LANGUAGE RELATED RESEARCH (COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE RESEARCH)
Year:2019 | Volume:10 | Issue:3 (51) |Papers Count:14

Verb valency is central to dependency grammar, but its role in generative grammar is ambiguous. The first theory gives a central role to verbs, determines certain groups of relations among the components of a sentence, and assumes free valence around key elements of a sentence, especially for verbs. The second theory is based on formal and relational structures of subject and predicate and assumes the generation of grammatical layers. The main objective of this study is to compare the two grammars to find out if Chomsky's sentential transformations are controlled by the concept of valency or not, and to discover how verbal valency affects the basic structure of a sentence and determines the surface structure. In order to answer these questions, the authors have first taken a look at new analytical and developmental views on Tesniè re's theory through examples. Then, by an analytical approach, the authors have provided a comparative study of Tesniè re and Chomsky's views. According to Tesniè re, speech acts like the translation of a “ linear system” into a “ syntactic system” . Conversely, the action of understanding in its turn acts like the translation of a syntactic system into a linear one. He differentiates between both and believes that the syntactic system is not necessarily linear. Moreover, by defining a concept of zero (free) valency, Tesniè re’ s approach is better able to explain the transformations and permutations in the sentences compared to Chomsky’ s approach. The concept of "universal sentence" in Chomsky’ s theory seeks to describe the abilities of language users in the production of complex sentences. By analyzing some examples in this study, the authors have shown that Chomsky’ s approach, which considers the transformations of a sentence as an ability of the main to accept additional ones, is more similar to Tesniè re’ s approach. Chomsky’ s theory, takes into accounts a free place for an additional syntagma to explain the development of the basic structure as well. So, this syntagmatic load resembles free valence in Tesniè re’ s theory. The results showed that as a dynamic system, language automatically creates free valence around or next to central elements and ultimately provides the possibility of certain grammatical transformations.

In systemic functional typology, which studies the systems of languages rather than the whole languages, linguists strive towards empirical generalizations that in principle apply to all languages around the world. In line with the above-mentioned goal of systemic functional typology and having examined the ideational (logical and experiential), interpersonal, and textual systems of the ‘ clause grammar’ of different and various languages, Matthiessen (2004) has achieved a series of typological generalizations/universals. In connection with his proposed typological generalizations, Matthiessen (2004) has argued that they can be applied in the description of any language and in the attempt to expand the typological explanations in the framework of systemic functional grammar as well. However, he has immediately stated that “ It is not yet possible to propose a generalized map; but we have to move in that direction. ” In line with Matthiessen’ s claim mentioned above, the present paper has attempted to describe ʿ material clauses҆ in Persian within the system of PROCESS TYPE. This research has been conducted in terms of the following typological parameters concerning material clauses: (1) the number of participants involved in a material process clause (2) strategies for bringing in extra participants (3) the nature of Actor, (4) case marking, and (5) strategies for construing the transfer of possession and dispossession. Studying typological behaviors of Persian ʿ material clauses҆ in the framework of Matthiessen (2004)’ s typological generalizations shows that in Persian (1) as in English, beside the two inherent participants of Actor and Goal, other participants, i. e. Recipient/Client, Initiator, Scope, and Attribute, are involved in the realization of the material process, (2) as in English but unlike languages such as German and Japanese, the inherent participant of Actor is widespread, (3) each of the above-mentioned extra participants is somehow added to a material clause. For instance, the Initiator is added to a material clause via causativization, (4) as in German, the case marking of material participants is fairly straightforward, and (5) as in English, the transfer of possession is construed differently from the dispossession. These results indicate that all Matthiessen (2004)’ s generalizations concerning material clauses can be utilized in the description of Persian material clauses. In the end, it is suggested that the typological behaviors of the material clauses of other languages spoken in Iran be identified and introduced in the aforementioned framework.

After the World War II, the notion of spatiotemporality plays an important role instead of space and time independence from each other. This emphasizes time category and all its strata and dimensions. Based on the theoretical framework of geo-criticism and according to Bertrand Westphal's point of view, the present study attempts to investigate spatiotemporality from textual space, relying on La Modification novel by Michel Butor in order to create a new study of this novel on elements of geo criticism. Space evolution during time is described in textual space by Michel Butor's novel. Research questions are: what is the role of time in space evolution? How the spatiotemporality evolution in Butor novel is described? Therefore, results of this paper demonstrated that space cannot be analyzed without considering the temporal strata and intervals; space and time have created a spatio-temporal continuum. Space and time are inseparable elements in geo-criticism. If time is dynamic and variable, the space is also variable and dynamic. Therefore, the only way to represent transformed and stratified space is paying attention to textual space. This paper aims to scrutinize the represented space and its changes in literary discourse, so that the reader can imagine this space and represent it in his/her mind.

