JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES IN LINGUISTICS
Year:2014 | Volume:5 | Issue:2 |Papers Count:6

Generic sentences (e.g., GijAhAn be ?Ab nijAz dArӕnd “Plants need water”) refer to essential, enduring and timeless properties of the category and play a crucial role in the developmental trend of childrens’ conceptual processing. Interpreting generic sentences requires integration of multiple linguistic and non-linguistic cues rather than implementing a simple rule. The present study focused on 3-4 and 4-5 year-olds’ (N = 16) use of morphosyntactic cues to determine whether the NP in subject position of a sentence is generic or not. The results of the data analysis revealed that in both morphological and syntactic experiments, children in the 4-5 age group had higher level of linguistic ability in the comprehension and production of generic noun phrases compared to children in the 3-4 age group. Also, children of both age groups used morphological cues rather than syntactic ones to process generic noun phrases.

Metathesis occurs when, due to some different factors, phonological segments exchange their linear order. The analysis developed in the framework of autosegmental phonology and optimality theory highlight the major role of Attraction Principle and Obligatory Contour Principle in activating metathesis which stimulates some other phonological processes such as feature coalescence, deletion, compensatory lengthening and dissimilation in return to provide optimal forms in Persian. Results illustrate that [+son] consonants, especially /r/ and glottal consonants /h/ and /?/ as well as [+cont] consonants, i.e fricatives, more than others are attracted by the source, i.e. vowels which causes metathesis. The phonological behavior of glottal consonants in metathesis provides some evidence for their sonoracity. In this paper, besides feature coalescence, deletion and dissimilation are also introduced as the consequences of OCP.

Hyland (2005) presents a theoretical framework on metadiscourse to treat interaction between a text writer and the intended reader. Based on this model, any writer employs a number of devices such as positive and/or negative attitude markers (adjectives like eloquent, weak), hedges (adverbs such as maybe), and boosters (adverbs such as certainly) to convey the values of a phenomenon or the (un)certainty of expressed statement. This study takes Hyland (2005)’ model to provide a concrete scheme of book review genre in Persian language. As such, forty book reviews published in Iranian peer-reviewed linguistics journals are selected as the corpus of study, and the frequency of four discourse variables including positive attitude markers, negative attitude markers, hedges, and boosters are analyzed. The findings indicate that the negative attitude markers are the most frequent interaction devices. It is also shown that most discourse markers are used in the closing section of book reviews. In addition, the frequency of negative attitude markers as well as boosters in the corpus of male critics is higher than that of female ones giving weight to the gender divide over language use. It is also revealed that female critics mainly deal with the writer of the book to be reviewed while male critics mostly analyze the book itself.

In this paper, we compare and contrast two competing hypotheses with respect to the structure of Degree Phrase (DegP) in Persian comparative adjectival constructions in the light of Moazzami’s (2006) analysis of the Ezafe construction in this language. Arguing against Kennedy’s (1999) proposal, according to which DegP as a independent syntactic object takes the AP as its complement, we show that data from Persian support the hypothesis proposed by Jackendoff (1977), Hellan (1981), Heim (1985), McCawley (1994), and Hazout (1995), among others, under which the DegP is merged in the Spec AP and takes a prepositioanal phrase headed by «az» (than) as its complement. We propose that the head Deg bears a strong uninterpretable feature [Adj] and absorbs the adjective to check and delete it in overt syntax.

In the present article, we deal with one of crucial characteristics of Farsi distinguishing it from partial null subject languages (NSLs). According to pro drop parameters of Rizzi (1982) emphasizing on null personal pronoun and the notion of referentiality, consistent NSLs would allow all kinds of null subjects. In this article we illustrate a counterexample to this prediction i.e. Farsi as a consistent NSL and through language data, we argue although it seems that null subjects are used more in consistent NSLs than partial NSLs, the condition is vice versa with respect to impersonal 3SG pro. In particular, in Farsi like other consistent NSLs and in contrast with partial NSLs, generic 3SG pro is not allowed. In this article we adopt Holmberg (2010)’s approach modifying Rizzi’s parameters and justify the distinction between Farsi and partial NSLs regarding overt and non overt generic impersonal pronoun.

In this paper, we investigate the syntactic role of numeral classifiers inside the DPs of Kalhori Kurdish as a classifier language. As a complement of the numeral head, classifiers are used with countable nouns, so that its functional projection (CLP) is placed below weak quantifier phrase (WQP) and above number phrase (NumP). To describe the function of this element, we first represent the models of Chierchia (1998), Borer (2005) and Gebhardt (2009) as the three dominant models in this regard and through the description of Kalhori Kurdish numeral classifiers, we also examine these models adequacy across these new data. According to chierchia’s model, in classifier languages, the denotation of nouns is uniformly mass. Consequently, because of the absence of plurals, a classifier is needed to individuate masses into individuals. mass/count distinction of nouns and plural morphology in Kurdish and optionality of classifiers prove that Chierchia’s idea is not applicable to Kurdish data. Borer (2005) refers to the general complementary distribution between numeral classifiers and number morphology and believes that the role of both number morphology and classifiers is to individuate nouns. Because of the simultaneous presence of classifiers and plural morphemes in the same DP in the language under study, the efficacy of this model is also rejected in describing the data of this language. At last, following Gebhardt’s feature-based model, we consider that the numeral classifiers have some features such as [abs q] and [indiv] and plural morphemes have the more specific [group] feature, in addition to specifying the classifiers function, using these features, we are able to describe their distribution inside Kurdish DPs as well.