مجله جستار های زبانی
سال پنجم شماره 5 (پیاپی 21، بهمن و اسفند 1393)

Entering into the Arabic language and literature in the early Islamic centuries, Iranian culture generally turned to become a position of Arabic culture and common among the people in the 4th century (A.H.). This culture has been transferred though the language tool; therefore, it has influenced on the Iranian authors who used to write in Arabic. Abu-Hahyyan Al-Tawhidi is one of the greatest scientists in the Islamic world in the 4th century (A.D.) whose works have Iranian vein. In his book, Titled Al-Amtaa Wal-Muanassa, there are almost100 pension load words, among which 20 words, have appeared for the first time in his work, 21 words have been taken from the Ignorance Age introduced into the Arabic language, and 57 words are loan words borrowed from the Islamic and Arabic eras. The Persian loan words mainly include the names of food stuff, birds, animals, and mechanic herbs. The names of flowers, musical instruments, plays, building tools, etc. have rarely been used in this books. Since, the Persian loanwords are meaningful by themselves; hence, the goal of this study is to assign the cultural meaning/concept of Persian words, which have conveyed in to Arabic Language. As such, through knowing the Semitics of words, the kind of influencing culture can be easily specified.

One of the most controversial topics, which has attracted many researches and scholars in the recent decades is bilingualism. The aim of this research is studying the use of Persian and Kurdish in the formal and informal situations in Cherdavel Shirvan. To achieve this, 394 testee were selected randomly from Cherdavel Shirvan. The testees were selected according to the age group (children under 11, adolescent 12-16, youth 17-29, middle age 30-50,and old above 51),education level (illiterate, primary, guidance school, high school, Diploma, associate diploma, bachelor, master, PhD), and gender (male and female). In this research, Parasher questionnaire has been used. The testees were required to determine the Kurdish and Persian on the basis of multiple choices “always”, “often”, “sometimes” and “never”. The questionnaire contained and 36 questions, which are ordered according to the formality of fields (family, friendship, neighborhood, educational and official interaction) from informal to formal. After collecting the questionnaires, the data were processed by the software. Statistical methods such as X2, Kendall, pair T-test, and unilateral variance were used to analyze the data. The findings showed that using Persian and Kurdish by different age, education and gender groups is statistically significant.

Mohammad Taghi Bahar is the initiator of historical stylistics in Iran by publishing “Tarikhe Tatavor e Nasre Farsi” (the Evolution of Farsi Pose) (1331/1952), and his manner has been followed so far. To exit the recession with which Farsi prose stylistics is afflicted, one of the solutions suggested in this article is applying the new branches of stylistics and retrieval of the suitable tools for analyzing Persian texts. To reach this goal, we will consider critical stylistics as one of the new branches, and specifically discuss the arguable stylistic layers in the critical stylistics of short story and novel. The basic question processed in this study is that what stylistic variables could be discussed in critical investigating of short story and novel styles, which leads to discovering the ideologies and power relations in the texts. To answer the question, we will consider studying story and novel in textual and narrative macro-layers by analyzing focalization; the level of persistence of focalization and the facets of focalization (perceptual facet: time, order, duration, frequency, and space; an overall and eye-bird’s view or a partial and close-up view, cognitive and ideological facets), and lexical, syntactic, pragmatic and rhetorical micro-layers in relation with its external layer (situational context). The aim will be applying the new branches of stylistics in studying Farsi literature texts; many of the stylistic criteria and features discussed in this article could be applied in studying the style of other branches of narrative literature, e. g. myth, fiction, allegory and romance.

Scrambling has been investigated syntactically and discursively in different languages so far. The results of this research indicate that scrambling is governed by universal principles and constraints as well as language-specific characteristics (parameters). This research indicates that all kinds of scrambling, namely, short-distance scrambling, long-distance scrambling and multiple scrambling occur in Mazandarani dialect. The fundamental functions of scrambling in discourse change the distribution of theme and rheme and also the distribution of old and new information. The behavior of short-distance scrambling indicates that the movement of constituents in scrambling is subject to discourse principles and information structure, but scrambled constituents in the long-distance scrambling are dependent on syntactic factors and minimalistic principles in addition to discourse principles. In other words, we observed that there is an interface between discourse and syntax, especially minimalism, and there is congruence between the results of this research and achievements of linguists in different linguistic modules. Investigation of the syntactic and discursive behaviors of scrambling in Mazandarani dialect is the main purpose of this research.

This study examines the relation between the level of informant's interlanguage and the frequency of two types of errors: intralinguals and interlinguals. A cognitive- contrastive approach has been suggested as an eclectic model to analyze the frequency of errors of Persian-speaking students in using Spanish verb-governed prepositions. This study is considered as an applied study based on research objectives, and a correlation from the point of view of method. The population is from Alame Tabatabaie University undergraduate Spanish students. First 75 students were selected according to the cluster sampling method. Then 67 of students were reselected and divided into the following three levels of interlanguage: basic, intermediate, and advanced. The level of interlanguage was determined by the student's answers to the questionnaire. Using descriptive statistics, the study shows that the frequency of intralingual errors has a positive correlation with the level of the interlanguage, and the frequency of interlingual errors has a negative correlation with the level of interlanguage.

