جستجوی مقالات مرتبط با کلیدواژه « english » در نشریات گروه « ادبیات و زبان ها »

The aim of this comparative research is to investigate the polysemy of “head-compounds” in Persian and English and to identify the constructional schemas governing the construction of these compounds based on Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010). To this end, all compounds consisting of “head” as their first constituent were collected from different Persian and English sources. Our data consist of 300 compound words collected from Comprehensive Sokhan Dictionary, Zansoo Dictionary, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Online Merriom-Webster, Collins, and Cambridge Dictionaries. Then the collected compounds were semantically categorized and their similarities and differences were examined. The findings showed that the polysemy in these compounds could be explained not at the level of words, but at the level of abstract constructions and constructional schemas in both languages. Therefore, it was considered as a type of constructional polysemy. Moreover, it was found that although there were similar constructional schemas and subschemas for "head-compounds” in both languages, the semantic variations and the number of subschemas in Persian were more than that of English. This difference indicated that the schematic hierarchy of the construction [Head-X] in Persian was more semantically complex and more extended compared to English.

This article is a descriptive-analytical research based on the theory of conceptual metaphor, which examines the conceptual metaphors of the field of fear in three literary works from different languages, Sang Sabbour (Persian), Sound and Fury (English) and Miramar (Arabic). The findings of the research show that all three authors jointly used the Specific metaphor "FEAR ARE OBJECTS" and this can be a confirmation of the universality of conceptual metaphors. But in relation to Generic- level metaphors in these stories, it was found that Sadegh Chubak and Najib Mahfouz in Persian and Arabic stories have benefited the most from the Generic- level metaphor "EMOTIONS ARE OBJECTS", while Faulkner has used the most in the English story, Sound and Fury. Equally, it uses the Generic- level metaphors "EMOTIONS ARE LOCATIONS" and "EMOTIONS ARE FORCES". The difference between Persian and Arabic stories with English story points to the culture-specificity of Generic - level metaphors.

The present research provides a cross-cultural study about hand and foot metonomy-based metaphors in Persian and English by means of a semantic analysis. The research method is exploratory and its data includes 32 conventional metaphorical expressions containing hand and foot body terms which are taken from the idioms of The Free Dictionary, and their Persian equivalents are extracted based on Farhang Moaser One-Volume Millennium English-Persian Dictionary (Haghshenas et al., 2002). The research objective is to explain the biological motivation of the metaphors on the basis of holistic medicine. The research findings show that a number of the metaphorical expressions related to hands and feet can be investigated based on their biological origin in the holistic medicine, and the others are schematic and symbolic and formed according to externally visible events and bodily functions. The results indicate that, regarding the same biological origin, we can see relatively similar metonymies, while cultural patterns have created different metaphors in both Persian and English.

Comparison is a fundamental aspect of human cognition that is expressed in various ways across languages. However, it cannot be solely described by individual words or morphemes; rather, its existence depends on underlying schematic structures. Heine (1997) notes that the domain of comparison encompasses different conceptual and linguistic forms, with the "superior comparative" serving as a prototypical example in languages worldwide. It is worth noting that both "superior comparative" and "superlative" constructions share common underlying structures. This study hypothesizes that Persian exhibits a greater variety of language-specific superlative constructions compared to English, attributed to typological features such as the "Ezafe construction," "free word order," as well as other morpho-syntactic elements including constructional idioms, specific lexical items, and phrasal/complex predicates unique to Persian.This study aims to address the following questions: 1) What schemas and morpho-syntactic mechanisms do Persian and English employ to express the superlative comparison notion? 2) Do all constructive components of superlative comparison in Persian and English require obligatory or optional formal expression? 3) To what extent can Stassen's typological classification (1985) and Heine's cognitive approach (1997) explain the superlative comparative constructions in these two languages? 4) How similar or different are the dedicated grammaticalized constructions employed by Persian and English to express the superlative comparison notion?

In recent years, the enrollment of English as a foreign language (EFL) has increased significantly in higher education. The aim of this study is investigating the impact of a group learning program which is implemented as online on learning motivation of English among Iranian university students. Forty four undergraduate university students (25 males and 19 females) with the age range of 18 to 30 participated in this study. The Dornyei theoretical framework (2005; 2009) was used to measure the three aspects of motivation (ideal L2 self, ought-to L2self, and L2 learning experience). A pre- and posttest survey and a semi-instructured interview were used as the main instruments. For identifying the differences of the scores of three aspects of motivation, a paired sample T-test was used. The findings showed that there was a significant difference in L2 learning experience prior to and after the program administration and no significant difference were observed regarding the two other aspects. The findings also showed the most motivating feature was interesting learning recourses and tools and the most demotivating feature was technology barriers. Moreover, the findings of the interviews showed that most of the students had positive experience of this project. With the increasing role of English in Iran in all aspects of teaching and learning as an international language, it is crucial for teachers and program developers to care about the motivational drives of learners due to the positive feedback of some programs as the project under the study.

