مجله جستار های زبانی
سال ششم شماره 6 (پیاپی 27، زمستان 1394)

Syntactic movement is one of the most attractive parts of the Universal Grammar which has conserved its importance from the starting models of this theory to its recent models; and there have been a lot of explanations for the operations of this syntactic process in the language structures of different languages. Despite many efforts of Persian linguists, many issues of Universal Grammar, especially in minimalist approach, are still unexplored in the Persian language. In this paper, we will have a more detailed investigation of the syntax of Persian sentences and the complexities of this kind of movements, on the basis of Minimalism. Regarding this objective, we will introduce some unique and distinguishing properties of downward movements and will study four types of downward movements in Persian language, from which downward movements of the heads of Agreement, Tense and Negation projections can be mentioned. It seems that, accepting the possibility of syntactic downward movements, there will be better explanations for the syntax of Persian sentences and the positions of functional nodes in the hierarchical organization of Persian sentences in their derivation.

order to study the acoustic features of stress in Tati language, one minimal pair has been selected where in one the stress was on the last syllable and in another on the first syllable. These minimal pairs were embedded in declarative and interrogative carrier sentences. Eight educated native speakers were participated in this experiment reading these in a silent room. Using PRAAT, a textgrid has been made for each in which the vowel boundaries determined, then by a script we measured duration, F1, F2, Fundamental frequency and intensity. The results show that the difference of duration, F0 and intensity between stressed and unstressed vowels is significant while the F1 and F2 are not important cues. So the most important cues distinguishing the place of stress in Tati are F0, Duration and intensity. A final observation concerns the utterance-final syllable interrogative contours Which is H% while declarative utterances end in L%.

This paper attempts to investigate the Persian morphological system in the framework of Lexical Morphology Model (Kiparsky, 1982). The main goal of this research is to study the efficacy of the model in analyzing the Persian data. Having introduced the Lexical Morphology, some data which are counterexamples to the model at first sight, will be discussed. It will be shown that on the basis of different syntactic, semantic and cognitive criteria there is some kind of conformity between the data and the Lexical Morphology Model; although it is asserted that the efficacy of the model to analyze the English data (the language on which the model is designed) is more than its efficacy in Persian. In addition, the author suggests that in order to cope with some inadequacy that Kiparsky’s model encounters to analyze idioms (listed syntactic objects) the model should be revised by a loop connecting the syntax level to lexicon. Therefore, idioms are firstly formed in syntax, after lexicalization they will return to syntax. It seems that this loop makes the model much more efficient.

This study investigated the mapping between Farsnet and Princeton English WordNet (PWN) and tried to answer these questions: Are the unmapped synsets in FarsNet with Princeton WordNet Persian specific lexical items? How can these cases be classified? Is it possible to find equivalents for some of these cases in PWN? In other words, were all of the equivalents of these lexical elements not lexicalized in English or there is another reason for that? For this purpose, a sample including 2000 synsets of FarsNet was selected and unmapped synsets were analyzed. Out of the sample, near 15 percent of the synsets had no mapping. The Categorization and analysis of the selected synsets showed that less than two third of these synsets were Persian specific words and more than one third were synsets that were unmapped due to other reasons and therefore those are not specific lexical items in Persian. By enriching and completing the information in PWN and then FarsNet a lot of these cases can be mapped with PWN synsets.

Adopting a theory and data-based research via introducing natural morphology theory, this article, tries to study inflectional system of Persian language on the basis of congruity –system principle which is one of the components of dependent-system theory. The authors have stated unique features of inflectional affixes. Then, on the basis of five properties of this principle (occurrence of categorical systems and categories, occurrence of base form inflection or stem inflection, separate or combined symbolization of categories, number and manner of formal distinctions in the paradigm, occurrence of marker types related to the categorical system involved, and presence or absence of inflectional classes), the congruity of inflectional affixes of the Persian language has been measured. For this purpose these affixes have been analyzed in three macro classes: noun, verb, and adjective. On the basis of this principle adjective affixes are more congruous and uniform, but noun affixes are less natural.

Stroke can negatively affect a person’s ability to utilize properly acoustic measurements as a cue to prosody at the sentence level. The objective of this study was to determine the nature of the prosodic disturbances in Persian Broca’s aphasics at the sentence level in the framework of Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology. The subjects of this experimental study included three Persian-speaking males. They were selected by simple purposive sampling method from patients directed to the speech therapy unit in the Ghaem Educational, Research and Treatment Centre (Mashhad, Iran). Aphasic subjects sustained a lesion to the left hemisphere and particularly to the Fronto-temporal region. Acoustic measurements of duration, intensity, and terminal components of fundamental frequency (F0) that distinguish statements from their yes-no question counterparts were examined in the reading task in Persian-speaking aphasic patients. The findings of the present research revealed that the aphasic individuals were able to produce statements from their yes-no question counterparts in terms of terminal components of fundamental frequency (F0); however, they demonstrated a poorer performance than the control group. So, generally speaking, the present study confirms that linguistic ability of Persian-speaking aphasic patients to differentiate statements from questions may be preserved to some extent. The findings also support the notion that the left hemisphere may be important in the production of prosody and the Fronto-temporal region is sensitive to sentence-level prosodic contours.

