LANGUAGE RELATED RESEARCH (COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE RESEARCH)
Year:2014 | Volume:4 | Issue:4 (16)|Papers Count:13

In Haliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), there are three metafunctions that actually are three semantic layers of clauses of a language; being aware of them are important in transferring meaning in the process of translation. Regarding the crucial importance of transferring meaning faithfully in translation, particularly meanings beyond the propositional meaning of an utterance, here, we study the semantic changes of the structures termed “predicated themes” in SFG. Data investigation revealed that in ideational, interpersonal, textual and also information structure of many predicated themes translated into Persian, we see changes that sometimes have ended in missing of some important parts of meaning. In case of being aware of the different semantic layers of structures like predicated themes, many of these kinds of semantic changes are avoidable; consequently, it is possible to transfer meaning of the source language more faithfully to the target language. Therefore, the main goal of this article is to investigate the semantic changes of predicated themes in the process of translation. The next goal of the research is providing some ways for minimizing these kinds of changes.

The process of learning never happens in vacuum, and the final product encompasses the various interactions between the language learner and the surrounding world. Most often, the language learner is assessed in a two-way relationship and in this respect, the academic environment and the classroom are the first and the last destinations, which are considered. Considering the importance of ecological and environmental factors in learning a foreign language, the present article tries to investigate the parents’ role in learning English language qualitatively. The amount of effective interaction between the parents and the child, the amount of accessibility to cultural goods such as computer and the Internet and that the effects of these goods on learning, as well as the parent’s values with respect to learning English language were included as the purpose of this study. The study was conducted based on the following assumptions: (a) Intelligence and aptitude are not the only way toward success or failure in learning English language, and (b) there may be some discrepancies between the set of values advocated by schools and institutes with those of the parents. Thirty-five families participated in this study whose children were instructed in English language institutes in Mashhad. We interviewed all of these families as well as their children. The results revealed that families in both more-proficient and less-proficient learners use various strategies. At the end, some recommendations were given to improve the quality of education within families.

Specificity usually refers to one of the properties of noun phrases. In this study, drawing upon the definition of specificity by Enc (1999) and Karimi (1999 and 2003), the Kurdish morpheme “  ægæ” is investigated as the morphological marker of specificity in noun phrases in different syntactic positions. Using a wide range of evidence and data such as the obligatory presence of “ægæ” at the end of definite and some of the indefinite noun phrases, it is argued that unlike what Edmonds (1995), MacKenzie (1961), Yarmoradi (1384) and Bahador (1390) point out, in Kermanshahi Kurdish this morpheme indicates specificity and not definiteness. Finally, based on Lyons’ classification of languages (1999), Kermanshahi Kurdish is placed among the languages, which only mark indefiniteness. Regarding the fundamental principle in Generative Grammar that the linguistic knowledge in the mind of speakers of a language is similar, the data were collected from the authors’ speech using the argumentative methodology. The theoretical framework was based on the viewpoints of Enc (1991) and Karimi (1999) on specificity.

Additional compounds are sort of issues that are studied in both Russian and Persian languages in terms of nominal groups. Some linguists and grammarians of Persian language relate additional compounds (though without prepositions) to noun complements. Additional compounds represent various concepts and features such as ownership, identity, gender expression and allocation. These compounds in Persian language are stated by adding a noun to another noun, which the equivalent expressions in Russian language are consistent (определение согласованное) and inconsistent (несогласованное определение) noun affiliates. The aim of this study is to evaluate additional compounds in Persian and Russian languages in terms of syntax, and to find the possible similarities and harmony, between them. Finally, the ways to express the same meanings in the different structures of these compounds are discussed.

The present paper focuses on the effects of discourse and pragmatic factors on the determination of case system in Hawrami. Du Bois (1987) argues that dominant case systems in any language cannot be thoroughly accounted for unless pragmatic factors are taken into consideration. He further shows that certain features of narrative discourse creates a special discourse tendency, called “Preferred Argument Structure”, whose defining characteristics are exactly the same as those of “Ergative systems”. The way this pragmatic tendency competes with other pragmatic factors, which exhibit accusative-like features, ultimately determines the case system in syntax. In this paper, it is first shown that, although preferred argument structure is observed in all syntactic constructions of Hawrami, its effect in aorist constructions is more prominent than in the present constructions, and this very fact causes the former set of constructions to become Ergative. Other competing pragmatic tendencies like topic animacy and topic continuity, unlike the preferred argument structure, always motivate the accusative case pattern in syntax. The effects of each of these two factors on determination of accusative case system in the present constructions are not the same; only topic animacy has the potential to set the ultimate case system in syntax as accusative. From a theoretical point of view, the empirical findings of this research may lend more support to those functionally-oriented theories of language, which consider the syntactic properties of languages as direct results of pragmatic considerations and communicative needs of speakers.

