نشریه زبان و زبان شناسی
پیاپی 37 (بهار و تابستان 1402)

The present article examines syllable-final consonant clusters in original and borrowed words in standard Pashto. In doing this, the phonotactic constraints on such clusters are analyzed within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). The focus of previous research on the phonological system of Pashto has been on initial consonant clusters, however it is the belief of the authors of this article that examining the phonotactic constraints on final clusters reveals certain characteristics of the phonology of Pashto that has not been discussed before. Similarity avoidance governs final clusters of originally Pashto words; the cluster can be simplified through the deletion of a final stop in clusters in which the perceptual similarity of the members of the cluster is high. Also, the comparison of phonotactic constraints on consonant clusters of loanwords in Pashto and Persian reveals a difference in the characteristics of cluster-final nasal consonants in the two languages; while Persian tolerates violations of the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), Pashto resolves loan clusters of C+n through vowel epenthesis.

Despite recent advances in developing language technologies for the standard Persian dialect, the official Iranian language, a large number of Iranian language variations remained computationally unexplored. Iranian languages, e.g., Kurdi, Azeri, and many Persian dialects are examples of low-resource language distinctions lacking significant linguistic resources such as machine-readable lexicons or part-of-speech (POS) taggers. Efforts in developing language technologies for such languages can significantly contribute to language survival in the digital era and promote cultural diversity. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we created linguistic resources for the Luri and the Yazdi dialects by introducing the first parallel corpora between these language variations and the modern Persian language. In this study, we train neural encoder-decoders (1) recurrent sequence-to-sequence and (2) transformer-based machine translation models and evaluate the trained model using BLEU score on an unseen test dataset.Availability of datasets and models: Datasets are available here at https://github.com/language-ml/dataset_yazdi_luri.git

This research is aimed at addressing one of the most important language issues of Iran, i.e., the educational justice for the students in bilingual areas, and the possibility of designing a native model for education in these areas. First, the educational planning and policies in 13 countries are reviewed; Then, the results of the empirical studies regarding the academic achievement of the students in bilingual areas of Iran will be discussed to find the answers to the following questions: what educational policies are implemented in countries around the world? What bilingual education strategies are implemented? What do the results of studies about academic achievement of bilingual students of Iran imply? What are the considerations for designing a native model of education in Iran? The results show that creating and maintaining a sense of nationalism, achieving educational justice, economical situations, and language distribution in all countries are the important factors in choosing educational strategies. The policies and strategies have been changed during time in all countries. The monolingual strategy especially in multilingual, and remote areas is proved to be ineffective in most studies. Based on empirical studies in Iran, the academic performance of most of the students in bilingual areas is significantly weaker than the Persian speaking students which can be interpreted as the ineffectiveness of the existing methods. The students’ first language and their similarities and differences to Persian have significant effect on the students’ achievements. The positive effect of pre-school programs has been proven in many studies. To design a native model of education, it is necessary to consider different bilingual education strategies and methods, the linguistic, and cultural features of bilingual areas of Iran, the successful models implemented by other countries, and training the experts in this field.

The role of a language teacher is of utmost importance in the teaching and learning process, exerting a significant influence on education quality, student learning experiences, academic performance, personal development, and self-confidence. This research aims to identify and model the characteristics of an effective teacher for teaching Persian as a second language. Using field research and a questionnaire, the study gathered responses from 63 participants, including Persian learners and non-Iranian male and female students. The findings emphasize the paramount significance of language didactics knowledge, linguistic content knowledge, and social and emotional competencies in the effectiveness of Persian language teachers. Regarding personality traits, language learners prioritize politeness and respect towards the learner's individuality, fostering an inclusive learning environment. Actively listening to learners' opinions and building their confidence are also crucial aspects, highlighting the value of active communication. In terms of social and emotional competencies, language learners highly value the encouragement of extracurricular language learning, underscoring the need for motivation and support in terms of self-efficacy. The importance of motivational strategies and good communication competencies is also recognized, emphasizing their role in successful language teaching. In the field of didactics knowledge, language learners identify three essential competencies: providing explanations of grammar and vocabulary using real-life examples, designing clear and goal-oriented lessons, and presenting teaching content in a learner-friendly manner while adapting instructional methods. These findings underscore the importance of teaching expertise, instructional clarity, and consistency. Proficiency in reading, writing, speaking, and listening comprehension, along with familiarity with Persian language rules and vocabulary, is deemed crucial in terms of linguistic content knowledge. These competencies contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the language. In terms of technology, language learners acknowledge the significance of incorporating visual and audio tools in language learning. They also recognize the value of utilizing language teaching software, online dictionaries, translation tools, and digital resources for interactive activities such as tests and online assessments. These findings highlight the increasing role of technology in language teaching, as perceived by language learners. It is worth noting that there were no significant variations in perceptions among Persian learners, non-Iranian students, or between genders regarding the desirable traits of an efficient Persian language teacher. This research provides valuable insights for educators, informing them about the essential attributes required for enhanced educational standards and fostering a better understanding of learner perspectives.