In this paper, the authors deal with polysemy of a Persian suffix, – gar, its development, and some non-compositional aspects of meanings of the words derived from it. – gar is a productive agentive suffix in Persian deriving deverbal/denominal agent nouns and adjectives. The polysemous derived agent nouns are categorized as human agent nouns, human agent nouns denoting an occupation and non-human agent nouns (instruments). We investigate this polysemy in the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010). Construction Morphology provides a framework for proper account of word formation processes, in particular derivation, by employing a lexeme-based approach and by considering some morphological schemas/constructions in word formation. Present analysis is based on a data set extracted from diachronic and synchronic corpora. First, a collection of 124 words derived from – gar was extracted from two dictionaries of Sokhan and Zansou (a Persian reveres dictionary) as well as from Persian Linguistic Database (PLDB). Present work also takes into account a diachronic perspective by searching the collected non-human agent nouns (instruments) in the diachronic corpus of Farhanyar, which contains literary works spanning from 9th century up to the present century and is the only diachronic corpus in Persian. The collected nouns were subsequently assigned to different categories of general human agents, human agents denoting a job, and non-human agents (instruments) based on their semantic variations. Meaning of ‘ human agent of a regular and distinguished action related to the meaning of the base’ was assigned to [x-gar] construction as a prototypical meaning and a starting point for the ramification. The authors propose here that the development of instrument sub-schema-as a recent development in function of gar-is due to the influence of English loan words derived from – er. It seems that the mechanism behind this development is approximation i. e. the metaphoric extension at patterns level and not at the words level. The authors also argue that words with meanings of job and non-job agentive nouns are derived from two independent sub-schemas.

The impact of motivation in human activities, especially in L2/FL learning/teaching has always attracted researcher's attention. After revealing the limitations of Gardner's ideas, it was determined, in 90's, that mental representations of language learners have a great effect on their motivational processes. The L2 motivational system of Dö rnyei, as an integration of Gardner, Higgins, Markus and Nurius's ideas with possible selves concept in psychology is one of the most modern theories for studying the L2/FL motivation; the theoretical model contains 3 main concepts: The Ideal L2 self, The Ought-to L2 self and The Learning Experience. In this paper, the authors study the motivational factors of Dö rnyei’ s theory in Iranian French learners. A questionnaire was distributed to 160 French learners (University students and institute learners) and was analyzed by SPSS 18 software. The results showed that recognition and enhancement of L2 motivational factors can predict the intended effort. Correlation analyses coefficient revealed that the ideal L2 self-variable has a direct relationship with instrumentality-prevention, instrumentality-promotion and intended effort. Also, there is no significant correlation between the anxiety, Ideal L2 self, and intended effort while there is a direct relation between anxiety and the ought-to-to L2 self-items.

The media can never force their audience to think but they can use some techniques to make you think about what they want to manipulate. By highlighting the messages in line with their goals, they attract the audience's attention to the subject they are interested in. This study deals with the linguistic analysis of the American withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in the discourses of the two satellite channels called – Al-Arabiya and Al – Manar adopting Teun van Dijk theoretical framework. In order to foreground a message in media, there are several techniques among them the linguistic ones are highly common. By analyzing the exit of America from JCPOA, the current research aims at investigating linguistic components of this event as reflected in Al-Arabiya and Al – Manar. Marginalization and foregrounding are among the techniques used by these channels in order to highlight the power of their discourse and to bold the weakness of the rival discourse. The reason to choose these channels was their different ideology vis-à-vis the JCPOA. These channels have tried to use linguistic tools such as repetition, exaggeration and contradiction to influence and persuade the audience. To do this, they carefully selected the letters and words used in the text of the act in a different way.

In a paradigmatic shift, semiotics tends to poststructuralist approaches with phenomenological landscape. The result of this shift has been the emergence of subject at the center of enunciation by paying special attention to perceptive components and socio-cultural issues in the study of signs and language. In this perspective, the manner “ I” as subject encounters with “ other” undergoes diverse changes and new interactions come into play. New semiospheres emerge as a result of this encounter whose relations encompass interaction, contrast, exclusion, segregation and adjustment. This approach has been proposed by Eric Landowski – French semiotics theoretician-and is based on four main strategies including assimilation, exclusion, segregation and acceptation in case of identity. Thus, the main question of the present study is as follows: How is it possible to explain the semiotic place of culture as semiosphere and the type of interaction occurred between “ Self” and “ other” in discursive atmosphere of “ Nasseri’ s death” by Ahmad Shamlou? The purpose of this study is to investigate the type of their encounter (self – other) and their complex relationships in the so-called poem from the point of view of socio-cultural semiotics in order to explain the position of the cultural spaces that govern it. This study will pave the way to better understand the manner semiotic atmospheres interfere with each other and finally leads to the formation of central semiotic semiospheres at socio-cultural level.

