LANGUAGE RELATED RESEARCH (COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE RESEARCH)
Year:2020 | Volume:10 | Issue:6 (54) |Papers Count:14

As with literature where literarity appreciation entails a literary text, textuality is a prerequisite for materializing texts. In fact, in order for textuality to be actualized, we need to have "coherence" ensured that has been studied by many scholars including Michel Charolles in discourse analysis. A device for establishing this quality as addressed by Charolles is "prepositional syntagms". Even though he duly emphasized the particular function of these devices within coherence, it seems, however, that the perspective in which he envisions the issue can be open to criticism. The present paper seeks to offer an alternative to a formal-syntactic view suggesting that coherence can be characterized in semantic terms in which the reader assumes a more active role. Drawbacks to the former perspective are adequately highlighted and more comprehensive view is offered to compensate for the inadequacies of the linguist's idea. The question which arises here is the relation between textual structuralization using prepositional syntagms and continuity of meaning: whether prepositional syntagms have causative role, that is to say continuity of meaning is due to their presence, or vice-versa, prepositional syntagms are the effect of this continuity. According to this second hypothesis, continuity of meaning results in coherence which creates a specific structuralization and prepositional syntagms are just some elements of this structure. Therefore, if we can find a coherent text or passage which has discoursal conditions of the texts where Charolles studies prepositional syntagms while these elements are absent there, Charolles's theory faces a counterexample. In this way, the role of these elements in issue of coherence will be modified. Thus we believe that criticizing Charolles's theory is sufficient to prove the novelty of this research. As a result, we propose to deal with the issue considering coherence rather than cohesion. Since not only the functions which Charolles attributes to prepositional syntagms are not limited to them, but also these functions cannot, in themselves, guarantee the coherence of the text, because other features such as readers' topic familiarity should be considered as well. To these aims, at the first stage, the particular function of "prepositional syntagms" which Charolles calls "framing adverbials" is clarified through his theory. Subsequently, the paper focuses on deemphasizing the exclusive dominance of such elements through resorting to contextualized aspects of coherence.

Currently reflective teaching has received much attention by educators in the field of education and is believed to be a serious new measure of the quality of teaching. Many experimental studies have been carried out to study teachers’ reflective teaching using methods and research instruments such as reflective journals, video recordings or actions research but little research has been conducted using reflective journals in L2 teaching in the context of Iran. The present study intends to explore the extent to which EFL teachers engage in reflective teaching. For the survey section, there was a random sampling of 250 Iranian EFL teachers holding M. A, B. A. Ph. D. degree in linguistics, translation, English literature. Out of 250 surveyed participants, a convenience sampling comprising of 60 EFL teachers, both males and females, from two language institutes in Sabzevar, Iran, participated in the study. They were randomly assigned into two groups of A as the experimental group and B as the control group with 30 participants each. Data were collected by the following means: (a) Akbari et al. ’ s (2010) reflective teaching inventory administered to 250 Iranian EFL teachers, (b) journals written by 60 EFL teachers. The results revealed that EFL teachers practice the metacognitive as the most frequently used component and the practical component as the least frequently used one. Using Farrell’ s (2004) framework, journal data were analyzed whose results indicated that EFL teachers practiced three chronological types of reflection namely, reflection-for-, in, and on-action with different degrees. The analysis of the contents of reflective teaching resulted in a framework with metacognitive, learner-based, cognitive, critical components. Some implications and suggestions for teacher education programs are discussed in EFL context.