Corpus linguistics is one of the new methods in linguistics that studies language in language corpora. Sociolinguistics study the differences and similarities between (or in) different language varieties and reveals the impact of social variables on language productions. The present research discusses the role of sex in speech based on Baker’s (2010) corpus-based sociolinguistics approach. To this end, first a Baboli dialect corpus was developed and then the data was transcribed alphabetically. Then the text was translated into standard Persian. In order to investigate the role of sex, by controlling the age variable and also the topic variable of the corpus which was exclusively on life difficulties, the keywords of each sex group were identified by LancsBox concordancer program. Then, the keywords were categorized based on their semantic domains. The results revealed that sex differences played an important role in the representation of the life difficulties in the dialect.

Nowadays, the existence of emerging communication tools has made communication between speakers possible through writing. The electronic, global and interactive nature of such emerging technologies has facilitated and increased the speed of communication. The linguistic interaction by using these tools and the relationship between speech and writing have causes a type of writing to be created by the users of a language, a writing type known as “neography”. The main aim of this research is to investigate the properties of neography in Persian and classify them into the categories based on a linguistic corpus developed from the data published in social media. To this end, the corpus is semi-automatically annotated based on the standard writing style, and the linguistic properties at phonetic, morphological and syntax levels. Then, the words whose written forms are different from the standard form and have a type of neography are studied based on the orthography properties and also linguistic features. The results of the analyzing the data and the assigned labels show that neography in Persian in the virtual space occurs at two levels of oryhography and morpho-phonetic, and the content words bear the highest amount of neography in the words.

Attributive Constructions are one of the most widely used constructions in Persian language and therefore its teaching to Persian language learners is very important. Due to the many differences between Persian and Arabic, especially in documentary constructs, the learner faces many challenges in learning such constructions. The teacher should be able to teach such constructions to Arabic learners using the correct teaching patterns. One of the teaching models that can be used in teaching these structures is the Advancement organizer strategy. In this research, using analytical-descriptive method, the effect of this model in teaching Persian documentary constructs (is, was and was) to Arabic language learners has been investigated. The results show that the use of advance organizer strategy has a great positive effect, especially in teaching the above-mentioned documentary structures to Arabic speakers. There are many advance organizer strategies that Arabic learners can use in the field of documentary verbs and relate them to new information, and the teacher has a duty to identify this information and make it meaningful for the learner to learn by repeating and emphasizing them. advance organizer strategy has a great positive effect, especially in teaching those verbs that have a definite equivalent in Arabic.

Fake news detection using content features have attracted many researchers in the last few years. These approaches rely mainly on news datasets and analyzing their style and content. Although there are some fake news datasets in English, fake news detection in the Persian language suffers from the lack of suitable datasets. This article introduces a manually labeled Persian fake news dataset, containing about 5000 posts related to COVID-19 and extracted from Telegram messenger. The process of building the dataset is done in two stages: 1) data collection and pre-processing; and 2) labeling manually using a settled rule set and an established framework. In the labeling stage, seven tasks have been used for labeling, including: 1) Factual; 2) Hate, blame, and negative speech; 3) Rising moral, encouragement, and advise; 4) Political news; 5) Death statistics; 6) Cure, medicine, and health care; and 7) Worth to be considered for fact checking. For each labeling task, 3 labels including “Yes”, “No”, and “Can’t decide” are used. The main labeling task, i.e. “Factual” task is assigned to two annotators and in case of disagreement between annotators, the label assigned by third annotator is accepted. The kappa measure for inter-annotators agreement obtained equal to 0.706 that is in substantial range. This dataset is about 10 times larger in comparison to similar Persian datasets and can be used for not only fake news studies but also some other Persian Natural Language Processing (NLP) studies.