The concept of “intelligence” lost its one-dimensional sense many years ago and is now considered a multidimensional concept that encompasses all abilities of individuals. One type of intelligence that is based on time-related individual differences is “temporal intelligence”, which refers to the thoughts, views, and behaviors of people in relation to time. Although this variable has been researched in the field of managerial science, it has not received much attention in the field of education. Since the concept of time is closely related to culture and language, the present study attempted to compare the effects of studying three different languages on students’ temporal intelligence. Two objectives were considered in this study: first, to investigate the effects of studying English, Persian and Arabic languages on students’ temporal intelligence by considering the Applied ELT approach, activity theory, and habitual theory; and second, to investigate the possibility of significant differences among undergraduate students in English, Persian and Arabic in terms of temporal intelligence. For this purpose, the General Temporal Intelligence Scale was completed by 100 students of English language and literature, 100 students of Persian language and literature, and 90 students of Arabic language and literature. The results of the independent samples t-test on the data showed a significantly-negative effect of studying Persian and English on the temporal intelligence of students in these fields (p < 0.05), meaning that the temporal intelligence of second-semester students was higher than the temporal intelligence of eighth-semester students. Regarding the second purpose of the study, the findings indicated that there was a significant difference among these three groups in terms of temporal intelligence; in other words, English students had higher temporal intelligence (p < 0.05). Finally, the results and implications of this study were discussed in the context of language education.

The morphological systems tend to follow certain principles, transparency is one of these important principles. This study examined the transparency of Persian and English inflectionals based on natural morphology. The main issue is how transparency is represented according to natural morphology. Persian data are selected from Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies Corpora and English data are extracted from Corpus of Contemporary American English through random sampling (and based on equal number of words). Afterwards, they were analyzed based on Dressler and Mayerthaler’s approach. The results indicate, in Persian, the plural markers –ha,-un, the superlative adjective marker -tarin, past tense suffixes –t, -ad, and negation prefix n-, and in English, the genitive marker -'s, superlative adjective marker -est and past participle -en are transparent and the rest is opaque. Findings indicate the transparency of nouns and verbs in Persian is more than adjectives; however, in English, it′s not true. This is one of the differences of two morphological systems. Also, there is no direct relationship between transparency and frequency of inflectional affixes. Indeed, there is a direct relationship between grammatical categories and transparency of inflectional affixes. This relationship doesn’t necessarily apply to the transparency of each affix with its frequency.

This article is a descriptive-analytical research based on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), which studies the conceptual metaphors of the field of anger in three fictional works of Sange Sabour (Persian), Sound and Fury (English) and Miramar (Arabic). The findings of the research show that one of the most frequent source domains that all three authors have used to express the abstract concept of anger is the specific metaphor "ANGER IS AN OBJECT / TOOL". Of course, just by having one common source domain, it is not possible to strongly emphasize the universality of conceptual metaphors, and the existing differences indicate culture-specificity of these specific metaphors.But in relation to Generic- level metaphors in these stories, it was found that all three writers, Sadegh Chubak, William Faulkner, and Najib Mahfouz, have benefited the most from the Generic- level metaphor "EMOTIONS ARE OBJECT" in the field of anger, and it can be said that at the Generic- level of metaphors, The universality of metaphors can be confirmed.

The present article reviewed “English Special: A Resource for Teaching English at Special Schools from Grade 7 to 9” by Heide Wöske. This book aims to teach English as a foreign language to students with learning difficulties from grade seven to nine in Germany. With regard to the criteria proposed by the Council for Reviewing Books and Texts on Humanities, the book’s merits and demerits in terms of form and content were discussed, and recommendations were made to enhance both the quality and the content of the book for future editions or adaptations. The most salient strong points of the book are the diversity of topics and the provision of various worksheets. Points which require attention in future editions or adaptations include the difficulty of reading the narratives, black-and-white printing of worksheets, difficulty of matching each worksheet with its how-to-teach notes, and an overemphasis on the culture of English-speaking countries which may restrict the application of the book in other parts of the world.

In this research, an attempt has been made to find out the intellectual differences that have originated from occupation, climate and environment, as well as a comparative study of a number of morphological and syntactic structures of Persian, English and Chinese to examine where there is a connection between the thoughts of people and the relations of thought and language in these three languages. In this research, the theoretical framework of linguistic relativity (Sapir, 1997: 36) has been used. The results of this study showed that Chinese speakers and Persian speakers describe the issues in general and emotionally and attach great importance to the group; Therefore, Chinese and Persian languages pay more attention to the meaning outside the language. English-speakers are more proficient in analytical thinking and analyze topics in detail, paying attention to the person and completeness of the sentence in terms of sentence structure. Examining the sentences of these three languages, it was found that the verbs of English and Persian, unlike Chinese, have a time. The non-living subject in these languages can be placed in the position of the subject. Nominal expressions have signs in terms of being known (definite) and or not known (indefinite). But in Chinese, noun phrases have no sign and the non-living subject is not in the position of the subject. Persian language is more similar to English in terms of structure and is more similar to Chinese in terms of thinking and culture.