Capitalizing on Hulstijn and Laufer’ s (2001) notion of Involvement Load Hypothesis, this study aimed to investigate the impact of task-induced involvement load on Iranian EFL learners’ retention of idiomatic expressions. The main concern of present study is to explore if principles of involvement load hypothesis hold true when applied to learning idioms. The research questions formulated to achieve the objectives include: 1. What is EFL learners’ retention rate of idiomatic expressions for the reading-comprehension task with involvement index 1? 2. What is EFL learners’ retention rate of idiomatic expressions for the fill-in-the blanks task with involvement index 2? 3. What is EFL learners’ retention rate of idiomatic expressions for the composition task with involvement index 3? 4. Does Involvement Load play any significant role in the retention of idioms of Iranian EFL learners? Given the fact that the depth of processing a word is the key component in vocabulary learning, it could be assumed that composition tasks designed to develop idiomatic expressions in EFL learners, enjoy much greater retention rate, hence attesting to the effectiveness of involvement load on the retention of idiomatic expressions. To this end, 60 female upper-intermediate Iranian EFL students in an English language institute in Tehran took part in the study. Twenty idioms were taught to three groups of students through tasks that induced different levels of involvement load, namely reading comprehension, fill in the blanks and composition tasks. To conduct the statistical analysis, fifteen idioms were picked from among the ones presented in the pretest, so that learners’ prior knowledge of some idioms was taken care of. The retention of the chosen idiomatic expressions was then tested via an immediate and a delayed post-test. MANOVA was run to compare the groups’ performance on the three tasks on the posttest and delayed posttest. Scheffe’ s test was then used as a post-hoc comparison test to compare the groups on posttest and delayed posttest. The results pointed to a direct relationship between the involvement as induced by the tasks and participants’ retention of idioms, implying the fact that the higher involvement load of a task, the higher the retention of the task will be. Accordingly, the findings indicated that retention rate was the highest in the composition task, lower in the fill in the blanks, and the lowest in the reading comprehension task. The study has implications for task analysis, task instruction, and task design; Curriculum developers may benefit from the findings of this study when engaged in designing courses related to idiomatic expressions. English teachers could be more cognizant of varying involvement indexes in tasks and their effect on the retention rate of their learners. Eventually, language learners will be informed of the optimal amount of time and effort needed for mastering idiomatic expressions.

One of the objectives of structuralist criticism-based on linguistics-is to analyze the formation of texts from literature. In this descriptive and analytical study, The authors took advantage of a semasiological approach to the study of the text in order to enrich The analysis of textual structures. By the semasiological approach It means the study of meanings which consists in starting from words, from forms to go towards the determination of meaning. The purpose of this research is to present a structural analysis of a corpus of contemporary Persian literature. The problematic of this research consists of knowing how meaning takes its configuration by means of the text structures of the story "Some credible stories about love" by Mostafa Mastour. Mastour was born in 1964 in Ahvaz. He wrote his first stories before his thirtieth birthday. He has a particular penchant for physics and geometry in his writings. The corpus in the present research is the first story in a Short story collection composed of seven short stories entitled "Some credible stories", published in 2003. The methodological novelty of this study comes from the fact that in the analysis a semasiological approach was taken into account with regard to confrontation of the famous dichotomy: meaning/form. The main hypothesis of this research consists of believing that the structural system of text analysis follows a logic and a movement that goes from microstructures to macrostructures, from particles of forms to the semantic whole. The result of this article demonstrated how meaning takes shape in text, from a semasiological point of view, where the analysis of structures and forms (lexicon, phonetics, grammar and narration) of the corpus gives us access to the main theme and the overall meaning of the story, namely love.

