فصلنامه زبان شناسی اجتماعی
سال پنجم شماره 2 (پیاپی 18، بهار 1401)

Discourse markers are a group of words or linguistic elements that make connections between the speech segments or sentences without having a role in their semantic meanings. Fraser (2009) divided discourse markers in three groups: elaborative, inferential and contrastive markers. Fraser has considered words such as and,but and soas primary discourse markers. In this study, we investigated all kinds of discourse markers especially the primary discourse markers in Persian conversations. The data were collected from a large Persian telephone conversation database. Thirty conversations for 10 hours and 36 minutes with different topics have been selected,and were analyzed based on Fraser’s classification. The results showed that the discourse markers “va” (and), “vali” (but) and “ba’d” (then) have the highest frequency and are considered as the primary discourse markers in Persian conversations. Moreover, there are other expressions in Persian which are produced through the combination of two discourse markers like “vali khob” (but well) and “va ba’d” (and then). These expressions although were not mentioned by Fraser, have a broad application in Persian and therefore can be considered as compound discourse markers.

This study aims to analyze the grammar of linguistic metaphors in Persian based on the theoretical framework of Deignan (2005, 2006). The purpose of the present study is to answer the questions “what role does grammar (part of speech, inflection, lexical grammar) play in the metaphorical representation of hand as one of the members of the conceptual domain of human body?", and "how does each of the three levels of grammar affect the metaphorical representation of the mentioned conceptual domain?" In other words, which level does play the more significant role? The second version of Hamshahri corpus was used to answer the research questions to determine the function of grammar in the metaphorical representation of hand as a source domain. The findings signify that the first level of Deignan’s framework has no influence upon the metaphorical usage of hand. From among the components of the second level, singular inflection in both metaphorical and literal uses is the only significant form. In the third level, the relatively fixed patterns in the metaphorical meanings and the free syntactic patterns in the literal uses show how metaphorical meanings are shaped.

The purpose of this article is to explore high school girls' graffiti from the perspective of sociolinguistics. The article starts with a review of previous research and then, the relevant theoretical framework was presented. For the purpose of data collection, photography was used to document the graffiti. The sample consisted of 705 graffiti of two high schools in Tehran and Karaj. The data were first analyzed in terms of writing system and then in terms of contents. The research method was descriptive and documentary. The results of the study indicate that the Persian script has the most writings. Also, the special name, cheating, handwriting, memento, taboo, humor and joke and calling God were the most common contents of the graffiti. The results of one-sample t-test confirmed that most graffiti are contents for expressing emotions such as love and hate, and fewer are for expressing non-emotional issues.The statistical population included 705 graffiti of two high schools in Tehran and Karaj. The data were first analyzed in terms of writing system and then in terms of contents. The research method was descriptive and documentary. The results of the study indicate that the Persian script has the most writings. Also, the special name, cheating, handwriting, memento, taboo, humor and joke and reading God are the most common contents of the graffiti. The results of one-sample t-test confirmed that most graffiti are contents for expressing emotions such as love and hate, and fewer are for expressing non-emotional issues.

Due to the importance of Covid19 virus in people's lives in the last few years, the present study aimed to investigate how people expressed their feelings about this disease. In other words, this study explored the type of emotions expressed by people and the topics discussed by them in social networks. To this end, using a configuration-based method, first, 53000 documents were collected using the method of crawling pages from Twitter. The data were then classified automatically using emotional keywords and metaphorical concepts. After that the important issues raised in these data were identified. Topics such as vaccination, complications of coronary disease, and health, cultural, political, economic, religious, educational, and global status have been among the topics raised by users during this period. The results showed that some economic, health, and political issues and complications of coronary heart disease have played a greater role than other issues to express emotions.

Ethnic identity provides a way of understanding the need to assert oneself in the face of threats to one's identity (Weinreich, 1988) and social categories are the output of one's categorization based on a specific factor. The present study investigates the role of categorization as a cognitive strategy in identifying the Guilak people. In that it seeks to determine how a change in basic level membership reflects the attitude of one ethnic group toward the food category and how that categorization leads to confrontation between self and the other. The selection of Guilaki food proverbs as the research data indicates the importance of the role of these linguistic utterances as an integral component of popular culture which explains ethnic backgrounds. These proverbs have been collected in a field method and analyzed based on Rush's (1975) opinions. The findings of the research reveal that the lowland settlers in Guilan whose staple diet is rice define their identity based on it. Therefore, while categorizing food into two general categories of bread and rice, through the confrontation of these two, they forge the identity of self and the other. Rice, as an identity-building component, determines the degree of social belonging of a Guilak to the group.

With the aim of understanding the hidden layers and knowing the desired effects of this letter, the present article has adopted a discourse analysis approach to analyze the letters based on Searle’s (2015) category of speech act and its structural features. For this purpose, first, the text of the letter was divided into utterances, and then their respective speech acts were identified. The findings showed that out of a total of 22 actions, representative acts with 8, directive acts with 7 and expressive acts with 6 occurrences were the most frequently used speech acts in this letter. Moreover, the declarative act had only one occurrence, and the communicative speech act was absent in the corpus. The frequency of directive and representative speech acts in this letter indicates that Imam (A.S., peace be upon Him) has tried to prevent Muawiya from war through ‘warning’, ‘ordering’, and ‘advising’. In this letter, each action was expressed with a specific style and structure, and the type of words and the structure of the sentences were used in harmony with the action.
Keywords: Nahj al-Balaghah, letter 10, speech action, cognitive text, Searle

Discursive psychology considers body as a construct of discourse, and discourse is action-oriented in this approach. The increasing number of cosmetic surgeries in the country and its consequent risks, changed the study of the beauty phenomenon and its new concept into a serious problem. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to study warrants in Iranian female’s discourse based on discursive psychology approach. This analytic theoretical approach focuses on speech and writing and considers the understanding of psychological phenomenon in the social context possible. This study is qualitative, and the data were analyzed based on Ruth Wood Dock’s (1985) warrants and Talmin's (1995) model. The data were collected from blogger's interviews and lives on Instagram. The interviewees are ten female bloggers between twenty to thirty from homogeneous areas in Tehran. The results confirm that the female body and the embodied identity are produced, understood and validated through simple and everyday practices and human physics plays an essential role in formation of myself or identity. The use of warrants such as being beautiful, making money and buisiness success in the bloggers' discourse is a guarantee for the realization of appreciation of the operated body, complaining about the current body and accepting responsibility for surgeries.