant constraints being active in Persian with respect to the relative position of heads and complements within phrases. Bearing in mind the non-uniformity of head position across Persian syntactic phrases, it is concluded that the general constraint Align-Left (X, XP) is highly active and determinant in most of the syntactic structures in the language; also, the exceptions of head-finality, i.e. verb phrases and the direct object case marker ‘rā’, are accounted for by more specific, higher-ranked constraints of opposite value. These higher-ranked constraints are Align-Right(V, VP) and Align-Right(K, KP) respectively.