نشریه زبان شناخت
سال سیزدهم شماره 2 (پاییز و زمستان 1401)

Škand Gumānīg Wizār is a Pahlavi polemical text of the ninth century CE, when that language had lost its former political support, while its daily usage among people was declining, and Arabic and Persian were gradually replacing it in all respects. In such a time, the author of this work, while avoiding loan words to express complex concepts, began to write this polemical book, and of course, he was wonderfully successful in accomplishing this task. This raises the question as to whether the Pahlavi suffixes, used in this text, were of especial type quantitatively and qualitatively. Research on this text reveals the suffixes used by the author were far less than Persian suffixes, while all but one or two were used in Persian.

Face, an image a person adopts for himself/herself in social interactions, can be lost, maintained or boosted and is of two aspects: (positive: will to be self-operative and Negative (will to be approved of by other). In any instance of interaction, face, which is tightly related to power, comes into play. Power has been traditionally set in the males’ hands and this made it easy for them to threaten the face of their inferiors, though this has been sometimes contested. Comparing the FTAs Mahmud Shaygan and his wife do in “Monji dar Sobhe Namnak” (Savior in a Damp Morning) based on Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model, the present article shows how the female character is different from the gender-cliché’s we have in mind. The findings show that the woman threatened her husband’s face more through disagreement, criticism and confrontation. In other words, the more the male character commits acts that threatens the face of his wife, the more the woman does FTAs to threaten the face of her husband.

In this research selections from the discourse of the Iranian tenth parliament(2016-2020), with the aim of identifying and analyzing verbal aggression, were examined. To this end, two different theoretical bases — Culpeper's impoliteness (2011), and Aristotelian Rhetoric (Kennedy, 2007), had been relied on so that occurrences of impoliteness in a selected number of question sessions could be identified, decision could be made on the inclusion of the utterances involving impoliteness in each of the Aristotelian Rhetorical genres. Research questions: Which of Culpeper’s impoliteness categories (2011) and how frequently are instantiated in the corpus of the research? What percent of utterances involving impoliteness could be considered as included in each of the judicial, deliberative and epideictic genres? The findings show that from among Culpeper’s categories (2011, 113 - 193), unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions and next insults, from conventionalized impoliteness formulas, and innuendos and next sarcastic comments, from implicational impoliteness, are instantiated most frequently. Some highly frequent linguistic expressions in the corpus are identified and presented as conventionalized impoliteness formulas in the discourse of (at least that period of) Iranian parliament. 70percent of the utterances which involved impoliteness are labeled as judicial and the remaining ones are labeled as deliberative and epideictic.

Learning is the process of acquiring the new information, and the outcome of learning is memory. Memory is the ability to store, retain, and retrieve information that activates past experiences to influence today's behavior. Researchers have studied the important role of two basic dimensions of emotion, namely arousal and capacity, in the memory of emotional events. The aim of this study was to answer the questions of whether the emotional lexical content of sentences or the tone of emotional speech prosody is effective in evoking the memory of patients with Alzheimer disease. Does the interaction of the two play a greater role in better recovering the memory of these patients? For this purpose, from 40 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer disease, a test was performed using the Persian ESD emotional language database to assess the degree of memory arousal. The results showed that emotional lexical content along with emotional speech prosody is effective in retrieving, recalling and sustaining emotional sentences. The effect of emotional speech prosody on words primarily causes emotional arousal to increase clarity and clearly of memory, and secondly causes emotional words to form a conceptual group or conceptual cohesion. Therefore, they should be retrieve better.

The morphological systems tend to follow certain principles, transparency is one of these important principles. This study examined the transparency of Persian and English inflectionals based on natural morphology. The main issue is how transparency is represented according to natural morphology. Persian data are selected from Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies Corpora and English data are extracted from Corpus of Contemporary American English through random sampling (and based on equal number of words). Afterwards, they were analyzed based on Dressler and Mayerthaler’s approach. The results indicate, in Persian, the plural markers –ha,-un, the superlative adjective marker -tarin, past tense suffixes –t, -ad, and negation prefix n-, and in English, the genitive marker -'s, superlative adjective marker -est and past participle -en are transparent and the rest is opaque. Findings indicate the transparency of nouns and verbs in Persian is more than adjectives; however, in English, it′s not true. This is one of the differences of two morphological systems. Also, there is no direct relationship between transparency and frequency of inflectional affixes. Indeed, there is a direct relationship between grammatical categories and transparency of inflectional affixes. This relationship doesn’t necessarily apply to the transparency of each affix with its frequency.

Grice’s cooperative principles are about how language is used between human beings, and it is based on the fact that speakers must play their part in the conversation properly based on the intended purpose. Grice has introduced four maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. The main objectives of the present study are to investigate the function of Grice’s Maxims in the quality of text interpretation, examining the degree of disorder in text interpretation in case of flouting Maxims and the extent of flouting Maxims by men and women in The Salesman movie. This research is based on Grice’s theory of cooperative principles and in the framework of perceptual approach, and it is descriptive-analytical and fundamental. A selection of dialogues of The Salesman's movie have been used as data in this study. The results show that none of the Grice’s cooperative principles have been fully observed in The Salesman movie, and this has affected the quality of text interpretation; however, the text interpretation has not been disturbed and the audience has reached correct interpretation of the film. The results also show that men and women have flouted Grice's maxims to different degrees in response to the same or opposite gender.

