JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES IN LINGUISTICS
Year:2010 | Volume:1 | Issue:1|Papers Count:7

In Old and Middle Persian, pronominal clitics appear in Wackernagel’s position. However, in Tati, a Modern North-Western Iranian language, these clitics function as an A-past marker, direct object marker and possessor in possessive structure. As A-past markers, they appear in Wackernagel’s position. In other functions, they tend to move to verb adjacent positions, although they do not appear in post-verbal position, but appear pre-verbally. This feature shows that rightward drift has happened in Iranian languages, moving the clitics toward the right of sentence.

In any standard syntactic analysis, making a distinction between three levels of description is quite necessary. Having a critical overview of most important syntactic studies on Persian adverbial phrases, the writer found that this category remained to be thoroughly studied because the majority of the previous studies reflected an incomplete picture of the case. Recognizing that Persian adverbials and adjective phrases share many formal features, these study offers seven distributional criteria to distinguish between the two categories. In the domain of syntactic functions, four functions were discussed for this category. As far as semantic functions of Persian adverbials are concerned, they are too vast to be completely discussed in this paper. However, twelve of the most general ones are presented along with relevant examples. The present paper is an attempt to remove a number of misunderstandings regarding the nature of Persian adverbial phrases.

The process of compensatory lengthening characteristic of the Kurdish dialect of Sorany is what this paper sets out to study. Within the framework of Moraic Theory, this process is assumed to be triggered by the deletion of a given moraic segment on the phoneme layer, with its mora remaining free on the mora level. This paper is devoted to investigating two types of compensatory lengthening: one resulting from the deletion of a moraic consonant and the other being triggered through vowel deletion. As far as the dialect under discussion is concerned, four consonants can be recognized: /h/، /ħ/ and /x/. What the results of this paper show is that, preserving the word weight, and not the syllable weight as claimed by Hayes (1989), is the main offshoot of compensatory lengthening.

In this research, by providing different morpho-syntactic strategies which are used by the speakers of the world's languages to make genitive constructions and determining the grammatical criteria which are considered in this classification, we are going to study the genitive strategies which are used in the contemporary Persian and analyze these strategies according to the mentioned criteria. Then, based on the criteria which determine the dominant strategy, we will specify the dominant strategy for making the genitive constructions in Persian and finally we will determine the linguistic type of the Persian language regarding the dominant strategy which is used by this language for making its genitive constructions. According to the studies done in this research, from two morpho-syntactic strategies, that is affixation and linker, the later strategy, which is called "the more grammaticalized strategy" by Croft (2003), is the dominant strategy in the contemporary Persian. Regarding the dependency criteria, this language is among the languages which are some where in between the concatenational and fused languages and considering the word order of the main constituents of the genitive construction, that is possessor and possessum, Persian belongs to the linguistic type which has the possessum-possessor word order in its genitive construction.

This paper, based on metrical stress theory (Hayes, 1981), begins to argue that lexemes of standard Persian have a bounded main stress with feet which are mostly right-dominant and quantity-sensitive. It also illustrates that the foot construction in Persian follows a "right-to-left" process. Then it argues that in the theoretical framework of Hayes (1995), the lexemes of Persian have Iambic feet with a "Final End Rule".

Power has been identified as an important variable in linguistic theories of politeness but the way it influences interaction is not always in line with the models’ predictions. In this research, linguistic markers of disagreement have been studied in eight master’s thesis defense sessions in four departments. Tokens of disagreement between participants with power differentials (professor-student, student-professor) and those with equal relative powers (professor-professor, student-student) were extracted and analyzed within the framework of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness. The results clearly point to the influence of relative power relations but not necessarily in the manner predicted by Brown and Levinson (1987) or Leech (1983). It is concluded that power is displayed and exerted in thesis defense sessions by interacting with other factors such as severity of the face-threat, status, specific requirements of the context and, probably, generational differences.

Linguistic rhythm is studied in the 3 fields of: metrical structure, speech rhythm, and metrics (poetry). For Persian language, feet are recognized as Iambic in 4 combinations of syllables (Tabibzadeh, 1386), metrics for classical poetry is also comprehensively studied (Najafi, 1386-a&b) and as for the speech rhythm of Persian, guesses about syllable-timing (Haghshenas, 1376) has been examined by phonetically-based quantitative index (Booban, 1386). However, the relations of these three areas and their phonetic correlates are not clearly observed so far.Here, recognizing Persian as a syllable-timed language, which means that syllables basically shape the rhythmic structure, we have segmented samples of utterance in standard Persian including words, prose and poetry to the P-centers (perception centers) of their syllables and examined the iambic feet in the timing structures that are easily observed through such segmentation. Results are in harmony with the phonological acclaims for feet structure in Persian.