فصلنامه زبان شناسی اجتماعی
سال سوم شماره 3 (پیاپی 9، زمستان 1398)

As naming is of paramount importance in human communities, creating suitable and meaningful names is an important task of the writers. The author can choose various general, specific, mix and descriptive names with respect to theme and story environment, or even let them unnamed. Like writing styles, using names in story is different from person to person. Being familiar with the aim of the writer for choosing each name, helps audience to have a better understanding of the underlying meaning and hidden secrets in the story. Using a descriptive–analytical method, this research aims to study the onomastic of the characters in the novel “Malakout” by Bahram Sadeghi. In this story, names are analyzed based on point of view, character recognition and their meanings. Findings of the present research shows that most of the chosen names by Sadeghi are congruent with the characters in the story and have been chosen based on the action and behavior of the individuals. Furthermore, the usage of symbolic and metaphorical names in this story which are influenced by the special political and social era after the coup of 28th of Mordad 1332, reveals that a combination of political, social and cultural factors along with the specific lines of thoughts of the writer are responsible for his way of naming

With the 1979 Iran revolution, there has been an evolution in the logic of self and other in the foreign policy discourses of the Islamic republic of Iran and the USA, and these former two strategic allies, turned to the present antagonistic forces. From this historical point onwards, Iran-the USA relations and consequently, Iran and the West, was represented in a circle of agonism to antagonism. This issue has been considerable in both objective and subjective levels and Iran sanctions is one of its focuses. This study aims to investigate the hidden discourse in NOW, a web-based newspaper and magazine corpus, and to examine which signs and concepts were and forgrounded or backgrounded. The data were collected from NOW corpus from 2010 to 2019, and then analyzed in two micro and macro levels. In the micro level, with a focus on Iran sanctions items, the corpus was analyzed for the use of semantic categories. In the macro level, the representation of this issue was represented was investigated based on the approach of critical discourse analysis focusing on the hidden discourse of Fairclough, Laclau and Mouffe and van Dijk. Results show that some issues such as the reimposition of sanctions, their upcoming, violation, lifting sanctions, legislation and the names of different countries are foregrounded in this corpus. The most frequent topics in this corpus denote a one-sided view from the USA’s attitude, neglecting Iran’s reactions.

The research aims to investigate the women's identity as one of the most controversial subjects in the Islamic Revolutionary sub-discourse such as construction, reform, radical principalism and moderation on the basis of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory. To this end, the speeches of each above-mentioned sub-discourse were analyzed of the political elites. The findings show that the central slab of the three superscripts of tradition, modernity and traditional discourse moderated intrinsic inequality between men and women, social activity of women as Westernization and Muslim women in proximity proportions. There are some features of the previous two discourses that formulate the meaning of the discourse with different signatures. Also, the analysis of the discourse of women's position in the subtleties of the traditionalized superfundament suggests that constructive discourse emphasizes the presence of women in the community with education and employment syndrome. In contrast to the cross-talk of reform, women's participation in various social fields, which is considered to be equal to empowerment and employment, is associated with the concept of changing attitudes toward women, equal opportunities, lack of attention to gender, knowledge and awareness, family consolidation and veil (with tolerance). In conflict with the reformist discourse, the radical principled rhetoric emphasizes the strengthening of the family and the role of feminine and female motherhood, while building a central part of it, which is a partnership. The semantic system of the women's base in this subtitle arranges the maternal syndrome, complementary man, educator, promoter of love, veil and chastity and family labor. Dialogue of moderation in conflict with radical discourse, and in contrast, considers women as independent subjects, with an emphasis on the equality of women and men, highlights the central paradigm of equality between men and women, and the women's employment syndrome, equal opportunities, elimination of legal barriers, family planning, lack of gender and welfare, and women's insurance are linked to the gender parenting of Men and Women.

This study aims to investigate the polysemy of the Persian word /jigar/ from the perspective of cognitive sociolinguistics. The main objective is to show that cognitive sociolinguistic approach is more adequate to explain lexical polysemy in comparison to cognitive linguistics. In cognitive sociolinguistics, it is believed that polysemy cannot be reduced to a static state, one and the same for all speakers of a language. Rather, social variables like age and gender of speakers affect the way they perceive different meanings of the polysemous words. This paper, in line with Robinson (2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014), investigates the effects of two social variables of age and gender on the number and salience of each meaning of the polysemous word /jigar/. The data are gathered through library research (e.g., using Persian dictionaries), interviews, and questionnaires. The research method employed is hybrid, i.e. qualitative and quantitative. The data are gathered from 200 subjects, 100 male and 100 females, in four different age groups in Tehran. The results indicated that cognitive sociolinguistics is indeed more adequate in giving more exact explanations concerning meaning variation in polysemous words and the effect of social variables of age and gender on the number and salience of each sense. In other words, the results show that different senses of the polysemous words do not suggest the same distribution among different speakers, both male and female, belonging to different age groups, and are not accidental but explainable in terms of age and gender of the speakers.

Today, advertising plays a significant and indisputable role in human life and in many different aspects of human societies, and for this reason, promotional texts are also very important. From a linguistic perspective, in particular Halliday and Hassan's (1976) theory of cohesion, one of the important criteria for the meaningfulness and effectiveness of a text is cohesion. Therefore, it is expected that the advertising texts that are intended to persuade and influence the audience will also be strongly coherent. The main questions of this research are: What is the role of reference, as one of the cohesive devices, in creating cohesion of advertising texts? And what are the similarities and differences between the use of this cohesive device in English and Persian advertisement? Considering the importance and prosperity of food product advertising among different types of advertising, the data (15 Persian and 15 English advertisement texts) were randomly selected during a three-month period from March 2019 to May 2019. Product and food advertising have been featured on television and satellite channels. The findings of the study indicate that the frequency of demonstrative reference in Persian advertising is more than personal and comparative reference, while in English advertising the frequency of personal reference is much higher than the other two types. Among the types of personal reference, reference to the audience was the most frequently used one in both Persian and English corpuses. The results can be explained by considering the purpose of advertising which is to address and persuade the audience. The results also suggest that while personal references appear as parts of nominal groups in Persian texts, they appear as parts of adverbial groups in English texts Also, among the types of comparative references in both texts, the use of specific comparative references is more common.

Request formulaic expressions constitute an important part of the formulaic expressions whose concepts, in terms of sociolinguistics, can be interpreted into specific socio-cultural patterns. Despite its importance, research on Gilaki dialkect of Rasht received little attention. The purpose of this article, firstly, is to identify the politeness markers and mitigators in the polite request formulae in Gilaki of Rasht, and secondly, from a viewpoint of sociolinguistics, is to evaluate the role of these formulaic expressions in social interactions. In this study, using a qualitative approach and ethnographic research method, the data were derived from three sources of natural speech, language intuition and semi-structured interview. The sample consisted of informants of three villages in Rasht who were selected by a snowball sampling method. The extraction of formulaic expressions was based on Blum-Kulka et al.’s (1989) model, and the sociological content analysis of formulaic expression was based on Ferguson’s (1976) model. The findings presented the most common markers and mitigators of polite requests in Gilaki of Rasht. The results revealed some social values such as socialization, politeness in social interactions, respecting the rights of others, humility and the spirit of cooperation, which are institutionalized in the culture of this region.