This study aims to consider ghazal/sonnet from conceptual metaphor perspective (Lakoff, 1980). The corpus used in the study contains 24 poems (189 couplets) in Persian, Azerbaijani Turkish and English. The results of the paper show that the most frequent target domain in ghazal is “love”. Moreover, central conceptual metaphors in “love” are: A) in Persian: LOVE IS JOURNEY, LOVE IS WINE, LOVE IS TIE, LOVE IS FIRE, LOVE IS AWAKENING, LOVE IS DEAL. B) in Azerbaijani Turkish: LOVE IS OPPRESSION, LOVE IS WAITING, LOVE IS TURNING/TAWAF, LOVE IS SPRING, LOVE IS WINE, LOVE IS SERMON. C) in English: LOVE IS LIVE, LOVE IS UNSTABLE, LOVE IS PARADOX. This study also confirms that linguistic form has a direct influence on conceptual metaphor occurrence in ghazal. According to the findings of the current paper, the central conceptual metaphor plays a key role in versification. That is, central conceptual metaphor in ghazal seems to be the stimulus to the poet.

Speech act analysis, as a significant aspect of discourse analysis and pragmatics, has increasingly drawn the researchers’ attention since John L. Austin (1962) put forward speech act theory, and ever since then, the study of the linguistic structures of speech acts and their functional values have been among the key areas of study in speech act analyses. The present study comparatively explored the manifestations and functions of flattery speech acts in Persian and English languages. To do so, flattery instances were identified and extracted form a corpus of 60 Persian speaking and 60 English speaking film scripts. The speech act instances were extracted from different movie genres including social and family, drama, science-fiction, and romance. The movies were produced between the years 2010-2020. A sample of 343 Persian and 228 English flattery instances were extracted and analyzed on the basis of Hymes’s (1967) model. The obtained results indicated that flattery was used in both Persian and English cultures in order to exert positive influence on the addressees. Moreover, in both languages, the act of flattery was done in both formal and informal situations in an attempt to deceive, compliment, praise, and ridicule. In addition, although flattery speech act was found in both formal and informal situations—in the case of Persian language and culture—, its application in informal and private situations was more frequent than in formal situations. Moreover, the frequency of flattery in Persian language and culture was found to be significantly higher than English.

This study aims to propose a new definition of ‘meaning’ using corpus linguistics. The framework used in the current study is the Dooley and Levinsohn’s (2001) model of functional-cognitive approach. The corpus of the study contains 4 narratives (two English narratives and two Turkish ones). The results of the study show that meaning develops like a cell. As far as the study is concerned, meaning, as a physiologic cell, can be imagined as a cellular-cognitive schema. According to the cellular-cognitive schema, meaning is built in three steps like giving a birth (to a baby or a butterfly). That is, the birth of a baby, a butterfly, and meaning follow the same pattern. In the mentioned items, a cell or a unit (caterpillar regarding butterfly, sperm regarding baby, word regarding meaning) is located in the initial step. In the second step, there happens to be a cell/unit growth (butterfly: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly; baby: sperm, getting flesh/bone, baby; language: word gets new information). And in the final step, the cell/unit turns into a live creature (a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, a sperm turns into a baby, a word gets its meaning). Each of the items is produced in its context (sperm in mother’s womb, butterfly in its living environment, and language in linguistic context).

This study explores the effect of a cooperative instructional technique, named Ben Franklin, on the perception of Iranian EFL learners’ foreign accent. The technique requires learners to take detailed notes on what they are listening to (authentic podcasts in this study) and then go back and try to record themselves based on the notes. Thirty-four (34) learners at three proficiency levels from two intact classes participated in the study which lasted four months. Pre- and post-test measures were obtained to ascertain differences in performance of the learners. Two native speakers of English and two experienced Persian-speaking EFL teachers rated the learners’ performance on a 9-point foreign accentedness scale. A semi-structured interview also elicited eight learners’ attitudes towards the technique. Results showed a statistically significant improvement in the learners’ foreign accent ratings on the post-test. It was also found out that the learners’ accentedness ratings are highly related to their language proficiency.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the students’ perceptions of the language teachers’ ethical characteristics with regard to the students’ socioeconomic status. For this reason, an explanatory sequential mixed methods design was employed. First, a socioeconomic status questionnaire which was used to categorize the students into socioeconomically higher or lower groups. From among the 81 questionnaires distributed at 5 different language classrooms of 2 universities in Qom, 53 of them were completed. Afterwards, 22 of the students agreed to participate in a semi-structured interview as the second qualitative portion of the study. After close and repeated analyses of the codes and categories of the students’ interviews, 1 major theme (seriousness) was identified and cross-checked with the students’ socioeconomic status by using Fisher’s exact test. Finally, a model of language teachers’ ethical characteristics was contemplated on the basis of the students’ perceptions in order to be utilized in planning codes of ethics particularly designed for language educators as well as raising their awareness.