نشریه زبان و زبان شناسی
پیاپی 39 (بهار و تابستان 1403)

This research investigates diachronic changes of Persian vowel system from Old Iranian to Middle Persian, to Dari and to Present Day Persian, describes how they have occurred and analyzes why they have happened in the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). The changes are regular and context free, formed in a chain shift fashion resulting in a more symmetrical vowel system in terms of the qualitative distinctions of simple vowels and also in elimination of the phonemic role of Persian diphthongs and long vowels. These changes are explained through constraints interaction whose final output in each language period (variation) is the optimal vowel of that period and corresponds to the input for its speaker and remains in his lexicon until another vowel change occurs. New changes are represented by constraints reranking and result in input restructuring. Also, the intermediate stages of gradual vowel changes are explained in OT with candidate chains.

One of the uses of the suffix -tar- in Indo-Iranian is to form an agent noun. The use of -tar- as the agent suffix has an Indo-European background. In the Indo-European period, the agent noun with this suffix has two forms, accented and unaccented, which can be traced in Vedic Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. In addition to the distinction in the position of the accent, these two forms of the agent noun differ in terms of meaning and syntax. The purpose of this article is to determine whether such a differentiation exists between the two forms of the agent noun in Old Iranian, and to identify their distinctive features. In other words, our work seeks to assess if the rules of syntax and morphophonology of the agent nouns in Vedic apply to Old Iranian. Any conclusion in this article is based on a comprehensive analysis of all available evidence in Old Iranian.

Studying Iranian languages and dialects is crucial for understanding the historical development of the Persian language. Dialects often preserve older forms of the language, providing valuable insights into ancient and middle Iranian languages. Additionally, they can shed light on the linguistic changes that have shaped modern Persian over time. The specific focus of this article is on studying the types of verbs in terms of tense, mood, aspect, along with past and present stems, passive verbs and infinitive construction in Lori Dialect of Xorramabad in comparison with Middle Persian (Pahlavi) to identify similarities and differences between this dialect and Middle Persian. Pahlavi is one of the middle Iranian languages of the southwestern branch and Xorramabadi is one of the varieties of Lori as one of the modern southwestern languages of Iran. The study aims to bridge the gap between ancient and modern languages within the same language family by presenting verb structures and constructions in Lori Dialect of Xorramabad and Middle Persian, highlighting their similarities and differences.

In the discussion between basic and non-basic voices, many researchers consider verb change as the main factor in non-basic voices. For instance, in Persian, both the passive voice and causative constructions exhibit such characteristics, utilizing markers to indicate passive and causative verbs. However, from a functional-typological perspective, every construction is defined based on function(s) it plays. The same construction may have various strategies across different languages. One of these strategies could involve changes in the form of the verb, but other strategies also exist for each construction. This paper aims to define the functions of two non-basic constructions: the anti-passive construction and the applicative construction. In the anti-passive construction, the patient role is downgraded and becomes less prominent, while in the applicative construction, the oblique participant becomes more prominent and becomes object, concurrently causing a downgrade in the prominence of the agent. We attempt to demonstrate which strategies Persian employs to represent these two constructions. Through this functional analysis, we will examine the reasons for the existence of these constructions in Persian and their typological relationship with other languages.

One of the topics examined within the framework of corpus linguistics is the compound verb. Compound verbs consist of two parts: a "non-verbal element" and a "light verb." In this study, the frequency of light verbs was extracted from two specialized corpora, " PAZHUHESHNAME" and "PEKA" (the corpus of IranDoc books), and the frequency of the top three light verbs in these two corpora was compared with their frequency in a general corpus, namely the "Persian Text Corpus."In these two specialized corpora, which together contain nearly eight million words, the light verbs "zadan" (to hit), "dashtan" (to have), "kardan" (to do), "sepordan" (to give), "gereftan" (to take), "amadan" (to come), "dadan" (to give), "oftadan" (to fall), "khordan" (to eat), "keshidan" (to pull), "avardan" (to bring), "nemoudan" (to do), "raftan" (to go), "bordan" (to carry), and "andakhtan" (to throw) were analyzed. Among these, the light verbs "kardan" with a frequency of 5848 and "dadan" with a frequency of 5037 ranked first and second in terms of frequency. The frequency of these two light verbs is also high in the general corpus, where they rank among the top. The light verb "gereftan" with a frequency of 3246 ranks third in the specialized corpora. However, in the general corpus, the light verb "gereftan" ranks after the light verbs "kardan," "dadan," "dashtan," and "namoudan" in terms of frequency.After extracting and examining the frequency of light verbs, compound verbs formed with these three light verbs (kardan, dadan, and gereftan) were also analyzed in terms of the likelihood of a gap between the non-verbal element and the light verb within a defined context (five tokens before and five tokens after the target light verb). The analysis of the behavior of high-frequency compound verbs in specialized corpora showed that authors of specialized texts, mainly researchers, students, and professors, are less inclined to place a gap between the non-verbal element and the light verb. Therefore, in most compound verbs, the non-verbal element and the light verb appear together without any syntactic category or group intervening. In contrast, in general texts, the likelihood of authors inserting syntactic groups or various categories between the non-verbal element and the light verb is higher than in specialized texts