The present paper seeks to analyze the main term-formation methods in Persiand and Russian Languages Special languages and their linguistics specification (morphological, syntactic, word formation and etc. ) are one of the most research subjects in modern terminology. Recently, among these linguistics specifications, researches on term formation are becoming necessary due to their main role in terminology systematization. On the other hand, with the increase of inter-linguistic interactions in the specialized fields, the comparative aspects of the aforementioned researches have made a major contribution to the research in this field. It is evident that for such research, a general reference system of the classification of tools and methods of word formation is necessary. This paper aims to present a common system for different types of term formation in Persian and Russian languages. This paper answer to this question: to what extent term-making tools and methods are overlapping in these two languages, and could reach into a comprehensive classification of both Persian and Russian languages? To This end, The authors first studied all present kind of term-formation methods and tools in both Persian and Russian languages. The result showed, in the first section, the relative affinities term-formation methods and tools for the Russian and Persian languages. Next, according to classification cited in Russian sources and focusing on the linguistic nature of the new term-formation method, the term – formation methods were classified into five general categories of morphological, syntactic, semantic, borrowing, and abbreviations making. Morphological method focuses on morpheme (generally affixes) for new word; syntactic method leads to phrase-formation as an term; in semantic method usually, words of general language are transformed to terms using metonymic or metaphoric tools; in borrowing, words incorporated into one language from other languages and in abbreviations making – as a word formation method, words divided to a unit such as phoneme.

Goal: This study aims to develop a language-based skill test revolving around four main language skills, with principals and basics of language test development in mind intended to evaluate Persian language proficiency of non-Iranian students (In terms of language level). One of the main goals of this study is to develop a Persian language skill (proficiency) test. The purpose of language proficiency test is to measure one's overall ability to utilize the desired language without having to undergo specific training courses. So the content of a language proficiency test is not based on the content or purpose of the language courses. Also in this study, measures are foreseen to evaluate the validity and reliability of the designed test in order to obtain the Credibility of the standardized test. Research Question: The questions raised in this study are as follows: • What are characteristics of designed tests in terms of analysis of test making procedures? • To what extent does the test designed conform to the standard criteria? Research hypothesis: This test possesses the following characteristics in terms of analysis of test making procedures: This test incorporates the necessary efficiency This test is reliable. This test is valid. This test is applicable and practical. This test is designed according to standardized criteria. Research method: In this research a descriptive-analytical method is firstly used to study previous researches, and to select a theoretical framework in order to present the theoretical concepts and basics; to construct the criterion test and standardize it the “ agreement-oriented scaling method” was used, and to determine the validity of the proposed test, the “ field method” was used. The statistical population of this study is the learners of Persian Language Learning Centre of Imam Khomeini International University of Qazvin. The total population of this statistical population is 200 people. The sample size of this study will be 130 members of this statistical population who have been learning Persian language for at least 2 months and a maximum of 1 year. Their mean age is 38-38 years. The sampling method utilized is cluster random sampling. Conclusion: The current study has presented the Persian language proficiency test based on the multidimensional concept of language derived from Stern theory. Since it was found that the average difficulty coefficient of reading questions was appropriate and optimal compared to the criteria of test designing, It can be claimed that the designed test were in accordance with the test designing criteria. Difficulty coefficient of listening comprehension questions were assessed easy, which after flaw scrutinizing was found that it was influenced by the nationality of some of the testees and the duration of Persian language learning. Since 15 of the subjects were Tajik and 24 of them have been leaning Persian in Faculty of Foreign Languages of Beijing for 1 year, they possessed a high listening comprehension skill and this had an impact on the difficulty coefficient factor. Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the test was 0. 7, indicating the reliability of the test. The content validity of the test was also evaluated well, based on the judgment of the Persian language teachers. After calculating Pearson's correlation coefficient, structural validity between reading and listening skills was also evaluated well. The designed test can be used for placement since it also possesses the needed efficiency, it can be used to for placement of subjects and determine the base level of language learner, thus informing the Persian language learners of their own skill and making Professors cognizant of Students' Linguistic Status. Another attribute of a good test is its applicability and practicality, which the designed the test is also easy to conduct, easy to score and easy to interpret and apply. Finally, in response to the research question, it can be concluded that the designed test possesses the test designing criteria and features, and has been designed in accordance with standard criteria.

