نشریه زبان و زبان شناسی
پیاپی 28 (پاییز و زمستان 1397)

The information structure and how to represent it in a variety of constructions is one of the topics that has attracted much attention in the functional approaches to language review. In this article, we will look at how to distribute information from the perspective of common ground management in complex sentences. In the role and reference grammar, subordination constructions are divided into two types: daughter subordination and ad subordination. Hence, it is possible to construct external information, including information structure in an entirely subordinate clause, and constructing internal information including the embedded clause. In this research, based on the above parameters [daughter subordinate constructions vs ad subordinate and external information structure vs internal information structure] the distribution of information was examined  in complex sentences of the Persian language. The results, in brief, showed that restrictive relative clauses normally cannot host the focus of the sentence and that they are not a good domain for contrastive topics. The reason is that if there are any such categories of information, then it cannot successfully fulfil its primary function and help identify the referent of the head noun. The adverbial clauses that are kind of ad subordinate clauses cannot have internal information structure or, in other words, they cannot be questioned by any of their inner constituents. The only way to question these elements is through echo or in situ questions, which highly depend on texture. The complement clauses in the Persian language have a full internal information structure and the complement clauses with manner and factive verbs in the Persian language, especially in the language of speech, can have internal information structure; if there is a contrastive presupposition, the complement clauses will have internal information structure.

Ecolinguistics is a new area in language studies, which focuses on the interrelation between a language and its users’ geographical and natural environment. In ecolinguistics, the environment around the speakers, their association with  nature and the climate of their region are among the various factors involved in the formation of words in a linguistic society.  For example the number of terms related to nature is greater in societies linked with nature through livestock or farming than in those which lack such link. Iran has a large diversity in natural ecosystems. The present paper first introduces and describes ecolinguistics, then the animal adjectives (qualifying domestic animals, wildlife, birds and insects) are studied in the Lori Bakhtiari dialect. The findings of this research show that the words related to animal characteristics and moods and their metaphorical meanings are used to describe the speakers’ characteristics and moods in the linguistic society under investigation.

This paper is the report of a thesis, a corpus- based descriptive and theoretical study of cognitive grammar account of Imperative construction in Persian language. The study investigated the classification of Imperative construction in Persian language, the most frequent verbs and their usage pattern in Persian language, frequency of verbs in negative imperative and also discourse- interactive usage of imperative construction in Persian language. The data consisted of imperative constructions which were extracted and collected from the novel “Dai Jan Napelon” . Then data collection was extended to PLDB, where , “Tatneshinhaye Boloke Zahra”, “Ghessehaye Behrang”, “Educational Hamshahri Newspaper 1-1382” and “Educational Hamshahri Newspaper 2-1382” were examined for their Imperative constructions. The study characterized Persian imperative in terms of cognitive grammar concepts as prototype and schema. It showed that based on these concepts, Persian imperative can be classified into simple, passive, conditional, good wishes, imprecation and interrogative types. The most frequent verbs in Persian imperative are to say, to let, to see, to go, to come, and to give. In negative imperative mental verbs are mostly used. Moreover, it was observed that some imperative constructions demonstrate non- imperative functions.

The article proposes a fuzzy approach to Modern Persian perceptual vowel space. The theory of fuzzy sets is based on multi-valued logic, in which a category has no sharp boundary, so a membership function plays a key role. To achieve our goal, we carried out an acoustic experiment. A number of 96*2 synthetic stimuli of the six vowels in Modern Persian (/i,e,a,ɑ,o,u/) were examined through an Identification test. Each of the stimuli was randomly played twice for twenty participants (10 males and 10 females) and the values of the vowels’ first two formants (F1 and F2) were recorded. Based on the collected data, not only were the “crisp values” and “fuzzy values” of vowels tabulated, but the areas of “auditory clarity” and “auditory vagueness” around each vowel were also identified. The results showed that the vowel continuum between two adjacent vowels were vaguely perceived by the participants. It  was concluded that fuzzy vowels have no clearly defined boundaries. In other words, they may contain partial degrees of membership denoted by a real number that ranges from zero (meaning no membership) to one (meaning complete membership). Moreover, the  fuzzy sets theory proved to have the ability to calculate and explicate the overlapping vowels in the vowel space.

Death is a vague, frightening and abstract concept, mostly considered as a taboo. The current study investigates the ways of conceptualizing death among Persian language speakers in a representative corpus of Persian texts. It seeks answer to the question: What kind of linguistic tools are used by Persian language speakers in order to conceptualize the phenomenon of death and what cultural elements are involved in this regard .To answer the research question, we used the Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB) and a selection of obituaries and epitaphs as data and attempted to identify and extract all the expressions which were directly or indirectly related to the concept of death. Using the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), by Lakoff and Johnson (1987), and cultural conceptualization by Sharifian (2011), the ways death is conceptualized were identified on the basis of a cognitive-cultural approach.

The term‘‘reflexive’’has been used throughout the history of linguistics in the sense of referring to the function of marking two arguments of a verb as co-referential. The present paper is an attempt to analyze the deverbal compound nouns derived from reflexives and reflexive intensifiers in Persian. It argues that the verbal part of these compound nouns provides information about the noun’s argument structure. Typically, the two argument positions inherited from the underlying transitive verb must be filled by the same argument. In other words, the relevant nominals express a reflexive meaning. Given that we are dealing with the interface of grammar and the lexicon, it should not come as a surprise that we find a certain amount but not a total degree of semantic compositionality in this domain. Following Konig (2011) and the principles of grammaticalization theory, we will show that the reflexives and intensifiers component encode the same content as their syntactic meaning. It is further demonstrated that the reflexive meaning, direct object and the frequency of "xod" are more documented than the intensifier function, indirect object and the frequency of xiš and xištan.

Many researchers believe that children with cochlear implants have normal speech development like children with normal hearing. However, speech errors or phonological processes which in normal children usually disappear by the age of six, may, in children with severe/profound hearing impairment and cochlear implants, take longer to disappear, sometimes extending beyond age six. In order to help treatment, it is therefore necessary to examine the existence and type of speech errors among these children. The rationale behind the present study is that these processes which are known to be different in different languages and dialects, seem to be under-researched in Persian. To investigate and describe the normal and abnormal phonological processes in the continuous speech of four children of cochlear implantation from different grades in the elementary school for the deaf, the standard phonological test was used. Then their speech errors were analyzed. The results showed that normal phonological processes still exist in these children and that the elimination of the final consonant is the most frequent process (11/25), whereas the reduction of the cluster is the least frequent (0/75). The elimination of the final consonant, predilection, disengagement, and extension of the four phonological processes were found to be normal, having maximum values  in all the four cases. The most abnormal phonological processes concerned the number of laterals (3/75) that were found in all the four cases. Based on the findings of the study, it is concluded that there are normal and abnormal processes in the speech of children with cochlear implantation but their number decreases as they grow older.