مجله زبان شناسی گویش های ایرانی
سال پنجم شماره 1 (پیاپی 6، بهار و تابستان 1399)

Toponyms or place names are divided into three categories according to their type: uronyms or the name of lows and highs of earth, hydronyms or names of geographical features that refer to waters, and oykonyms or names of residential areas. Toponyms are also part of the vocabulary of any language, and the same grammatical rules apply to them as are common to other words in the language. Toponyms can morphologically be divided into two categories, simple and complex. Simple place names are words that consist of only one morpheme. But complex nouns are divided into three categories: derivative, compound, and derivative-compound. Compound or complex toponyms are words that consist of at least two independent and meaningful words. In such compound place names, the meaning of one of the two words present in the compound is usually slightly altered and gradually, as a result of overuse, becomes a topoformant. In Iranian toponyms, these topoformants play a major role, and their use in the construction of place names is more important than derivational affixes. In compound oykonyms of Iran, different topoformants are used. In this paper, those topoformants that are considered as unmarked place names are discussed. To this end, these topoformants in compound oykonyms are examined from both morphological and semantic perspectives.

Clitics are medial linguistic units that have some characteristics of both affixes and words. The present research has been done to investigate clitics in Kalhori Kurdish of Ilam dialect. This investigation was done through a descriptive-analytic method whose data has been collected by referring to numerous resources of Kalhori Kurdish of Ilam and the linguistic intuition of the authors of this research. The patterns used to identify these clitics in this article are those criteria applied by Shaqaqi (1374) adopted from Zwicky and Pullum (1983) to investigate and classify the morphemes of the Persian Language. The results of this research show that the clitics of Kurdish dialect include: enclitic personal pronouns, object marker, linking verbs, marker of indefinite nouns, and the marker of past perfect tense and passive marker. Of these clitics, pronoun clitics (personal pronouns) have an agreement rule. This article shows also that the model of Zwicky and Pullum (1983) can be used as an appropriate scientific tool to identify and study Kurdish language clitics. The new achievement of this research is identifying "ɥ" clitic as the marker of the auxiliary verb in the past perfect tense and the existence of "ja" clitic for the passive verb.

This article addresses vowel harmony in Hamedani Turkish Within the framework of different models of optimality theory including Feature alignment, Local Agreement, Spread, Span, and Agreement-By-Correspondence. A corpus of related data was gathered and pronounced by 30 native speakers of Hamedani Turkish. Examination of the data suggested that three types of harmony occur in the said dialect, namely total harmony, opaque harmony, and transparent harmony. Results obtained from analyses indicated that the Spread theory, as contrasted with other models of optimality theory, has both descriptive and explanatory adequacy to account for data of vowel harmony in Hamedani Turkish. For one thing, the model can account for any type of vowel harmony in Hamedani Turkish. On the other hand, using the markedness constraint Spead [αF], the model can explain why different processes of assimilation in the sound systems of languages serve to operate and function similarly in respect to agreement in articulatory mechanisms.

Reduplication is the subject of many language studies in different languages. Reduplication is a word-formation process in which all or part of a word is repeated to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase in size, added intensity, and continuance. This paper is aimed at classifying and analyzing types of reduplication in the Lari language based on a phonological approach. Lari is a subset of southwestern Iranian languages and UNESCO identified this language as one of the endangered languages in its Atlas of endangered languages. 114 corpus of this study has been collected from a native speaker of this language and the author’s intuition as a native speaker as well. By carrying out this study in a descriptive-analytic framework, the results of this study show that there are total and partial reduplications in Lari that can be justified based on a phonological approach.

