فصلنامه زبان شناسی اجتماعی
سال سوم شماره 3 (پیاپی 11، تابستان 1399)

Investigating the perception of language learners toward language and literature is considered as a significant issue in sociolinguistics and research on language education. Probing the Persian language learners’ understanding toward the literature might shed lights on the effectiveness of literal texts in learning Persian language; it may also clarify its status among the Persian language learners. It is currently argued that the literature cannot be beneficial in language teaching making it the subject of intense debate among Persian language practitioners. The relevant literature indicates that the attitude of Persian language learners has received very little scholarly attention. This study investigated the perception of non-Iranian Persian language learners toward the use of literal texts in Persian language teaching profession. The data collection tool was a forty-five-item questionnaire distributed among 166 participants. The findings indicated that the non-Iranian Persian language learners had significantly positive attitude toward the application of literal texts in Persian language courses; the considered criteria were apparently effective in encouraging the learners to learn Persian through the literal texts. The results could be contributing in curriculum development for non-Persian language learners and Persian language teaching program.

Critical Metaphor Theory is an interdisciplinary approach in linguistic studies beginning with Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and introduced as a theory by Chartris-Black (2004). This research is to find the quality of election conceptualizations in Iran's Political Newspapers Headlines. Then, it attempts to investigate how the two dominant political ideologies of reformism and fundamentalism function to legitimate the self and illegitimate the other candidates and ideology. To do so, Chilton's (2004) Deictic Dimension Model was used. The data were extracted from the election headlines of 12 political newspapers during a two-month period of 2017 presidential election. Having analyzed the data, the researcher found that there are three dominant election metaphors, namely: Election is a journey, Election is a battle, and Election is a sport competition in both reformist and fundamentalist' newspapers' headlines. The result of this study is significant in that it was found that THE SELF is conceptualized as now, here, and good, near the deictic center, though THE OTHER is spatially and temporally far from deictic center and its values. This paper shows that political structures and processes like SELF/ THE OTHER opposition obviously influence metaphorical conceptualizations.

Every part of a conversation is related to what comes before or after, however, there is sometimes a long gap between the beginning and the end topic of the conversation. Hobbs (1990) calls this phenomenon “topic drift” and defines 4 types of coherence relations responsible for topic drift. Since the messages are displayed in a reverse chronological order and subsequently it is not obvious to which message the comment refers, maintaining coherence in multi-user computer-mediated communication is rather difficult. Moreover, intervening messages are observed among the messages that logically form a chain. As a result, one can consider the existence of coherence relations and analyze topic drift in conversations occurring on social media. In this paper, we have attempted to use Hobbs (1990) and Herring and Nix’s (1997) framework to investigate the coherence relations among 27 posts and 4881 comments on Instagram. In comments related to the main post, the order of coherence relations was “on topic and semantic parallelism” with the distances 3, 2 and 1 respectively, “break” with the distance 4, “explanation” with the distances 3, 2, and 1, and “metatalk” with the distances 0, 4, 3, 1, and 2. In comments forming intervening chains, the order of coherence relations can be defined as: “on topic” with distance 0, “explanation” with distances 1, 3 and 2, “Semantic parallelism” with distance 1, 3 and 2 and “metatalk” with distance zero and 2.

The projection and reflection of thoughts, beliefs and generally ideology in linguistic forms is one of the considerable foci in many areas of linguistics, including critical discourse analysis. Literary texts are adopted from authors' hidden ideology to direct addresser toward what they have in their mind. On the other hand, with the development of studies on corpus linguistics, the analysis of large volumes of linguistic data has already been provided. One of the important concepts in linguistics is keyness. Keywords do not mean the most frequent words in a corpus, but rather words that have a higher frequency in a particular text than is expected of a corpus. In this study, based on Baker's (2006) theoretical approach, we analyzed the keywords in two works of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, "Khasi dar Mighat" and "Gharbzadegi", investigating the social and political atmosphere of the works. To this end, after creating a reference corpus of Al-e Ahmad's other works, Word Smith tools was used for data analysis and 20 keywords were extracted and analyzed in the form of sample sentences.The results showed the reflection of Jalal al-e Ahmad's ideology such as criticizing the westoxification, caroxification, rooting failure causes, achieving Iranian society for freedom, and attempt to preserve cultural identity in these two works.

Over the past six decades looking for linguistic manifestations of sexism has been a noticeable trend in linguistics. The theoretical motivation for this unprecedented interest is an insight put forward by critical linguists in terms of which linguistic events can affect social structures and at the same time, being affected by them. It is in the light of this view that looking for linguistic instantiations of sexism can gain a significance which goes beyond the language itself. Looking for gender inequality in those linguistic products which are tightly associated with popular culture can potentially lead us to the underlying social order which has given rise to them. Jokes, which are prototypical examples of such linguistic products, are the focus of this study. Based on the framework of critical linguistics we aim to identify and explain manifestations of discursive sexism in Persian jokes in terms of the social order witch constitute them. To this end, nine indicators of sexism in jokes have been elicited, and measured in a corpus of popular Persian jokes. The corpus-based analysis shows that instances of sexist discourse are highly frequent in Persian joke-telling culture; Moreover, the findings show that sexism in jokes cannot be reduced to those jokes which are “obviously” sexist in their humor, and the linguistic-structural manifestations of sexist discourse can be found in the whole Persian joke-telling culture and beyond the scope of sexist jokes.

The present study explores the functions of linguistic taboos in Iranian contemporary cinema, and and the effect of gender on the film characters and screenwriters in expressing them. Twenty Iranian movies in a twenty-year period from 1998 to 2018 shaped the corpus of this sociolinguistic study. To analyze the data, a revised classification of Wardhaugh's (2006) framework was used. The fidnings showed that among Wardhaugh's classification, attention, stimulation and humiliation were observed in Iranian contemporary cinema. Moreover, four new functions, namely emphasis, psychological relief, fear, and expressions of affection, were also identified in the Iranian corpus. Results showed that the taboo words related to psychological relief were the most frequently used taboo words (49%) in the corpus. The results also revealed that male characters made the most use of taboo terms in comparison with the females. Female screenwriters, however, were the ones who employed more taboo terms in their plays than the males. The result may help to effectively undertand the informal expressions of language, and it eplxores the hidden layers in which emotion are expressed in human's conversation. The findings may have implications for playwriters, screenwrites, language designers, linguists and even language teachers

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the manner of space-building and how space is transmitted during the process of translation from English to Persian based on Fauconnier's (1998) mental spaces theory. This paper aims to evaluate the role and frequency of space-builders in the formation of mental spaces and the degree of alignment of mental spaces with the audience of two languages. The role of contextual and pragmatics factors, and translator influences in conveying homogeneous spaces is another issue that has been addressed in this study. The research data set contains 100 sentences of two novels, The Kite Runner (Hosseini, 2003) and The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway, 1990) and the equivalent translation of these two works (Ghabraei, 1396; Daryabandari, 1385) which are compared and assessed in a descriptive-analytic study. The findings indicate that  the most frequency of space-builders belong to prepositional phrases and adverbial elements  and despite of some differences in the type and number of space-builders in two language sentences, the establishment of spaces is almost identical. The role of contextual and pragmatic factors was also important in disambiguating some words, in correct text translation and in the transmission of mental space details.