The main purpose of the present study was to examine reading problems of senior high school graduates of Tehran based on ‘ AMZA’ test data regarding the variables of gender and major. AMZA’ test is known as the first test for assessing the language and literary skills of senior high school graduates which was held by Academy of Persian Language and Literature in academic year of 2013-14. For the purpose of this study, the AMZA data for a sample size of 377 students (197 females and 180 males) in three disciplines of humanities, sciences and mathematics (106, 90 and 181participants, respectively) was analyzed. At first, the test items were categorized with respect to the type of text and micro-skills involved. Then, using the descriptive and inferential statistics the data was analyzed with regard to the participants’ gender and major, which yielded in the overall weakness of the participants in reading skill. The results of data analysis showed that the mean score of participants’ reading skills was 10. 25 out of 20, which in comparison to the standard band score of ministry of education (12) is indicative of the participants’ inability in acquiring the least amount of education. There was no significant difference between the participants’ overall mean scores and their scores in micro-skills of reading regarding their gender, though according to the descriptive statistics, the overall mean score of females was higher than males. Similarly, there was no significant difference between the participants’ overallmean scores with respect to their major. However, among the mean scores of reading micro-skills, there was a significant difference between the students of Humanities and Sciences in the area of "direct comprehension of the text", which shows a better performance of the former group. Moreover, there was a significant difference among participants’ overall results in the four types of text used in the test questions, so that their mean score in answering the questions of linguistic texts was higher than those of the old literary text. However, no such significant difference was found with regard to the participants’ major. The results of the present study showthat strategies like reforming the curriculum of the senior high school, choosing an appropriate educational program, changing the teachers’ teaching methods, and holding systematic and standard assessment courses for the reading skill, can prove helpful in enhancing the students’ reading skills.

This research aims at studying the discursive stylistics of the 28th sermon of Nahjulbalaghah from the perspective of two ideational and interpersonal metafunctions of Halliday's Functional Theory alongside the frequency of processes in the dissertation of thinkers and the way of formation and formulation of meaning in the layer of communication with the audience for expressing the discourse at the level of intertextuality. By adopting an analytical and descriptive research methodology, the current research seeks to apply the Halliday's theory in two levels of ideational and interpersonal metafunction, which is a descriptive discourse of the world and attempts to explain the discursive stylistics of the 28th Sermon of Nahjulbalaghah. The innovation of the research is that no research has been done on the analysis of Nahjulbalagha Sermons especially sermon 28 as a discoursive study. The results showed that the analysis of sermon's chapters at the ideational metafunction level indicates the highest frequencies of ideational processes belonging to material processes. By employing the frequency of material processes, the Prophet seems to try to tangibly express his attitude to the ephemeral features of the world and act for the hereafter.

The current study will be focused on the analysis of modern Persian conditionals based on a cognitive-pragmatic approach. The study proceeds to answer three questions: 1) Can Sweetser's (1990) theoretical model elucidate the different cognitive and pragmatic dimensions of Persian conditionals? 2) What are the conventional readings of agar (‘ if’ , the common particle in Persian for the conditionals) in Farsi, and in which conditionals are they most present? And finally 3) Can we draw a relationship between subjectivity / intersubjectivity and conditionals? The study assumed a pure and descriptive research whose data were largely derived from contemporary spoken Persian over a period of three months. To answer the questions, the investigation is comprised of three parts. The first part includes the analysis of triple classification of conditionals (e. g. content, epistemic, and speech act conditionals) in Persian sentences based on Sweetser's model (1990) and upholds the efficiency of this model to a great extent. The second part deals with the ways in which 'agar' construes several readings in Persian conditionals and classifies them as necessary and sufficient condition, topic marker, and concessive readings. Finally, the discussion focuses on the subjectivity and intersubjectivity aspects in relation to hypotheticality of conditionals and it argued that the hypotheticality of conditionals can be fairly explained in terms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Accordingly, we can propose the grammaticalisation of agar in Persian conditionals. Moreover, this paper furthers the issue by looking at the ways in which conditional insubordinate clauses are triggered by cooptation (in Heine’ s term); this happens by foregrounding the components of discourse situation, in particular, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. In fact, it can be asserted that subjectivity and intersubjectivity can account for the various conditional sentences applications in Farsi.

