The Role of Gender in Producing Linguistic Variation in Persian Translations of “Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka: An Interface between Sociolinguistics and Generative Grammar

Linguistic variation is one of the challengeable themes in sociolinguistics. The researcher discusses linguistic variation in Persian translations The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Translated into Persian by Sadegh Hedayat and Farzaneh Taheri. The main questions in the present research are: 1) How is the role of gender in producing lexical variation in these two translations of The Metamorphosis? 2) In which parts of speech does it take place lexical variation more than others? 3) How is the role of gender in producing syntactic variation in two translation of The Metamorphosis? 4) Are there any relationships between gender and syntactic processes concerning the syntactic variations? The results of research indicate that gender has crucial role in producing linguistic variation including lexical, morphological and syntactic variations in Persian language. The results indicate that there are 505 lexical variations in two translations in which the number of verbal, nominal, adjective, and adverbial variations is 398, 51, 39, 17, respectively. The investigation of data indicates that the rate of morphological variation is less than lexical and syntactic variations. Also, the results indicate that there are relationships between gender and syntactic variables such as scrambling, adjuncts application, question particle application, grammatical metaphor of nominalization, grammatical metaphor of modality, causation, relativization, extraposition, grammatical metaphor of transitivity, and subordination shifting. One of the main implications of present research is that there is close interface between sociolinguistics and generative grammar and therefore, the results of present research confirm the opinions of sociolinguists such as Sells et al. (1996) and Barbiers(2002) about interface between sociolinguistics and generative grammar.