1)Introduction Argumentation theory is the interdisciplinary study of how conclusions can be reached through logical reasoning; that is, claims based, soundly or not, on premises. This art and science employed in the process of civil debates, dialogues, conversations, and persuasions to protect one’ s beliefs or self-interests or choose to change them. It is also used in law, for example in trials, in preparing an argument to be presented to a court, and in testing the validity of certain kinds of evidence. Typically, an argument has an internal structure, comprising the following: a set of assumptions or premises a method of reasoning (deduction, induction, etc. ) a conclusion or claim. Often classical logic is used as the method of reasoning so that the conclusion follows logically from the assumptions or support. However, one challenge is that if the set of assumptions is inconsistent then anything can follow logically from inconsistency. That’ s why theorist philosophers try to develop approaches to analyze the consistency and strength of arguments. In the same vein, argumentation was generally integrated in the analytical toolkit of Discursive-Historical Approach (See Wodak, 2001, 2015; Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) and Topic-based Discourse Analysis Model (See Mazinani, 2017; Mazinani, Alizadeh, & Azad, 2017). However, some theories of argumentation, e. g. Toulmin’ s Model, are so extensive that they can be used as a single complete toolbox. Keeping this in mind, we aim, in this paper, to design and propose an analytical research method on the basis of this model to be applied in different linguistic areas including Stylistics, Discourse Analysis, and Forensic Linguistics. Stephen Toulmin (1958, [2003]), an English philosopher, developed a practical approach to analyzing the logic of everyday arguments. His approach involves identifying and separating the various components of an argument into a specific order so that they may be appraised. 2)Toulmin’ s Model and the Proposed Research Method In an attempt to provide solutions to the problems of absolutism and relativism, Toulmin attempts throughout his work to develop standards that are neither absolutist nor relativist for assessing the worth of ideas. He believes that a good argument can succeed in providing good justification to a claim, which will stand up to criticism and earn a favorable verdict. In The Uses of Argument (1958 [2003]), Toulmin introduced what became known as the Toulmin Model of Argument, which broke argument into six interrelated components: Claim: Conclusions whose merit must be established. For example, if a person tries to convince a listener that he is a British citizen, the claim would be "I am a British citizen. " Data: The facts we appeal to as a foundation for the claim. Warrant: The statement authorizing our movement from the data to the claim. In order to move from some data to a particular claim, one must supply a warrant-e. g. a law article, a logical statement, or a topo-to bridge the gap between the data and the claim. Backing: Credentials designed to certify the statement expressed in the warrant; backing must be introduced when the warrant itself is not convincing enough to the readers or the listeners. Rebuttal: Statements recognizing the restrictions, e. g. exceptions, to which the claim may legitimately be applied. Qualifier: Words or phrases expressing the speaker's degree of force or certainty concerning the claim. Such words or phrases include "possible, " "probably, " "impossible, " "certainly, " "presumably, " "as far as the evidence goes, " or "necessarily. " The claim "I am definitely a British citizen" has a greater degree of force than the claim "I am a British citizen, presumably. " The first three elements "claim", "data", and "warrant" are considered as the essential components of practical arguments, while the second triad "qualifier", "backing", and "rebuttal" may not be needed or applied in some arguments. Subsequently, these components are recognized in the following tailor-made text: "Institutions should prohibit the sacrifice of animals in doing cosmetic experiments [claim]. In these experiments, animals are tortured and/or killed [Data]. I believe Qualifier there is no need to justify this [warrant]. On one hand, the health and life of animals are more important than the benefit of cosmetics industries [Backing 1]. On the other hand, human beings take more advantages from some animals alive than dead [Backing 2]. Of course, I suppose Qualifier it is necessary to do these experiments in other fields of study such as pharmaceutics and medicine since all-inclusive prohibition of such experiments slows down their progress [Rebuttal]” As you see, the analysis of the component ‘ Qualifier’ in the model of Toulmin can, to a great extent, be inspired by modality analysis in Functional Systemic Grammar. Therefore, many texts, particularly defense bills, can be analyzed by the following suggested research objectives and questions: Proposed Research Objectives: The analysis of the dominant argumentation style of a chosen writer, lawyer, poet, theorist etc. in his/her selected text is determined as a general aim which is itself composed of the following objectives: To find and classify the writer’ s explicit or implied claims and their correspondent fields or backgrounds; To analyze the sufficiency of the data and to categorize them; these statements are some facts based on which the claims are made; To identify the explicit/implicit warrants and their correspondent backings; warrants can also be categorized into rational, legal or common sense statements, topos, etc., which are to confirm the claims of the writer. Fallacies should not be overlooked; To examine if the writer has been aware of possible rebuttals to his/her used warrants and stated claims; To examine the text qualifiers by implementing modality analysis to uncover the certainty degree of the writer while claiming, concluding, using data and evidence. Proposed Research Questions: Since discourse studies are basically ideological which means they are to decipher the underlying beliefs and read the mind of the creators of the texts under analysis, our research questions were designed as follows: 1) What claims were made by the creator of the selected text(s)? And in which fields of study? 2) What are the warrants and backings applied by the creator of the text(s) to confirm his/her made claims or to persuade the audience? Are the warrants rational, legal, and experimental, topos etc.? 3) What qualifiers are used in the text(s)? How frequent are they? What degree of certainty do they show for the writer/speaker while stating the data, warrants and making his/her claims? 4) What are the data-facts or assumptions-provided for the audience to be able to relate the warrants to the made claims? Are these data sufficient or relevant? 5) Did the creator of the text(s) know enough of possible rebuttals to the applied warrants? In other words, are the made claims stable? Or can they be rebutted by the analyst? 3) Conclusion Considering the argumentation process as well as the theorization of the relativist and absolutist philosophers on this issue, Toulmin presented a six-component model, which is both absolutistic and relativistic. In his model, an argument may have these components: 1) Claim, 2) Warrant, 3) Data, 4) Qualifier, 5) Backing, and 6) Rebuttal, of which the first three are necessary, and the others optional. Over time, the application capacity of this model was acknowledged in Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. In this paper, due to the lack of a systematic methodology to apply Toulmin’ s Model in analytic works, a research method was proposed to show the analytical power of this Model in the domains of Stylistics, Legal Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis. In this methodology we suggest that the modality analysis can be applied to the analysis of ‘ Qualifiers’-one of the six components of Toulminian Model. The general aim of the designed method is "to study the argumentation style of the given writer in his selected work", and duly introduces 5 research questions; its application was illustrated by three different texts including a piece of poetry, a defense bill, and a political speech by Donald Trump.

