نشریه زبان و زبان شناسی
پیاپی 21 (بهار و تابستان 1394)

In recent studies, evidentiality is a linguistic term which specifies the source of information and speaker`s attitude toward her/his statement and impact on audience. Aikhenvald (2004:3) defines evidentiality as a linguistic category whose primary meaning is source of information. Although there isn`t any grammatical evidential in Persian, this language has some linguistic items which fulfill the evidential function in addition to their first roles in language .Thus, evidentiality can be considered as an important discourse and textual elements. In this research, evidential structures were examined in the Persian discourse of the Oscar winning movie “Separation”. The results showed some direct evidential (visual) and indirect evidential (non-visual, inference, assumption, hearsay and quotation) in the form of impersonal passive forms, modal expressions, tense- aspect features, reports and quotations and sensory and perception verbs. The study of quality and quantity of movie`s evidentials, reveals important information about the movie characters. Therefore, the study of linguistic evidential plays an important role in understanding the purpose and motivation of the screenwriter for characterization in a movie.

International advertisers try to employ a myriad of techniques and devices to persuade different consumers who have various values and attitudes to choose from among competing brands. Analyzing 100 randomly photographed billboards of London and Tehran collected in 2014-15, this study aimed to compare English and Persian advertisements from the perspective of cultural values suggested by Cheng (1994).In this article, the data are only analyzed in terms of linguistic aspect. Using the descriptive-analytic method, the results of the research revealed that there were similarities and differences in both languages. Although the most common cultural values in both languages were “Modernity” and “Economy”, they varied in relative proportion and the sort of techniques used. Furthermore, values such as “Courtesy”, “Neatness”, “Respect for the elderly”, “Technology”, and “Work” were only used in billboards of Tehran, whereas “Leisure”, “Wisdom” and “Nurturance” were not observed at all in Persian samples. In addition, the findings showed significant differences in utilization of “convenience” and “Quality” which were more prevalent in English billboards. These differences seems to reflect different cultural values in the two societies under investigation.

Ain-Alghozat Hamedani is one of the most influential writers of Persian literature in the field of thought and expression. So, like many other famous authors, some works are assigned to him. This research used comparative stylistic analysis to examine his most important work “Tamhidat” together with “Lavayeh”, a work assigned to him. The purpose was to check the authenticity of these works. The study adopted a Systemic Functional perspective, and used the textual metafunction, focusing on theme. About 1500 clauses from each of these works were examined, in addition to other features of them. The results showed that the latter work does not seen to have been written by Ain-Alghozat Hamedani.

The present research aims to examine the image schemata in elementary school Persian textbooks within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Image schemata are of the basic arguments in fields such as philosophy, psychology and linguistics. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the importance of image schemata as a part of language and thought is that rudimentary embodied concepts of this kind provide the conceptual building blocks for more complex concepts. This makes their study inevitable in fields such as education in general and educational materials in particular which are incorporated in language and thought The analysis is geared towards determining the basic image schemata -containment, path and force- by Johnson (1987) in elementary school Persian textbooks as one of the important materials. The method of this study is qualitative, quantitative and descriptive. The results show that despite the significant difference (p

The current work investigated the prototypes of the concrete category of ‘flower’ for Persian-speaking male and female students of primary school (10-13 years old), middle school (13-15 years old) and high school (16-18 years old) and also college students of agriculture, psychology and medical sciences. It also investigated the effect of age, gender and educational background on these prototypes based on Rosch (1975) and Liu et al.’s (2009) methodologies. To collect data, different groups of participants were provided with two types of questionnaires in two steps. In the first questionnaire, participants were asked to write whatever examples they recalled from the category of ‘flower’. In the second questionnaire, which was based on the first one, participants were asked to score each member of the category from 1 to 5. Rose, Damascus rose and lilac were found to be strong prototypes for the category of ‘flower’ in Persian language in all the twelve groups of Persian-speaking students. The results also showed that environmental factors have a great effect on prototype formation of the category ‘flower’ in Persian language.

The present study examines the notion of cognitive morphology, considering the productive Persian morpheme "kār" as a polysemic morpheme. Image schema was studied to categorize various forms of the function of this morpheme. The present research revealed that when Persian speakers encounter words which use this morpheme, they predict the metaphorical meaning and form an embodied schema of that related usage. In this paper the cognitive morphology approach is introduced, metaphor and image schemata are discussed, and previous researches on this morpheme are presented. In the final section this morpheme is analyzed and discussed synchronically based on the cognitive morphology approach, and the related embodied schemas are presented.

Vowel perception occurs through the spectral and temporal information transference. Presence of temporal information in the envelope makes the speech signals perceivable, even when spectral information weakens in the synthesized signals. The present study deals, for the first time, with determining and comparing the acoustic characteristics of clear and vocoded vowels of the speakers of English and Persian languages. Ten native Persian (5 female and 5 male) and one male native English speakers produced their simple vowels of their mother tongue for three times. Tokens were of 180 Persian and 24 English phonetic samples. The vowels were then vocoded using MATLAB software and 270 Persian Vocoded samples and 54 English Vocoded samples were extracted. The waveforms, spectrograms and LPC diagrams of clear and vocoded vowels were analyzed using the Praat software. Results showed that in Persian speakers F0, F1, vowel space and duration of clear vowels were higher for females than males but the intensity was lower. Formant frequencies for F1-F3 were different across two languages. Vowel space was greater in Persian and English vowels duration and intensity were longer and lower respectively. In both languages, F0 and formants of vocoded vowels were not identifiable, and their LPC diagrams had rounded peaks with lower amplitudes. Duration of clear and vocoded vowels was similar, but intensity of the latter decreased in Persian and enhanced in English. Results showed spectral differences between vocoded and clear vowels in both languages.