The cultural schema is one of the main tools of cultural linguistics and it can be considered as a basis for the interaction of speech acts and speech understanding. The cultural scheme requires cultural presuppositions and expectations. Until now, in various analyzes and articles, it has been discussed that nationality shapes linguistic schemas as well as cultural schemas, but the influence of register and style in the formation of cultural schemas has not been addressed so far. In the present study, we will investigate the cultural schemas and speech acts of three Iranian characters as participants in the story Farsi Shekar ast (Jamalzadeh, 1300) using a descriptive-analytical method. Each of the conversation participants uses a different schema. The use of different cultural schemas causes different conceptualizations in language participants. A character who has not been exposed to a second culture and language, or the language of religion, does not understand the cultural schema and pragma of other dialogue participants. The conclusion of this research shows that in addition to nationality, different register and cultural contact also create different cultural schemas. The cultural schemas of the second language affect the first language and change them.

In the comprehensive scientific roadmap of the country (Iran), the promotion of Persian language as a science language among other international science languages is taken into consideration. One of the ways to reach this goal is suggested as expanding the usage of the Persian language. To achieve the goal, which can be raised in the field of Persian language policy making, it is necessary to understand more about the linguistic content properties and the basic concepts that are taught in the textbooks to students. The description of these features can be considered when preparing the language content. In this research, a corpus of textbooks from grades 1 to 6 (the primary school period) is developed that contains around 208,000 words and annotated. These courses include Farsi, Experimental Sciences, Social Studies and Heavenly Gifts. All the sentences of different courses are written in plain text files, separated by grade and course, and after normalization in the pre-processing process, they are annotated automatically at four levels: broad transliteration, lemmatization, part-of-speech and syntactic constituency parsing. The results of this research can help to know more about the content of textbooks and to be useful in the fields of education and policy making in language planning.

In this article, the writers have tried to study the syntactic structures of the first headlines of Ettela’at newspaper. Using these structures determined the writing style of the newspaper in two different periods The main research questions are as follows: "What syntactic features can be introduced as stylistic components to examine the writing style of the first headlines of the newspaper?" and " What has changed in these features of the Ettela'at newspaper of 1978 and 2020?" For this purpose, after giving an introduction regarding the importance, reason and how to choose the subject, Some previous related researches have been mentioned as background. Then, The research method and method of collecting data, choosing sample and categorizing the samples is provided. After that, since the article is related to both stylistics and generative grammar, a brief description of these topics are presented as a theoretical framework. In the discussion section, according to the examples provided, such things as the use of noun phrases and independent sentences, the use of verbs with imperative mood and subjunctive mood, the Relative rate of using of extraposition processes and topicalization, and the number of conjuncts are examined. It is found that there are significant differences in the first news headlines of this newspaper in 1978 and 2020 based on the mentioned cases. We also concluded that the tendency of journalists in 2020 to use finite clauses as the first headline, the use of subjunctive mood, and the use of extraposition was greater than in 1978. We also found that the tendency to use topicalization and the use of conjuncts in news headlines was higher in 1978 than in 2020.

According to systemic functional grammar, a text is constructed in accordance with the situational and cultural context of its production. With this assumption, this paper attempted to explore the distinct linguistic features in the texts of the websites of Persian and English-language science and technology parks that must be considered in their translation. To this end, the texts of “About Us” sections on the websites of 6 Iranian and 6 British and American science and technology parks were comparatively analyzed using the transitivity system within the framework of systemic functional grammar. The findings showed that despite the higher frequency of material processes in both groups of texts, in the Persian texts the parks appeared more in the role of Goal than Actor due to the higher frequency of passive clauses. Significant differences were also observed between the two groups of texts in the number and frequency of certain Circumstantial elements. Finally, it was proposed that in the translation of such Persian texts into English adopting the accepted norms of the international discourse of such texts would lead to better communicative results.