The present research aims at investigating the polysemy of the conjunctions "Ɂ æ ma" and "væ li" in persian language based on principled­ – ­ polysemy approach (Evans & Green, 2006). The methodology used in this qualitative research is descriptive­-analytic, and its type is corpus-based. the selected corpus has been obtained from interviewing with Persian speakers, newspapers and Persian grammarians books, analyzed by using cognitive approach, and their originality have been approved completely. It's worth mentioning that the authors have limited only a few samples of each meaning for distinct meanings of these two conjunctions, and each one has been drawn into a semantic network separately. This study has been done to explore and determine the distinct meanings of the conjunctions "Ɂ æ ma" and "væ li" in Persian language within principled-polysemy approach. Thus, the author has represented them in a semantic network separately. In this regard, the research results showed that the prototypical meaning of the conjunction /Ɂ æ ma/ coming to the speaker's mind immediately /væ li/ has fourteen distinct meanings and two semantic clusters in its own semantic network. Also, the prototypical meaning of the conjunction /vali/ is /Ɂ æ ma/ having eight distinct meanings and two semantic clusters in its own semantic network.

Political rhetoric is one of the new forms of rhetorical science or the use of persuasion’ s means in speech. In this regard, the parliamentary rhetoric, which is one of the most prominent manifestations of the political discourse of the countries, needs to be studied substantially. The five main centers of Rhetoric as creativity (Ethos, Logos, Pathos), Disposition, Eloquence, Deliverance and Memorial, form the important phases of the Rhetorical study of lectures from traditional to current concept. In this study, with the aim of examining the strengths and weaknesses of the debates in the general speech of the Islamic Consultative Assembly’ s members, the authors will find a new pattern of the parliamentary rhetoric in Iran. By examining the pattern of general speech in the representatives of the two political fractions, Omid and Velayat, the authors have found that in most cases, regardless of the difference in the type of Pathos, speakers are weak in Disposition and Deliverance section. Finally, based on the results obtained, the authors provide a model for achieving a principled speech based on rhetorical rules. Finally, based on the results obtained, the goal is to provide a model for achieving a principled speech based on rhetorical rules in order to provide a dynamic and efficient parliamentary rhetoric based on daily needs of country.