This study aims to analyze the clauses of Barzoki language from the perspective of two metafunctions (interpersonal and experimental) and the intention is to measure the semantic analysis of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar of this kind of language, which, like many local dialects or languages, has only a spoken and conversational form. For this purpose, according to the Interpersonal meta-functional analysis, the subject, finite elements, and the type of clauses and based on the experiential metafunction, the frequency, and type of processes of Raji Barzaki are examined.  Barzoki Rayeji (Raji) is one of the endangered Iranian languages which is spoken in Barzok (a city that is 50 Km far from Kashan).  This study is descriptive-analytic. The data were obtained from the interview with a female native speaker 83-year-old and 2 male native speakers 82 and 64-year-old From Barzok city. By studying 35 clauses of the oral narrative on the subject of the flood of 60 years ago in Barzok, the results indicate that the material process with 66% (23 verbs) is the most frequent event in the experiential metafunction. The occurrence of other processes is relational process 20% (7 verbs), mental process 8% (3 verbs), behavioral process 3% (1 verb), verbal process 3% (1 verb), and existential process 0%. Interpersonal meta-functional analysis of these clauses show that among the 35 clauses, 34 clauses are declarative and 1 clause is imperative; the subject is absent in 33 clauses and only in two clause subject and speaker are the same. Also in 35 verbs of the clauses, 33 verbs have the past tense (28 verbs with simple past tense and 5 verbs with a past continuous verb) and 2 verbs with the present tense.

Conversion is the process by which the lexical category of items changes without any change in form. The present study is an attempt to investigate the conversion process in Kalhori Kurdish. This study aims to determine the lexical categories which participate in conversion processes and to show the directionality of them. Furthermore, this study intends to critically evaluate the ability to explanation Kalhori Kurdish database on both Dirven (1999) event schema metonymy and Libere (1992, 2004, 2005) relisting approaches. The data were collected from two Kurdish dictionaries of Karimpur’s xowrhalaat (1380) and Jalilijan’s Baashur (1385). To detect lexical categories, first of all, the identical processes to conversion were discovered and deleted. Then, based on the semantic criterion, the direction of the conversion process is found out. After that, data were analyzed within metonymy and relisting frameworks. The results illustrated that in Kalhori Kurdish, Noun, adjective, and verb are three lexical categories that participate in the conversion process. moreover, the directionality of conversion processes is like the conversion from noun to verb, conversion from adjective to verb, and conversion from verb to noun. The conclusion also indicates that Dirven’s (1999) event schema metonymy can explain the data of Kalhori Kurdish in the conversion process.

Peykāni is a variety of Central Iranian dialects spoken in the village of Peykān (locally Peykom) in Jarquya district of Isfahan province in central Iran. It shares features with other Central dialects in the Southern branch such as Gazi, Sedehi, and Isfahani Jewish. This paper describes synchronic and historical phonology and grammar of Peykāni based on a corpus collected by the authors in Peykān village during winter 2019. The study of phonology of the dialect as presented in the current paper shows that Peykāni basically has Northwestern features and in later changes, it shares some features with other Central dialects but also shows features that are specific to Peykāni. In morpho-syntax features, Peykāni coincides with the Southern branch of Central dialects as it has no grammatical gender, passive stem, or future tense that separates it from the rest of Northeastern Central dialects in the Kashan region. By having some new grammatical features such as a new form for definiteness or imperfect suffix, Peykāni has specific features not seen in other Central dialects.

Tālēši is one of the languages bordering the Caspian Sea, which belongs to the western branch of the Iranian languages. Based on its geographical use, the language has three main dialects, Northern, Central and Southern dialect. These dialects are spoken along the shores of the Caspian Sea, in the southeastern part of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Māsāli, Lerik, Lankaran, and Astārā, east of Azerbaijan province and west of Gilān. This study deals with the historical changes of the Central Tālēši phonemes using written sources. The historical changes of some phonemes have been studied and compared in Ancient Iranian, Middle Persian, and New Persian languages, respectively. The results of this study showed that most phonemes in Tālēši had the same historical phonetic changes as in Persian, but some special developments have also occurred in this dialect. For example, the phonemes /v/, /č/, /y/ and /j/ have not changed historically from Ancient Iranian to Central Tālēši. Therefore, Central Tālēši can be considered as one of the conservative dialects in terms of historical changes in phonology.