Writing as an important skill in language learning has always been the focus of the authors and teachers of Persian language teaching books; Therefore, a part of Parsa's books is dedicated to this skill. In this research, the authors intend to use the nine evaluation indicators of Cunningsworth (1995) in "Writing Skills" to examine the book " Parsa". The method of analysis in this research is descriptive and tries to determine the position of this skill in this educational resource in terms of preparing and editing standards with descriptive questions from 30 Persian teachers who teach writing books. For this purpose, a 9-question questionnaire based on Cunningsworth's 9 indicators and using a 5-point Likert scale was designed and provided to teachers. The analysis of the obtained data showed that the results of the sample T-Tech test are significant in 7 out of 9 indicators of Cunningsworth evaluation in the written content of "Parsa". But it is not significant in other 2 indicators.

Cognitive linguistics is a growing and influential perspective on the nature of language, mind, and their relationship to socio-physical experience. "Image schema" is the result of embodied experiences and is formed in the mind, enabling humans to understand complex and abstract concepts. The necessity of the issue led to this research, which aims to examine, explain, and decode how abstract concepts are expressed through image schemas in the Persian language and their application in textbooks. The goal is to identify image schemas in the texts of Persian language textbooks for middle school from the perspective of Johnson's cognitive linguistics. This research is qualitative with a descriptive-analytical method, the unit of analysis is the "sentence," and the data was extracted through document analysis. The statistical population of the research is the sentences of Persian language textbooks for middle school, which includes 775 sentences with volume schemas, 511 sentences with movement schemas, and 648 sentences with force schemas.The findings of the research indicate that, of all the sentences with schemas, the most frequent use of schemas in middle school Persian textbooks is, in order, volume, force, and movement. The highest number of volume schemas is in seventh-grade Persian, the highest number of force schemas is in ninth-grade Persian, and the highest frequency of movement schemas is in seventh-grade Persian. The presence of image schemas indicates that the authors of Persian textbooks have paid special attention to a better understanding of the content, the growth of creativity, and abstract thinking in students.

Functional linguistics is a trend that not only pays attention but also to function and context. Halliday's functional systematic grammar (1994) also looks at the meaning and concept as function and makes analyzing possible through grammar. In this regard, ideational meta-function deals with the intellectual world, interpersonal meta-function focuses on attitude and interaction, and textual meta-function examines semantic relationships. The purpose of this research is to describe and analyze the worldview, attitude and way of connecting concepts and matters in Hassan Rouhani's speech through the above roles. The statistical population and sample size of the entire speech in 2012 is 195 sentences, the unit of analysis is sentence as well. The research method is mixed (qualitative-quantitative) and its approach is descriptive-analytical. The findings of the research show that in the ideational, the material, relational and existential processes has a higher frequency, which indicates the superiority of the world of physical and abstract relations to the world of self-conscious one. In the interpersonal function, one third of the time and mood belongs to the present tense and declarative mood, which indicates present-view and declarative expressiveness. In the textual meta- function, the dot has more frequency as a connecting device that indicates the end of ideas in the speech. Additional and explanatory connective and semicolon is also a sign of continuation of previous concepts and their explanation. Emphasis, persuasion, and request are evident in the cohesive ties, but there is no command, prohibition, or recommendation, so there is no power in the voice of the speech, and it is mostly in the form of request without conditions or wishes.

Sociolinguistics or the sociology of language is an interdisciplinary field of study that examines the phonetic, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic subsystems of language in the context of social changes. The contemporary world is not uniform in terms of language dispersion, and the experiences of nations and governments demonstrate that understanding and addressing socio-linguistic events such as massive migrations, marginalization, the decline of minority languages, and social violence caused by discrimination and prejudice requires relying on the advancements of sociolinguistics. Recent studies show that this focus has been increasingly incorporated into the agendas of official institutions in some countries. For example, the US Bureau of Statistics published a report acknowledging the need to train census officers in sociolinguistic methods to effectively conduct the national census and interview non-English speaking citizens (Pan, 2007). The book under review is in English and it adheres to the principles and norms commonly found in academic genres. It consists of a front matter, the body of articles and an index. The front matter includes title page, copyright information, table of contents, author info, table of illustrations and table of tables. The book is divided into 11 chapters organized into three sub-sections. The end of book features an index of key terms along with corresponding page numbers. A total of 12 authors contributed to the articles in this book with only three having Iranian affiliations, while the rest are affiliated with universities and research centers abroad.