It is commonly thought that when a work goes through retranslation process, the latest ones are expected to contribute to a better understanding of the text. However, it is not always the case, at least in Iran. The book market of Iran is replete with retranslated versions of classic works most of which are not genuine translation but plagiarized version of previous translations. One famous example is George Orwell’ s Animal Farm which has been translated into Persian more than 70 times by different translators since 1348. Regarding this issue, the present study attempts to investigate four Persian translations of Animal Farm based on forensic linguistics framework. The main goal of the present research is to demonstrate the patterns of plagiarism detection between different versions of translations of the same original piece of work based on textual similarities and differences. The project primarily centers on this question: what linguistic criteria are determinant in detecting plagiarism in translated texts? For our analysis, the data of the present research has been elicited from four Persian translations of this novel chosen by a time-lapse of 20 years between translations. Data were analyzed based on plagiarism detection patterns introduced by Turell (2004). The results of the study revealed a case of plagiarism among investigated translations. Disputed text overlaps 73. 5% and 42. 6% with plagiarized text in terms of vocabulary and phrasal similarity, respectively. In terms of unique vocabulary, they show the proportion of 17. 6% to 15. 16%. The disputed and plagiarized texts also have 35 shared-once only words and 22 shared-once only phrases. The article concludes that the proposed quantitative criteria of Turell’ s model perform well in plagiarism detection which replicates the results of previous studies. We believe that science society of Iran must pay more attention to plagiarism in order to find a solution to suppress publication and proliferation of the plagiarized texts.

Present paper is a theoretical research in the field of semantics based on componential analysis of meaning with a diachronic approach. Lexical forms and semantic roles of “ ba” have been cited and analyzed from historical sources and books of grammar and also from Sokhan Persian dictionary to be analyzed diachronically within the frame work of structural semantics. One of the problems investigated in this research is proving polysemy of “ ba” with regard to diachronic and synchronic semantic clues. The other investigated problem is justification of the mentioned preposition’ s grammaticalization on the basis of its polysemy. The preposition “ ba” is the remainder of upā ka-from old Persian. upā ka-has meant “ near, beside” in Sanskrit and has had the semantic component [accompany]. In middle Persian this word has turned into abā g which had prepositional function and with addition of a suffix it had become a noun; abā gī h meant “ accompaniment” . Through suffixation it also became verb, meant “ to accompany” . In this article polysemy of “ ba” has been studied based on its main meaning found via historical view over its semantic behavior and conceptual transmission model. Questions which the authors have intended to answer are: 1. What was the primary meaning of “ ba” ? 2. How and in how many steps has this word been grammaticalized? 3. Which meanings of this word have been derived from its primary meaning? and 4. Which semantic component relates different meanings of “ ba” together? Investigations have showed in the process of Persian change, this preposition has passed through two processes of grammaticalization: first, a noun has become a preposition with the meaning of “ accompaniment” and second, in the next step it has found other semantic functions; namely “ source” and other related meanings. So, in the first step, the preposition has undergone primary grammaticalization and in the next step it has undergone secondary grammaticalization. The authors have recognized sixteen meanings for “ ba” and have put these meanings into two groups. The first group contain meanings derived from “ accompaniment” which show “ person” conceptualization on Heine’ s scalar about categorization metaphors. The second group of meanings are those which are the result of secondary grammaticalization of “ ba” which are help, instrument, substance, manner, agency, comparison, opposition, and exchange. These show “ thing” , “ activity” and “ process” conceptualized metaphors on Heine’ s scalar have been made by Persian speakers.

