LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS
Year:2006 | Volume:1 | Issue:2|Papers Count:12

Language is the main factor of the culture and multilingual is the most precise reflex of multi culture. Our country can be known as a multilingual country because it has placed different societies in its political boundaries that each has its own particular culture as well as its own particular language as one of culture elements. In spite of the fact that different societies have passed different steps of their social history but never lived in isolate speakers of every one of these languages are in contact with neighbors who speak different languages. Consequently, every body is in a position to learn some of the words used by their neighbors and very frequently people take a linking to some of their neighbors' words and take these words over in to their own language. I.e. new words are constantly coming into use. Every language has its own phonological system (its own collection of available speech sound and its own rules for combining these sounds into pronounceable words) the phonological system of Persian and Azari are different and hence a loan word can be very difficult for speakers to pronounce. So they usually pronounce the loan word as though it were as native word following the ordinary phonological patterns of their language and as a result changing the original pronunciation of the word perhaps greatly. In this research an attempt is made to discover some phonological rules (vowel harmony, consonant assimilation, weakening and strengthening, change in vowels and syllable structure processes) that by using them phonetic representation of loan word is obtained.    

Among most of the literatures-related to the history of linguistic studies in general and the study of meaningful units of language in particular- when the contribution of eastern countries is under consideration, one can only find a brief review over the Arabic linguistic tradition in the early centuries of the Hijra. Two questions can be proposed in this regard: 1) Is it logically acceptable that this very important subject, has been considered in East, just by Islamic scientists and only during this period of time, but not before or after that? and 2) If it is so, what could be the motivation of paying attention to this subject in early centuries of Hijra, and what is the reason of stopping this kind of investigation in 1500 A.c. This paper, attempts to clarify the contribution of eastern scientists about language studies, and also find some answers to the above-mentioned questions.    

A brief study of the theoretical foundations of  intertextuality is provided. Its European sources- Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Gerard Genette, and Umberto Eco- are introduced, and several Iranian sources - both in literature and Quran exegesis - are suggested. It studies relations between internal and external elements of texts: physical context or environment and the inter-subjective world of each linguistic society or culture, and the subjective world of each text-reader might be regarded as external elements the text. Therefore, their influence over the general process of meaning-formation, which is far beyond the aggregate meaning of individual meanings of internal elements of the text plus their structures, is taken into account as well. To do this, a few external relations within different texts are exemplified and classified.    

The viewpoints of Russell and Wittgenstein in the beginning of twentieth century made philosophy of language in the center of philosophical attitudes. The meaningfulness of statements was the core of attention. They made the meaningfulness of statements in ethics, religion, aesthetics and metaphysics in doubt. The logical positivists, after them, like A.J.Ayer, accounted religious statements meaningless (not untrue) by their criteria of verifiability and falsification for meaningful statements. In this paper, the problem of meaninglessness of religious statements which is posed by Anthony Flew and the solutions in the views of Richard Hare, Basil Mitchell, John Hick and lan Crombie will be examined. Then the problem and solutions will be evaluated. At the end, a new answer to the problem from an Islamic philosophical viewpoint will be introduced with a clarification of some problematical account of religious beliefs.  