In recent years, extensive efforts have been done in developing new educational methods for teaching foreign language in order to increase the language learner's proficiency. This study aims to assess the role of the combined approach of the notional functional syllabus approach and the task-based approach for the purpose of "Arabic for the general aims" and "Arabic for the general academic aims". This assessment has been applied by investigating the required capabilities in learning two skills of speaking and listening in Arabic language by using the descriptive-analytical method. The most important result obtained from this study is that for having an effective communication with the speakers of foreign languages, the issue of linguistic knowledge and even full language input are not so much effective. The factors, which play a significant role in mastering the second languages, include: providing a conversational environment similar to the culture and community of its native speakers, making the process of learning functional and applicable, planning for the creative usage of language ability, and lastly, practical and continuous reproducing of language by the learners.

Cognitive poetics answers to the fundamental questions on the cognitive tools of art, language and literature. This is the strong point of this approach over the other approaches, especially literary theory, which has limitations such as inability to understand how different meanings are created and various interpretations of literary texts are possible. This paper explores how to connect the text world to the reader’s world to interpret the text and extend the reader's mental spaces in the understanding of literary texts as the research field. The main aim is the application of a model for the free reading of such interpretation, which is left to the person who relies on the opinion of cognitive poetics. Analysis of the story of Shazde Ehtejab (Golshiri, 1384/2005) is to check the elements in building the story. The questions are: 1) Which of the building elements of the story of Shazde Ehtejab can be identified by the Text World Theory? and 2) How does the identification of these elements help to interpret different text worlds? The answers to these questions (three layers of the text -“text world”, “discourse world” and “sub world”) are identified based on the Text World Theory, which is involved in building of the story. Then the link between the micro-text worlds in the form of included text world that has emerged in the mind of the Shazde and formed the original text world of the story, would be shown. The contrast between the characters and the mental spaces that are occurred through their thoughts, and form the smaller text worlds within the Shazde’s original text world, would be effective in systematic interpretation of the text.

Differences in people’s social, religious, and political status make them tend towards a specific way of speaking. As a result, speakers always try not to threaten the status and face of the person to whom they are speaking. Accordingly, believing that the Almighty Allah enjoys the highest status in the universe, Muslims, too, resort to specific strategies in speech to maintain His exalted status. Therefore, the question this paper is to deal with is what these strategies are and how they are applied when Muslims are praying. Thus, using an analytical-descriptive approach based on Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, the paper explores some of the strategies used in Shi’a supplications to maintain Allah’s face and status. The results show that, when making a request of Allah, people make use of “self-lowering” and “other-raising” strategies and try to praise Allah by mentioning His good qualities, and despise themselves by mentioning their negative qualities at the same time.

This study is intended to report the effect of age of acquisition on lexical decision latencies in a group of Persian-English bilinguals. Forty freshman university students were requested to perform the lexical decision task in a counter-balanced design using DMDX software on laptop. Forty five English words and several pseudowords as fillers were selected for the stimuli. The stimuli were selected based on three different levels of AOA, and were checked against the Persian version of Snodgrass and Vanderwart Naming Battery. Thirty words were matched in their AoA in both Farsi and English, and then divided into early acquired (Group 1) and late acquired words (Group 2). The third group consisted of 15 words, which were later acquired in Persian but early acquired in English. In so doing, we wanted to explore whether processing of L2 words was dependent on the first language AoA of the same words or not. The findings revealed that the second language (L2) age of acquisition had an effect on lexical decision latencies regardless of the age of acquisition of words in Persian. The means of both groups (1 and 3) pertaining to the early acquired words in English were significantly lower than those of the late acquired group (2), implying that perhaps L2 mental lexicon has its own system of representation and processing in beginner bilinguals contrary to the majority of models on L2 mental lexicon and theories, supporting a critical period in learning a second language. The findings of this study have implications for form-meaning interface and dissociation of declarative vs. procedural memory in bilingual mental lexicon research. Accordingly, future research should take into account the important role of AoA in foreign language mental lexicon representation and processing.

In this paper, the constructions of ditransitive verbs are examined in Persian. This study based on Construction Grammar (Goldberg: in press) views differently on this type of verbs. One of the objectives in this paper is to explain the internal properties of ditransitive constructions and determine their different types. The purpose is to display the distinctions of ditransitive constructions in order to demonstrate the interaction between syntax and discourse. Besides their syntactic differences, pragmatic ones will be mentioned too. This can be achieved by choosing a formal-functional approach. The Persian data analysis shows the effect of information structure and its interaction with patient and theme. Therefore, the contextual factors are considered as important as the syntactic ones. Information structure exerts a noticeable effect on the distribution of nominal arguments as well as on their scope properties among the Persian sentences. Thus these constructions not only indicate formal distinctions but also informative ones. Consequently, comprehensive and multi-dimensional interpretation, which is the basic goal in this study will be attained by relying on syntactic- pragmatic explanations.