Space has always been an important issue for philosophers and thinkers. The representation of spatial concepts in language has also been a concern for linguists. With the introduction of Gestalt psychology and Cognitive linguistics, a new interest in spatial language arose. One of the key elements in spatial linguistic studies is the concept of the Frame of Reference. A spatial Frame of Reference is a coordinate system by which a speaker of any given language determines the location of a figure in respect to a ground in space. The current article’ s aim is to study the Spatial Frames of Reference in Persian. The main questions are if the speakers first describe the object on the right or the object on the left of the photo, if they first describe the man or the tree first, and what the main Spatial Frames of Reference in Persian are. It was supposed that the speakers first describe what is on the right, first describe the tree, and use the relative and intrinsic FoRs. In order to obtain real data from the native speakers, the main 8 photos of the second set of photos from the “ Man & Tree” game devised by Max Planc Institute were used. In each photo, there is a man and a tree, and their positions in the photo and in respect to each other differs. The game was done with three pair of players as instructed by the standard manual and the data were analyzed accordingly. The utterances which where ambiguous between two FoRs were put aside. The analysis of the data showed that in a spatial scene consisting of a man and a tree, the Persian speakers tend to first describe the object on the right, which can be due to the fact that the Persian writing has a right to left system. In addition, between man and tree, the speakers tend to describe the tree first. In this scene, the tree is the ground, since it is bigger and more stable than the man. An interesting point was that in all the cases where the tree was on the right, it was described first. Furthermore, in order to describe the spatial relation between the man and the tree, the speakers use the Relative frame of reference, in which the man is the figure and the tree is the ground; yet, in describing the facing position of the man, they use the Intrinsic frame of reference, in which the man is the ground and in most cases the tree is the figure.

Iranian learners of the Russian language face numerous problems when learning the Russian grammar. One of these problems is the complexity of Russian prepositions, especially spatial and temporal prepositions in comparison with the Persian language. Since the task of the teacher is to facilitate the learning environment, to improve the learning process and to classify the content of learning from a logical point of view, it is necessary, first of all, to identify students' errors and study the causes of their occurrence. At the next stage, the teacher needs to think about ways to overcome these mistakes. The main objective of this study is to classify the frequent errors of Iranian students who use the spatial and temporal prepositions of Russian by identifying the reasons for their occurrence and the ways to overcome them. The corpus of the present study consists of 150 students of the middle stage of Allame Tabatabaei University. Research methodology is experimental – descriptive. The results of the study show that the most frequent errors in the application of spatial and temporal prepositions are associated with the interference between the native and the studied language, and the possibility of using simple Russian prepositions with several cases. Strategies are also being shown to reduce errors, among which the most important is the introduction of the subject “ teaching prepositions” into the program of teaching Russian in Iran and teaching students to think in Russian, rather than translating Persian thoughts.

The problem of discovering the identity of anonymous authors has engaged humans' attention during the ages. In present times, with the revolution brought about by digital computing and electronic corpora, and also with the applications made available by stylometry research in forensic linguistics, systematic analysis of texts in different languages has expanded the understanding of researchers on the different aspects of linguistic styles. In the present study, the possibility of authorship attribution based on idiolect has been investigated in Farsi. One of the linguistic elements that is claimed to be the seat for idiolect is function words. Function words have been the focus of attention in the authorship attribution research since it has been shown that they are processed unconsciously, have high frequency in texts, and remain independent of text topic. In this paper, the possibility of differentiating texts written by different authors has been studied using Farsi function words. The research questions were: 1) Are Farsi functions words capable of differentiating authors in Farsi prose? 2) Of monograms, bigrams, and trigrams, which one is the most efficient in differentiating author styles? 3) What is the minimum cut-off point for successful differentiation of author styles in Farsi? First, a corpus of five Iranian scholars’ writings was compiled, normalized and divided into different sample texts. Then 20 most frequent words were extracted from different author samples and n-gram sequences (up to tri-grams) were analyzed using principal component analysis and cluster analysis in the Stylo package of R. Findings showed that function words in Farsi were capable of differentiating authors’ writings with monogram words performing better than bi-gram and tri-grams in small size samples. Findings also indicated that under the experimental conditions used in this study, the minimum number of words for a text to be successfully attributed to an author is about 4000 words. This cut-off point is reached using 20 most frequent function words. It is concluded that different authors don't use function words in the same manner. In fact, while some high-frequency function words appear in the writings of all authors, they are given different priorities by different authors.