Conditional sentences are recognized as one of the Universals of Language and have been studied according to the language typologies. This article reviews grammatical tenses applied in the formation of Pahlavi conditional sentences, derived from Zand-ī Vohuman Yasn, Zātsparam, and Rivāyat-ī Pahlavi. This descriptive-quantitative analysis intends to prove the tendency between the possible world of conditional sentences with their applied grammatical tenses. 13 conditional sentences were located in the two first mentioned books and were suitable for the verb structure study. 160 sentences out of the 250 conditional sentences in Rivāyat-ī Pahlavi were chosen for the statistical survey.  85% of the subordinated clauses had verbs from the present system and 15% from the past system. The semantical analysis showed that in the Pahlavi language if the grammatical tenses in both clauses were made on the past system, the possible world would be factual in most cases. This result accords with Baqayi and Naqzgoo-Kohan's research outcome (2019), which was based on Declerck and Reed’s typology for New Persian conditional sentences. This study showed an abundant variety in the formation of conditional sentences aided by present and past tenses, nominal and, gerund forms. The Pahlavi unfulfilled conditional past tense was observed in the formation of other complex sentences, with indicative moods.

The concept of ‘time’ is one of the most important and fundamental concepts in human mind and life, which according to the findings of cognitive linguists, is mainly understood and expressed metaphorically in different languages and cultures. The present paper examines the conceptual metaphors of time in Persian and its purpose is to provide a systematic model of the types of conceptual metaphors that Persian speakers use to understand and express the concept of ‘time’. The study is based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1993) and the theory of image schemas (Johnson, 1987) and its data are mainly extracted from the Hamshahri Corpus (second version) supplemented with data from Internet Google search. The results show that in Persian, the concept of ‘time’ is understood and expressed based on three image schemas of ‘movement’, ‘container’ and ‘object’, and through the conceptual metaphors ‘time is space’, ‘time is an (moving or stationary) object’, ‘time is human’, and ‘time is a container’.

The present study has analyzed the concept of "life" in Persian using two methods corpus-oriented and questionnaire-oriented. For this purpose, the frequency of effective maps in conceptualizing "life" in 120 sentences of Persian language databases was examined. It was found that in Persian languages , the source domain of "place" plays a greater role in conceptualizing "life" than others. In the questionnaire-oriented analysis, a questionnaire with 11 metaphorical-oriented and orientation-oriented (intellectual orientation) questionnaires was presented to 120 random samples. The sample was divided into 6 groups: women under 20, men under 20, women between 25 and 35, men between 25 and 35, women over 50 and men over 50. Questions were designed with simple sentences and the conscience of the speaker. The selected options of the questionnaire were 5 items and were selected from a range of "I’m strongly agree" to "I’m strongly disagree". In this study, it was found that different ages and genders of the Persian language society differ in defining the concept of "life". Finally, the "life" diagrams and concepts of the foundation corpus and the foundation questionnaire were compared. As a result, it was found that Persian society agrees with corpus-based maps of “life” concept.

One of the rhetorical features of language in writing and speaking is the emphasis on speech. Emphasis occurs in different ways. Nominal groups are one of the tools of emphasis that have received less attention so far. Focus groups in this article are groups in which either the word is made up of repeated phoneme or the word is made up of two or more morphemes or repeated words, or the contents of the group are combined or turned in a way that convey emphasis. Focus groups are accompanied by proportional nouns, synonymous nouns and adjectives, contrasting nouns and adjectives, proportional verbs, and words with musical proportions. This research through providing a list of samples consisting of 1,500 nominal groups, has analyzed their structure, features, origin and function and classified them into different categories. These groups are used for different purposes including creating new meanings, secondary meanings, metaphorical and figurative, expanding meaning, inclusion, circumlocution, brevity; however, it’s most important function is emphasis. Such as emphasizing on the importance of something; feelings and emotions, distance, quantity and quality and intensity.

The inductive power of linguistic signs of a poem is inspired from different kinds of literary techniques and arts which act as the source of inducting meaning. Such semiotic competence mostly used by poets in creating their literary works. Sohrab Sepehri is among those contemporary poets who gave profound semantic depth to his poems to make them more impressive by using natural elements as well as artifice inspired from his poetic authorities. To this end, the library provided us with the corpus found in Sepehri’s most important book entitled "Hasht Ketab" (Eight books) .To analyze the collected data descriptive –analytical method used. Theoretical framework of Saussure and Peirce’s semiotic notions employed to disclose the fact that the process of semantic creativity comes from the utilization of natural signs represented in the semantic layers of Sepehri’s poems. The results of the present research revealed that different elements of nature (Wind, water, soil, rain, plants, animals, …) frequently used by this poet can transfer moral values and peaceful symbiosis. To be more scrounger and active considered to be focal points learned by him from natural elements and he sees all of them as beautiful signs of God.

The allegorical structure of dome in the Middle Persian text of Wizīdagīhā ī Zādisparam is used in a special sense to represent the mental force that is projected from the body’s dome-shaped structure. The present study aimed to investigate Zādisparam’s allegorical view of the design of the body dome and its generalization to the multifaceted patterns of psyche structure with respect to Chapters 29 and 30. In this article, factors and variables such as psyche teleportation (Chapter 31) were investigated with the help of “psyche in the ideal world” using descriptive-analytical method and the available ancient sources about Zoroastrian anthropology. The question posed for this study was whether according to the holographic theory (macrocosm and microcosm) in the human body (body dome) and ideal forces, the feedback of concepts such as reward, punishment and evaluation of individual beliefs in the struggle between good and evil forces all depend on the “psyche in the ideal world” (subconscious mind) or it depends on the will power and individual choice. The results revealed that the psyche has a psycho-kinesiological process and obtains the rank of “Lord” in the sense of the eminent ideal teacher under the teachings of ideal parents.