The focus of work in Chomsky's generative grammar is to provide an answer to what he considers to undergird theorizing in linguistics (Chomsky, 1986). The first question to be addressed for this purpose is "What constitutes knowledge of language?" From a Chomskyan point of view, to know a language is to be in a specific mental state characterized by a certain cognitive structure consisting of a system of rules and principles. The second fundamental question to theorizing in linguistics is "How is knowledge of language acquired?" This question constitutes the logical problem of language acquisition, a special case of Plato's problem. The answer provided by Chomsky throughout his writing is the innateness hypothesis, according to which human beings are endowed with some internal, unconscious knowledge of language known as language faculty. The theory of Universal Grammar (UG) is concerned with the nature of the initial state of this language faculty. UG provides an answer to the nature of a priori linguistic knowledge in terms of universals, a finite array of which is parameterized: hence the principles and parameters theory. It is through the interaction of the principles with the finitely valued parameters that both language universals and language variations are accounted for in Chomsky's camp (Chomsky, 1993, 1995; Chomsky and Lasnik, 1993). A major attraction of UG is the provision of parameters which constrain the class of attainable grammars and specify the predetermined range that particular grammars fall within. One of the parameters set up by Chomsky (1982), following Pelmutter (1971), Taraldson (1970), Jaeggli (1982), and Rizzi (1982), is the null subject/pro-drop parameter. This parameter "determines whether the subject of a clause can be suppressed. It has two values: either +pro-drop or -pro-drop. According to UG, a pro-drop language, e.g. Persian and Italian, can have null-subject sentences, while non-pro-drop languages, like English and French, cannot. The aim of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the pro-drop parameter in terms of (1) the learnability of the pro-drop parameter, (2) the role of discoursal, pragmatic, and semantic factors in the acquisition of the pro-drop parameter, and (3) the simplistic bifurcation of languages into pro-drop and non-pro-drop.  

Based on the language variety of the "Ochgonbad Soltan" village, the present paper deals with the description and the analysis of a number of frequent phonological processes of Bijar Turkish language. In order to collect data, four Bijar Turkish speakers, four hours recorded speech and the provided questionnaire according to dialect studies have been used. One of the authors as a native speaker of Bijar Turkish, has been assured of data correctness. Vowel harmony in plural suffix /-λ{ρ/and /- λAρ/ infinitive marker /-μεχ/and /-μAξ/, assimilation between consonant and vowel, vowel harmony in adding past suffix, changing of voiceless consonants to voiced ones, vowel inserting through final consonant clusters in loan words which are existed in Bijar Turkish language, are of the most frequent phonological processes. Presenting a good number of evidences, the processes would be analyzed and the corresponding rules would be pointed out. The data and rules would help to reexamine that the phonological processes mentioned above, exist in Bijar Tukish and involved features in each process take part independently and apart from the other features.    

Translation occurs when a message is reproduced in a "code" different from that of the original. When a message is transferred from the original "form" into another, the least inevitable difference between the translation and its original will be the change in the "form" of the message. Therefore, every translation, being a true one, can be just an "equivalent" to the original, not "identical" with it, as there can never be "identity" between two messages expressed in two different expressions or codes. The present article is an attempt to discuss the possibility of  "equivalence" and impossibility of "identity" in translation.  

This Paper studies the word "BRAUT" in germane language and the etymology comparing to a few other Indo-European languages. There are many meanings related to this word such as: legal partner, woman on her wedding's day, fiancée, bride, maid, bedfellow, which are coming from different old and middle texts. Probably the term "Hochzeit" (= wedding) comes from an adjective meaning in past. According to the etymological view, should be necessary not to forget the cultural aspect of this word.    

Although the majority of Persian maximal projections (XPs) such as Noun Phrases (NP/DPs), Adjectival Phrases (APs) and Prepositional Phrases (PPs) are head-initial, many grammarians and linguists have considered this language head-final just because of the word order of the sentence which is mostly SOV. This paper, focusing on the head initial structure of the majority of XPs in Persian argues for the head-initial analysis for this language based on the following three observations: first, post-verbal generation of CP-complements; second, placement of clitics and third, positioning of adverb relative to the Vº, head of VP and its complement. These observations in addition to the dual occurrence of OV and VO structure in Persian sentences conclude that supposing the head-final analysis for Persian does not illustrate the underlying structure of this language and proposes a head-initial analysis for Persian.  

One way to recognize the original Iranian dialects is to search for at least one of the following three characteristics in them, namely ergativity, gender, and case. With respect to the fact that Semnani dialect possesses all the three mentioned features we can come to the conclusion that Semnani dialect is one of the most original dialects of Iran's today.