In studies on the realization of information structure in West Germanic languages (notably English, German and Dutch), it is commonly assumed that new information is marked by a pitch accent, while given information is deaccented (i. e. there is no pitch accent where one would otherwise be expected, see Cruttenden, 2006). However, a number of investigations of the prosodic marking of given and new information have gone beyond this dichotomy, taking into account different types of accentuation. One such study is Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg’ s (1990) chapter on the interpretation of intonational contours in American English. They claim that both given and new information can be accented, and that it is the type of pitch accent which is used to differentiate between them (low: given; high: new). Two others within the British School (and on British English) are Halliday (1967a) and Brazil et al. (1980). Both, like Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg, allow for given information to be accented. Halliday (1967: 28) claims that contour type and accompanying local pitch range distinguish between given and new (mid-low to low: given; mid to low: new; and additionally high to low: contrastive new). Brazil et al. (1980: 13) also claim that the nuclear contour distinguishes given from new but list different tones (falling-rising: given; falling: new). Furthermore, much of the work done on prosodic marking of information structure has concentrated on the binary distinction between given and new information, rather than different degrees of givenness. One exception is Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) who claim that a particular type of pitch accent can indicate whether information should be inferable, i. e. neither completely givennor completely new. However, most studies which refer to degrees of givenness are predominantly concerned with the morphosyntactic form of referring expressions. Only few combine morphosyntax and intonation, notably Allerton (1978) who nonetheless concentrates on accent placement rather than accent or contour type. The present research addressed the phonetic realization of degrees of givenness in Persian intonational grammar. The study particularly explored the question as to whether the F0 contour of a referring expression correlates with the degree of accessibility it is associated with in a discourse context. It was hypothesized that the F0 excursion size of a pitch accent correlates with the degree of givenness of the respective referring expression such that the more given a referring expression is, the less the F0 excursion size will be. The research methodology was the one used in laboratory phonology. A corpus of 10 small texts was designed to test the hypothesis. The speakers (12 male and 12 female) read the texts on a computer screen. They were instructed to read each text naturally, with no special emphasis on any part of the sentence. The target texts were recorded on DAT recorder using a high quality unidirectional head-mounted microphone (Shure SM58) in a sound proof booth. All the measurements were made on simultaneous visual displays of waveform, wideband spectrogram and f0 tracks. The results suggested that there is a negative correlation between the degree of accessibility of an expression and the pitch range or F0 scaling of its pitch accent; thus, the less accessible a referring expression is in a discourse context, the more compressed the pitch range of its pitch accent. The results further suggested that the pitch register of a referring expression significantly decreases as the expression becomes less accessible since degrees of givenness in the discourse context affects not only the F0 scaling the H tone but also the scaling the F0 valley. However, the tonal structure of a pitch accent is not affected by degrees of accessibility.

Intercultural competence plays a significant role in learning French language because language and culture are correlative like the two sides of the same coin. In other words, learning a language is not merely concerned with learning its structure and vocabulary, yet in order to communicate, the language learner should study the culture of the target country well and respect it. Thus, teaching culture in the process of learning French language seems to be a crucial task. French literature is considered one of the richest resources that one can use to get familiar with French culture and the instructors can teach the culture to language learners, using some literary texts in their classes. Teaching a language with the help of literature is not merely intended for higher-level classes but one may take advantage of literary texts to teach the introduction to culture in lower-level classes. In this article, the authors attempt to introduce thirteen cultural elements of Gililian Lazar's theory after examining the impact of cultural education through literary texts and apply them in three literary texts in The French Literature Progressive (Litté rature Progressive du Franç ais); beginner-level literary texts also contain cultural elements and can help the teacher to teach culture. Then, some assignments are proposed to present the points in the class. These activities include personalization, providing explanations, asking students to infer cultural information, making cultural comparisons, making association, providing cultural background information as reading or listening comprehension and extention activities. In fact, doing these exercises improves individual and social capacities. Our objective in this study is to transform the course of French literature at the beginner level to develop the linguistic and individual capacities of the students and allow them to better understand themselves through other cognitions. To reach this goal, the question will be answered: How does literature improve intercultural competence? And finally, we recommend French language instructors include literary texts in the process of teaching and stimulate students’ curiosity to know cultural issues.