JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES IN LINGUISTICS
Year:2011 | Volume:2 | Issue:2 (3)|Papers Count:7

Speech databases play important role in researches and implementations of the systems related to computational linguistics. In this paper, after studying different phone units that can be used for this purpose, I will present different steps for implementing a diphone database. Therefore, at first I have prepared a corpus for Persian language. Then I have designed and implemented a software that extracts a special word from the corpus and specifies the diphones that must be extracted from that. In the next step, after studying the conditions for increasing the quality, we recorded the speech signals that contain the diphones. In the last step, the diphones extracted from the recorded signals. We evaluated three different methods for finding the diphone borders: listening, visiting the time signal, and studying the spectrogram of the signal, and we use all of them for the accuracy of our database.

In this paper, final consonant clusters of New Persian are compared statistically to those of Middle Persian from the viewpoint of their conformity to Sonority Sequencing Constraint (=SSC). In this regard, since Middle Persian is an extinct language, it was first necessary to hypothesize a syllabification pattern for this language according to some phonological universals. Then, for each type of sonority profile, or each combination of sonority classes (e.g. liquid+nasal or nasal+stop) in both Middle and New Persian, the frequency is counted at four levels: types (clusters with different segmental structures), tokens (clusters in codas of non-identical syllables), repetition in all codas (no matter the syllables are identical or different) and repetition in word-final positions; and afterwards, these frequencies are compared for the two languages. Analyses of inferential statistics indicate that, at all the four above-mentioned levels, the general statistical tendency in satisfying the Sonority Sequencing Constraint is the same for final consonant clusters of both Middle and New Persian: clusters which satisfy the SSC are the most frequent, and the least frequent clusters are those with unchanged degree of sonority, clusters violating the SSC are located in between. In addition, at the levels of types and tokens, the ‘distribution’ of clusters among these three classes of the overall sonority envelope (~SSC, +SSC, 0-SSC) follows the same pattern in Middle and New Persian.

According to the dominant view in linguistics, the relationship between signifier and signified is basically conventional and arbitrary. In this article we are going to claim that in home sign languages there are some degrees of motivation. To do this, we have collected the signs of a home signer through interview sessions within two years. After that, the signs and the potential relations between signifiers and signifieds have been analyzed. All the similarities or any kind of meaningful relation between signifiers and signifieds have been pointed out and a list of motivation devices has been presented. The research shows that there is a logical and meaningful relation between almost all the signifiers and the corresponding signifieds which can be clearly seen in the light of motivation devices.

The present study investigates the existence of expletives in Persian. Rizzi (1982, 1986) suggests that pro-drop languages, by virtue of licensing pro, would have empty non-referential subjects. However, Karimi (2005) takes the violation of Definiteness Effect in Persian as indicating that neither overt nor covert expletives exist in this language. Following Darzi (1996), we present pieces of evidence to show that Persian has overt expletives. We then present arguments in support of Rizzi’s (1982, 1986) hypothesis that pro-drop languages may have covert expletives as well. Finally, we provide cross-linguistic pieces of evidence from Icelandic, Finnish and Portuguese to suggest that being a pro-drop language or violating the Definiteness Effect in a language does not necessarily entail the absence of expletives in that language.

In this paper, two different functions of pronominal enclitics in Persian are discussed. Traditionally, it was supposed that these enclitics act as pronouns or real arguments, while this paper tries to indicate that they act as agreement markers in some contexts, too. As historically they have moved from Wackernagel’s position toward verb adjacent position, their functions have also changed. Now, they are used in object clitic doubling and as subject agreement markers in a group of Persian structures. As subject agreement markers, it is argued that they have acquired a new role via grammaticalization, namely agreement markers, and Blocking Principle, as envisaged in Fub (2005) could explain this process. While acting as object clitic doubling, the optional NP object acts as topic.

The interaction between syntax and word-formation has been of great theoretical significance in the past four decades. The question that is now raised is as follows: is word-formation an independent module, or should it be subsumed under syntax?Considering word-formation processes in Persian, this article is an attempt to provide a number of facts in favour of the existence of an independent word-formation component. These facts are:1. A great number of complex words in Persian are headless, contrary to the syntactic phrases.2. A great number of the Persian compounds have meanings which are predictable, yet different from their compositional meanings.3. The syntactic category of a large number of the Persian compounds is different from that of their constituent words.4. The derivational suffix “-i”, while added to nouns, may make adjectives or nouns, according to which we need to devide the Persian nouns into two subgroups. But this distinction is irrelevant in syntax.5. The Persian inflectional morphemes do not occur inside compounds.6. Compounds and syntactic phrases have different stress patterns.

It is believed that achieving simplicity in describing a system is a prominent component for defining the scientific methods. It also is one of the fundamental goals of the philosophy of science. To be more efficient, linguistics in general and generative linguistics in particular try to obtain a high degree of simplicity. In order to analyze simplicity, this article compares two dominant theories in which tendency to simplicity is a methodological commitment .The first one is a “syntactic theory” introduced by Chomsky as X bar theory, and the other is a logical theory “type theory” used by R. Montague for logical syntactic analysis of language .This analysis is based on two reasons as the theories both a) have the same conclusion and b) use formal methods. Formalization has two consequences: generalization and precision. Generalization in itself is an outcome of simplicity, in which the more quantitative relations results in a more simple system. Furthermore, a precise examination indicates that such formal methods do not necessarily lead to the same results. This is due to internal relations among elements and principles in the theory. The following analysis will show that such anticipation is not always realizable and describing simplicity is not always simple. Based on Gillies theory, it concludes that for comparison between the two theories, explanatory surplus principle is a firm criterion.