Nowadays, corpora are widely used in authorship attribution. In this research, a corpus of persian contemporary texts was applied to identify the authorship of texts and the effectiveness of function and content words in this task was compared. In order to reach this goal, seven contemporary writers named Hoshang Golshiri, Bozor Alavi, Ahmad Mahmoud, Mahmoud Dolatabadi, Nader Ebrahimi, Jalal Al Ahmad and Gholamhossein Saedi were selected and their books were collected. Then by using this corpus and deep learning algorithms like multilayer perceptron and Long Short Term Memory, effectiveness of function and content words was evaluated. The results of the research indicated that function words based method was superior to content words one in authorship attribution. In addition, pronouns, especially demonstrative and personal pronouns, showed the highest efficiency among the types of function words to determine the author of a text. Moreover, features based on conjunctions and auxiliary verbs were valuable to recognize persian writers.

Adjunct is an optional or secondary element used in a sentence to provide excess information about the action, participants, time, place, etc. The present paper studied the application and order of different types of adjuncts in the standard spoken Persian. Using corpus-based methods, the study showed that the usage of adjuncts is more than that of other main constituents (i.e. subject, verb, internal arguments), and it is used in all places of clause. Additionally, the types of descriptive, time, place, manner and quantity are the most used adjuncts in the standard spoken Persian with adjunct of time applied mostly at the beginning of the clause and around subject, and the descriptive one used dominantly in the middle of the clause and alongside verb and internal arguments. Accordingly, based on the type of adjuncts their places in clause, it can be concluded that expressing the time of an action for Persian speaker is the foremost priority in the spoken variety. The results can be useful to studies exploring word order in Persian language, differences of spoken and written varieties, and discourse analysis.

In inflected languages, case labels of distinct genders, being different and representing case and number, can never cover the full range of semantic and other properties of case. The labels primarily act as markers showing important synthetic and semantic properties. They do not have a proven capacity to describe the whole dimensions of the case and its functions. In the area of the case, therefore, labels at least are commonly seen at three levels, namely semantic functions, morphological case, and grammatical relations. Avestan language of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian as an inflected language includes eight grammatic cases by various semantic roles. In the paper, semantic roles of the dative case, one of grammatical cases (or main cases), are studied, consisting of ten roles: recipient, beneficiary, purpose, destination, location, manner, extent, accompany, agent, and attitude. It showed that added grammatical cases can exhibit similar semantic roles of dative case.

Research on plants and herbs has an important place in various fields of botany, pharmacology, medicine, geography, archeology and especially linguistics and compilation of Persian cultures. In this research, with the aim of studying linguistic strains, an attempt has been made to investigate the difficulties of identifying the nature of plant names in Middle Persian texts, considering its special feature as religious texts and not botanical or pharmacology. For this purpose, considering the continuation and continuity of the use of these plant names in Persian classical texts and also a brief review of these names in Arabic botanical sources and texts, some difficulties in knowing the nature and identity of these plant names will be explained and the question answered whether it is possible to identify carefully these flowers and plants by referring to their use in later texts, whether Persian or Arabic. This research is based on the data of Bundahšn's book (Iranian, Indian) and their continuation in classic Persian works of external writings, books related to botany and similar Arabic books. The results showed that the most important difficulties in the study of botanical names include the non-specialization of Middle Persian texts; text fonts and the possibility of different readings of a word; unrecognizability of some plant names that have not reached the classical texts, as well as the semantic and phonetic changes of plant names in the transition from the middle period to the new period. Therefore, even about plant names that can be recognized; to document the botanical names, it is necessary to conduct textual research studies based on the historical course. The Azariyun flower was attached as a sample after studying these issues.

Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live by, written by the British linguist and ecologist Arran Stibbe, is the second edition of the book that was first published in 2015 by Routledge and was one of the most prominent works focused on this relatively new interdisciplinary field of applied linguistics. The book, in its second edition (Stibbe, 2021), is organised in eleven chapters and, together with the appendix of the sources of data and the glossary of technical terms at the end of the book, contains a total of 260 pages. The present article will first give a brief overview of the background of the term “ecolinguistics”, and the advent of this field and the scope of its studies; that is because, as is often the case with many scientific disciplines, this cover term and its other related terms have been used in various senses since the emergence of the field. The content of the book in its second edition will then be looked at in detail.

Zoroastrian history and tradition and Zoroastrian Persian texts, the first two volumes of the collection 'Zoroastrian tradition in the Islamic era' , aim to study the history and textual traditions of the Persian Zoroastrian community, during the Islamic era. The volumes deal with issues such as the Zoroastrians' migrations patterns and their settlement centers, the hirbadistans i.e. associations that undertook duties including the composition of the religious texts as well as setting the Zoroastrian jurisprudence. The present two volumes provide their readers with a comprehensive list of the Iranian Zoroastrians' written texts during the Islamic era of Persia, with excellent analyses of the texts.