The current research examines the word order and the application of the topic and focuses on the Lahijani dialect with emphasis on the discourse functions such as the speaker, listener, and context. This study is based on the framework proposed by Erteschik-Shir (2007) and Whaley (1997). The objective is to know what the word order is in this dialect and how it interacts with information structure. To gather the data, native speakers’ conversations have been recorded for 8 hours (800 sentences). Data analysis shows that Lahijani is a verb-final language (with a high frequency of SOV order) with a free word order. It is a non-configurational language. Four types of topics have been determined, such as; stage, permanently and temporarily, null (topic-drop), and multiple topics. In Lahijani, every sentence must have at least one topic to be interpreted. Topic as given information tends to appear both clause initially and finally. Two types of foci as new information are determined: contrastive and restrictive focus. Context determines whether a constituent is a topic or focus; both can be contrastive. Therefore, Lahijani has both flexible word order and flexible information structure notions (as marked forms) in which both syntactic elements and information structures can be moved freely by speakers’ pragmatic intention. Thus, the main factor for this flexibility is the speakers’ pragmatic intention.

The aim of the present study is an attempt to determine and describe the clitics of Taleqani dialect based on Zwicky and Pullums tests (1983). Zwicky and Pullum provide several criteria for distinguishing the word from the clitic. These criteria indicate that clitics, compared to words, exhibit characteristics similar to fixes (mostly inflectional fixes). The research was descriptive-analytical and the contributors are twenty Taleqani speakers from the village of Kiyadeh who were in the range of 30 and 80 years and sex was disregarded. They include the different ages and illiterate and the educated. The results of this study show that the clitics of the Taleqani dialect are divided into two categories; simple and special. Simple clitics include 2 clitics; /-e/ (object maker) and /-e/ (complement maker) and special clitics include 7 clitics; /-o/ (conjunction “and”), /-am/ (adverb “also”), /-e/ (definiteness), /-i/ (linker), /-â/ (emphasis), clitic verbs and pronominal clitics. The present study shows that the Zwicky and Pullum’s (1983) tests can be used as a scientific and appropriate tool for identifying and studying Taleqani's clitics. To examine and classify the bound morphemes in the Taleqani dialect, we have selected seven tests from the Zwicky and Pullums tests (1983). The selected tests were divided into three groups: phonetic, morphological, and syntactic. To investigate and identify the clitics in the Taleqani dialect, first, all of the bound morphemes of this dialect were collected and measured with the help of these tests.

In some new morphological theories, by adapting a unified paradigmatic approach to the analysis of derivation and inflection, their traditional distinction has been diminished and paradigm functions apply to inflection and word formation based on a single lexeme. In the inferential-realizational theories, such as the theory of Paradigm Function Morphology by Stump (2001), taking a lexeme-based approach, the traditional notion of inflectional paradigm is the dominant theoretical idea, but the existence of derivational paradigm has been confirmed in parallel with it. The main question of this research is how to account for inflection and derivation in Farsi in terms of the criteria of the Paradigm Function Morphology. To this end, 40 verbal lexemes, their derivatives, and inflected forms and relations between them were analyzed concerning these criteria. It is noticeable that Beecher's model (2004) for derivational paradigm has been used here in line with Stump's theory (2001) to represent the relationships among Persian derived words more explicitly. The findings suggest that the paradigmatic approach and its mechanisms for derivation and inflection are roughly the same and differ only in some features that arise from distinct roles of inflection and derivation. In a paradigmatic approach, the direct and indirect relations between cells in inflectional and derivational paradigm as well as their relations with related lexeme are depicted more explicitly and clearly than a morpheme-based approach to inflection and derivation. Also, the asymmetry between form and meaning is much better accounted for because one whole-cell represents one meaning.

The present study, applying Optimality Theory, explores deletion and insertion in Rabor dialect in a descriptive-analytic approach. To see whether these two phonological processes in Rabor dialect are analyzable and justifiable in the Optimality Theory framework or not, final consonant deletion, medial consonant deletion, and glottal consonant deletion along with prothesis and epenthesis are explored. The data are gathered through people’s everyday conversations, books, and other publications on Rabor dialect and the author’s intuition. Data analysis shows, unlike Persian, in some cases in Rabor dialect, vowel deletion is used instead of medial consonant insertion for preventing hiatus, causing a more frequency for deletion in contrast to insertion. Vowel quality changes, in contrast to the Kermani dialect, and some other nearby cities, in the case of glottal consonant deletion in syllable coda, is not fixed in Rabor dialect. Furthermore, in Rabor dialect, epenthesis in verbs does not make use of current consonants used in Persian.