JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES IN LINGUISTICS
Year:2011 | Volume:3 | Issue:1|Papers Count:6

The aim of this paper is to study the concept of subjectivity associated with two Persian modal verbs- bayad and tavanestan -as well as investigating speaker-orientation vs. content-orientation within this domain. While offering examples taken from native Persian speakers, the present paper deals with the above-mentioned verbs in terms of subjectivity, their polysemy from semantic and pragmatic perspectives, and their formal convergence along deontic, dynamic and epistemic dimensions. The results of this study indicate that the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity is by no means clear-cut in modal verbs, and that the two concepts are inseparable. In addition, a thorough understanding of modal expressions is a function of the integration of contextual elements and encyclopedic knowledge of the outside world. Finally, the derivation of epistemic meaning from deontic meaning is not possible merely through truth-based semantic criterion. Also relevant in this respect are pragmatic aspects such as conversational implicatures.

Arabic seems to have borrowed the word Amen (אמו) originally from Hebrew and used it as a religious term in Islamic discourse the same as Jewish. Although it has a clear meaning in Hebrew, there is no explicit meaning for it in Arabic dictionaries and sources. At the same time, some Hebrew hypotheses about this word have had an effect on the comprehension of the Arab philologists and scholars. In the present study, Amen is investigated comparatively in Arabic and Hebrew authoritative books, and a new linguistic commentary is presented.

In recent years, morphology has been one of the most debated areas of study in generative grammar, so that different researches on different languages have led to various approaches and theories in the field. This article aims at studying a productive word-formation process in Persian, i.e. reduplication, from the point of view of one of the latest approaches in generative grammar, i.e. Optimality Theory. We attempt to analyze the structure of some types of (total and partial) reduplication in Persian in the framework of Standard Optimality Theory, also known as Correspondence Theory. The results of the study indicate that in different contexts, a particular type of faithfulness or markedness constraints is required to describe the structure of each type of reduplication in Persian, based on the pattern they depict and the meaning they convey.

In this paper, the acoustic features of syllable weight in Persian are investigated. Using PRAAT software, duration is analyzed as the acoustic correlates of syllable weight in Persian. The syllable weight ranking is cvcc>cvc>cv.

The aim of this article is to study the holistic effect in locative alternation of Persian. In Persian a number of verbs denoting dislocation of a substance (locatum) to a surface or a container (location) participate in locative alternation (bar zadan ‘load’, pashidan ‘spatter’) The locative alternation in Persian is characterized as a special relationship between two syntactic realizations of the same verb, which are called the locative variant and the objective variant.In locative variant the locatum is realized as NP accompanied by “ra” and location as a prepositional phrase (PrepP). In objective variant the location argument appears as NP accompanied by “ra” and locatum as a bare NP just before the verb. It is shown that contrary to Roshan (1998) and Lazard (1982), realization of location as NP accompanied by “ra” is not necessarily associated with holistic reading. When location argument appears with “ra”, it is considered to be “more affected” than PrepP. Contrary to Anderson (1988) who claims that the partitive/holistic effect is associated with the alternate realization as NP or PrepP, we propose that the choice between coding the location argument as a NP or a PrepP amounts to a choice between coding it as the patient or not. The patient stands in a privileged relation to the process, and it is encoded as “primary affected” entity (NP). The entity realized as a PrepP is encoded only as a secondary affected – hence the location is less ‘affected’ (Langacker 1991). So holicity is seen as an instantiation of the ‘primary affectedness’ semantically associated with the patient in general and “ra” marks the argument which is coded as patient. Count locatums obligatorily appear with “ra” and are associated with holistic and partitve reading. Mass and generic locatums can appear with or without “ra”. When appeared without “ra” holistic reading is not possible since they are not bound in their instantiation domain. When appeared with “ra”, the “quantificational” function of “ra” bounds them in their instantiation domain- hence the possibility of holistic reading.

Repair is a common phenomenon in everyday speech of all languages including Persian. Repair is an utterance uttered by the speaker himself or the listener to substitute a previously uttered speech in conversation. Repair organization is studied within conversation analysis which examines everyday talk in the form of audio and visual data. The present study aims at studying different types of repairs, their positions within the sequence of turns, the frequency of the occurrence of different types of repairs, and the accompanying lexical and non-lexical initiator techniques in 426 minutes of recorded Persian live television interviews. The findings of the study reveals that in general, the turns and the positions in which different types of repairs occur in Persian television interviews are the same as those described by Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks (1977) for American English everyday conversations. Moreover, in line with their observation for American English, it is realized that self- repair predominates over other-repair in the data and non-lexical initiators are more frequently used than lexical ones. Finally, with regard to the interactional function of repairs in conversation, the analysis of the data indicates that there are some factors outside the language that can affect the type and position of repairs in Persian television interviews. Some such factors include commitment to using Persian vocabulary, giving more information to viewers about the topic of the interview, and to shorten the conversation either because of the shortage of time or because of taking viewers' beliefs and susceptibilities into consideration.