Study of the experience of women and its difference with that of men has caused to the formation of different approaches about the connection between language and gender. Women and men have different tendencies in the use of some language features (especially vocal). This issue distinguishs their language from each other. Linguistic differences are not so clear and the speakers have not much sensitivity and awareness of them, but by examining the works of women, one can achieve the mentioned features. Among the type of poetries, literary gender has deep ties with poets feeling. Therefore, it provides reflection on the poets’ mind and thoughts. Finally, it has the capacity of analyzing the linguistic gender reflection. Technique of whimper poem is inspired of disaster, and stimulates the poets’ feelings in order to utter his/her grieving poems and affect on the audience. The main subject of this study, using the votes of language sociologists is discussion on the Sa’d Sabbah’s poems at three levels: lexical, syntactic and rhetorical in order to illustrate the connection between language and gender. The results showed that a close relationship exists between sentiment whimper and gender of the poet. And situation of grief has a direct impact on the poems of Sa’d Sabbah. Descriptive and analytical methods were used to explain the subject of this research.

According to the prevalent beliefs, comitative object, cognate object and object of purpose are not present in the syntactical functions of Persian language. However, there is lack of scientific research on this subject. Not only has it been ignored in grammar books, but also it has not been discussed in the essays and articles. The present study seeks to investigate the above mentioned functions in Persian syntax and to show their Persian equivalents by bringing several instances from Persian texts of prose and poetry. Subsequently, the paper aims to show the differences between these functions in Arabic and Persian. Influenced by Arabic, the article introduces new terminology, which did not formerly exist in Persian language.

The multidisciplinary analysis of relationship between language and law has been in the spotlight for many linguists in the last two decades. Forensic Linguistics attempts to describe and, where possible, explain the features that distinguish the language used in legal settings from the everyday language. Furthermore, discourse analysis is capable of application in a wide variety of settings and contexts. The purpose of this paper is to outline the theory and practice of forensic discourse analysis as a tool for interpretation and analysis of legal context with a particular focus on legal pragmatics in Persian legal events to enable both researchers in legal system and forensic linguists to pass the level of theory and barge into the practice of discourse analysis in Persian legal system. In this regard, we focused on the Legal Speech Acts based on the theory of Searle J. (1969). A collection of 20 files issued in legal context were analyzed and the results and applications will be discussed.

Semantic is one of the most important features in the study of native language learning process. The study of what children know about meanings in different levels would be away for achieving how the human becomes a speaker of a language. The aim of this study is evaluating children’s understanding of semantic contribution of the universal quantifier “every” at the across-proposition level. Investigating children’s computation of the across-propositional meaning relations involving the universal quantifier “every” would thus not only be the next valuable step to consider their knowledge about the semantics of “every”, but also would make a significant contribution toward a new aspect of children’s semantic competence. In this study, a new experiment evaluates the children’s ability in inferences between entailing and entailed sentences. For sampling, 28 girls aged 3-6 years were selection randomly. Finally, the results confirmed that the competence of children is like adults with regard to the semantics in the composition and comparison of sentential meanings.

Forensic phonetics is a subfield of forensic linguistics in which acoustic information and phonetic features of phones are investigated for completing the forensic cases where one of the existing evidences is related to the guilty. One of the most important tasks of a forensic phonetician is forensic speaker recognition. For doing this, the phonetician is asked to estimate the degree of similarity between the given records of the guilty’s and the suspect’s speech, and determine whether these two sound evidences match to each other or not. The objective of this study, which was conducted on the sound data from 10 Persian native speakers of both sexes, was to investigate the possibility of using Logarithmic spectrographs of vowels as a key for forensic speaker recognition tasks. The results showed that using these logarithmic spectrographs may be a useful means with perfect reliability in the tasks related to forensic speaker recognition.

In recent decades, processing relative clauses (RCs) and studying their complexity in different languages had an important role in linguistic and psycholinguistic researches. This study is to compare the complexity of two types of Persian RCs: Subject-Subject (SS) type and Subject-Object (SO) type. This complexity is assessed on the psychological criterion of the preschool children’s understanding of the sentences in which these types of RCs are used. 96 Persian native children in three different age ranges of 3-4, 4-5, and 5-6 (each range 32 children) took part in this study. They were presented by the fore-mentioned types of sentences in two different forms of declarative and interrogative sentences, in different ways of showing pictures and realties, and also asking them to follow the order. Then their understanding of these sentences was tested. The results showed that SO type RCs, both in declarative and interrogative forms, were clearly more complex than SS type RCs.

Different methods are used Cross-linguistically to code coordination relations. It may be the case that two clauses are simply juxtaposed. Here, their relations are inferred through the context of communication and their semantic properties. The alternative and more marked method is the presence of an overt coordinating marker, or connective. Both of these constructions occur in Persian Language. In this article, major coordinating relations of conjunction, disjunction and adversativity are touched upon; however, the main emphasis is put on adversatives and their development. In this connection, a rather long list of modern Persian adversatives identified is presented. On the basis of their internal structure, Persian adversatives can be classified as simple, compound and discontinuous words. In some cases, even a sentence functions as an adversative. These morphologically different adversatives derive from different grammatical and lexical sources. Like many languages, words with spatial, temporal, causal and emphatic meaning have been grammaticalized to function as adversatives. In addition, one can find sources that are almost rare in languages of the world. Among these, one can trace the development of some word-forms of the lexical verbs of goftan ‘say’, and kardan ‘do’ to adversatives. Furthermore, in the formation of some compound adversatives, question words as well as grammatical words denoting condition are used.