Adjacency condition is one of the syntactic constraints on case assignment in many languages such as English, Dutch, Turkish and Hindi. Many linguists studied adjacency condition in some languages and some of them including Chomsky (1981) and Stowell (1981) confirmed the role of this condition in generative grammar and some linguists including Johnson (1991) rejected it in generative grammar. Opponents of this hypothesis believe that adjacency condition can be replaced by projection principle and binary branching condition. In this research, we try to investigate the role of adjacency condition in Persian. Data analysis indicates that assigning structural case to subject by inflection head and also assigning structural case to definite direct object by verb are not subject to adjacency condition. In fact, the position of definite direct object and inflection head is in the specifier of inner verb phrase core and at the end of sentence, respectively which they are not adjacent to each other. However, assigning structural case to noun phrase by preposition and also assigning structural case to indefinite direct object by verb are subject to adjacency constraints. Therefore, there is a direct relationship between adjacency condition and specificity.

The comprehension of Persian idioms was studied in monolingual Persian aphasic patients. Having specific structures, idioms are different from other sentences in every language, so their way of processing can be different from that of other sentences too. The main goal of this study was to investigate the roles of the two brain hemispheres in idiom processing. Idiom comprehension in two left hemisphere damaged (LHD) and two right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients was assessed through three tasks: a sentence-to-word matching task, a sentence-to-picture matching task and an oral definition task. The results of all tasks showed that idiom comprehension in brain damaged patients was impaired compared to that of the control group (which consisted of 15 healthy subjects). There were no meaningful differences between the performance of right hemisphere damaged patients and that of left hemisphere damaged patients. In addition, some probable factors such as the visual-spatial deficits in RHD patients or severe production deficits in LHD patients had some effects on the patient's performances.

The Present research is a semantic attempt to the semantic exploration of Persian non- compound verbs and their formal-sematic equivalent compound verbs with the aim of showing which kind(s) of synonymy there are between these equivalents. In this study, first, the author’s point of view about Persian compound and non-compound verbs are explained and then, after mentioning different methods of making compound verbs out of non-compound verbs in Persian, different kinds of synonymy from semanticists’ point of view have been introduced and explained. After a short discussion about different kinds of synonymy, through using examples, we try to argue which kinds of synonymy there are between discussed equivalents. To reach this goal, 363 non-compound verbs which have formal-semantic equivalent compound verbs have been collected from Sokhan 8-vol. Persian dictionary. The corpus has been attached to the article as an appendix. The results of the investigations have shown that absolute synonymy and implied synonymy do not exist between these equivalents, but other kinds of synonymy; namely near synonymy, analytical synonymy, descriptive synonymy, partial synonymy, propositional synonymy do exist between the studied equivalents.

Lieber (2004, 2009) is a decompositional approach with seven semantic features and a principle called coindexation principle. In this theory each lexical item has one semantic skeleton and one semantic body. The skeleton may consist of a hierarchical arrangement of functions and arguments and the semantic body contains two layers: the first one, like semantic skeleton, is relatively stable and can be formalized but the second layer consisting of general information and encyclopedic knowledge, varies a lot. Coindexation principle identifies the arguments of two or more lexical items and makes another item that denotes one unified lexical item. This paper studies the semantic contributions of prepositions in Persian, and then, based on semantic features, classifies them. The conclusion of the paper is that prepositions like other categories as a result of semantic skeletons and weak semantic bodies, own semantic contributions and they have some common semantic features with verbs. Lastly, based on the semantic contribution/features of prepositions, they can be classified.

Sa’di’s Gulistan has always been considered as one of the most important sublime masterpieces of Persian literature. Regarding to stylistic researches on Gulistan, one of the peculiarities of Sa’di’s artistic techniques is to select the verbs in such a way to reflect the influence of didactic qualities. In Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, the verb category is also considered as a process of transitivity system (grammatical ability for representation of experience in language), ideational and experiential meta-functions. The study of the types and frequencies of the processes leads to the achievement of the author’s mental status and style. In the stylistic study of texts, transitivity system makes it possible to select the processes systematically and to represent the author’s intentions. The goal of this article is to study the main components of masterpieces like Gulistan and to describe its features. To attain this goal, having explained the processes and its types, seven parts of Gulistan (the first seven Babs) and their frequencies are studied at the first step. The study reveals that Sa’di has paid attention to the selection of the processes and the capability of the simultaneous artistic repetitions besides meaning and rhythm. Since most Sadi’s examples are of behavioral nature, it is concluded that the main concentration of Gulistan is on humans, social relationship and the didactic principles.

In dependency grammar, Valency refers to the lexical characteristics of a verb. In this grammar categories such as verb and noun combine with other constituents of the sentence and as a result a hierarchical relationship is established between words in the sentence. In this grammar, it is assumed that each sentence has a main verb and based on the kind and number of the obligatory and optional complement(s) of the verb, the basic structure of the sentences in which the verb is used can be determined. But in every language, in addition to lexcical peculiarities, there are syntactic rules which apply to the basic structures and transform them to derived structures such as passive, causative, or topic. In this paper, We intend to introduce the valency structure of verbs in the lexicon. For this purpose we have attempted to determine the complement(s) of the Persian verbs.

Borrowing words is a common and unavoidable phenomenon that is closely related to relation of different linguistic communities. The purpose of this research is to study the phonological adaptation of Arabic loanwords in Persian focusing on vowels system. Authors gathered 1647 Arabic loan words from Persian Dictionary of Moien and Sokhan, and then they extracted phonemic form of loan words from four Arabic dictionaries. Phonemic forms of the words in Persian were collected from both Dictionaries. All the phonemic forms of the words were written in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). And then by comparing two phonemic forms of the words, they found the phonological rules of adaptation. The framework of the study is OT (Optimality Theory) according to Prince and Smolensky. An optimal Tableau was considered for each phonological rules and explain the competition of constraints. The finding of the present study is that vowel substitution is the most common phonological rules in adaptation of Arabic vowels in Persian.