LANGUAGE RELATED RESEARCH (COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE RESEARCH)
Year:2012 | Volume:2 | Issue:4 (8)|Papers Count:8

Narrative semio-semantics is based on two principles: action and change. In this system, all actors often move logical and planned until achieve the favorite and permanent sense. It seems that in the texture of myth and epic fictions, dominant discourse is logical and narrative. In this research, we study the fiction of Rostam and Esfandyar of Ferdowsi’s Shahname based on semio-semantics theory in order to show that discursive components likewise narrative signs, have also effect to assign meaning to the fiction; because the enter of Simourgh to the fiction transforms normal narration and causes this study to go beyond narrative semio-semantics and get closer to discursive semio-semantics.The result of this study showed that in ideological discourse of Shahnameh, Rostam, as unconquerable Iranian hero, is located in the central thought. Events never occur in a way that damage authority of Rostam in the context of Shahnameh. Thus all signs lead to victory of Rostam in all championships in the fiction according to the narrator.

This paper examines the Quranic Iltifāt in the light of the structure of discourse information (SDI). The question is that how can Iltifat be justified through SDI? Firstly, it is referred to the literature review as well as the definition, categories and the kinds of Iltifat. Secondly SDI, topicalization, topic maintenance and point of view/focalization are analyzed. It seems that, through SDI, God turns the message into a new way (Iltifat) and gives it in a new package. This then results in the reader's empathy, which may change through the shift of point of view, hence, a change in Iltifat. Finally, the main findings read as follows: 1) in Iltifat, the reader receives information/Quranic message in a new package via SDI, 2) Iltifat can be justified through topicalization and topic maintenance, 3) Iltifat is the innovatory use of language rather than a grammatical error, and 4) Iltifat and its kinds underscore the here and now of the Quranic oral discourse as well as the active role of the reader as the God's present audience.

Literature of resistance has both human and world face. Efforts by a generation of fighters for liberation of land, religion, culture and traditions from the shackles of aggressors to national privacy and human values are done, which everyone can draw poetic and literary expression. Events such as occupied Palestine and Iraq’s attack on Iran caused the creation of unique works of the resistance literature of nations. Works of the poet of Palestinian resistance, “Smyah Alqasem”, poets of Iranian’s Sacred Defense, “Hosseini Hassan” and “Kaiser Amin Pour” are valuable legacy in the realm of the resistance poetry of the two territories.The present study is to investigate homology and differences in the poetry of resistance by relying on the works of two poets of the country. Research findings showed that sense of belonging to the land, disposal of foreign invasion and occupation are among the main factors in the incidence of resistance elements of Samyh, Husseini and Aminpour poetry. Land, war victims, rebellion against the aggressor, religious and ethnic motivations of struggle, martyrdom, the enemy, oriented ideals and values to override objections by flow resistance are the main themes of the poets.

The present study is the analysis of the drama “Death of a Salesman” and its interlingual and intersemiotic translations into Persian. The drama has been interlingually translated into Persian and it became the basis for an intersemiotic translation, a tele-theatre. For this reason, the researcher compared the Persian translation with the English text and the tele-theatre to the Persian text to define and analyze the translation of significant ideological concepts in both translations. Then, using critical semiotics theory and extending it to translation criticism, the researcher criticized the tele-theatre from a critical semiotics viewpoint to identify which types of signs have been changed in the tele-theatre and how. Therefore, changes of ideologically significant concepts were analyzed and criticized. The results showed that there were no changes in ideologically significant concepts of the Persian text. But, in the tele-theatre, almost all of these concepts were omitted or completely transformed. In fact, the tele-theatre contains so many censorships in a way that, in some parts, it has lost its cohesion and sometimes even its meanings. In fact, the translator/director has tried to do his best to change the text according to the viewpoints of dominant culture of receiving society. Moreover, maintaining and adding their accepted ideological concepts and omitting or transforming their unaccepted ones, he has tried to represent their values and ideological positions to the receivers. As a result, he has created a text, which lacks cohesion in comparison to the original text and infers meanings, which are sometimes completely opposite to those of the original text.

In relation to the impact of Persian literature on the west, in the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most outstanding American figures. His interest in Persian poetry, particularly that of Hafiz, encouraged him to translate some Persian poems into English. He also composed some poems with oriental inclinations, inspired by Hafiz and the mystical poetry of some other Persian poets.Emerson also wrote an essay, entitled “On Persian Poetry”, in which he introduced German translations of Persian literature as his source of knowledge and revealed his high regards for Persian poets. However, his greater admiration for Hafiz than for others in this essay is due to the fact that to him Hafiz, while being a greater poet, was a liberated minded intellectual as well.This study is an attempt to scrutinize Emerson’s observations of Persian poetry. First, the sources from which he acquired his oriental notions will be examined. Then his view on Persian poetry will be focused upon, and finally his praise for the merits of Hafiz’s poetry including: intellectual liberty, transcendental vision, Takhalloss (his mode of copyright), the function of the hidden layer of meaning in his poetry, etc. are going to be examined.This comparative study will finally present Emerson’s misconceptions in the field of Persian poetry. His mistakes and misconceptions might be the result of cultural differences, his lack of knowledge of Persian language and different time span in which the two poets lived.

Unwillingness-to-communication in a foreign language (UTC) on the part of learners, which is a tendency to avoid oral communication, is one of the main problems of language teachers. In a way, if the source of this unwillingness is determined, language teachers can decide better about those students who seem reluctant in the communication and usually avoid interactions. Yet the extent of this unwillingness is not constant among different individuals and it can be the result of many diverse factors. This study has focused on the relationship between the students' personality traits and their UTC, and the role of gender in the levels of UTC. In so doing, two highly validated measures of NEO Five Factor Model (NEO-FFM) and UTC scale of unwillingness to communicate were administered to 250 participants from four universities. The results of step-wise multiple regression showed that, from the five factors of personality (extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness to experience and agreeableness), extraversion was the best predictor of UTC. The second and the third predictive variables were neuroticism and conscientiousness, respectively. While extraversion and conscientiousness had a negative relationship with UTC, neuroticism had a positive correlation. Moreover, the results of t-test proved no significant difference between the two groups of males and females with respect to their levels of UTC. In the end, drawing on the relevant literature, the results of the study have been discussed and the importance of findings has been explicated for teachers and language teaching practitioners.

This paper attempts to explore the semantic space of Sod-in ‘to become’ in Persian in order to address some basic features of linguistic cognition (e.g. analyzability and compositionality). One of the highly-frequent verbs in Persian is Sod-in, which with regard to its different functions at the level of sentence, can be considered as the most active verb in this language. According to a diachronic viewpoint, the same verbal form, Sod-in, with four distinctive functions (as a main verb, as a copula, as a modal verb, and as the verbal constituent of complex predicates) plays an important role in Persian verbal system. The passive construction in Persian is considered as a Complex Predicate in which Sod-in combines with different linguistic categories such as noun, adjective, prepositional phrase and past participle (X in general).Its semantic space indicates that various types of constructions including Sod-in form a network of meanings, in which the verbal element Sod-in is meaningful, in contrast to the previous studies it's passive construction which considered it as a purely syntactic element carrying no meaning. Therefore, the passive construction in Persian is viewed as analyzable in which Sod-in is not a random occurrence but rather an extension of its other uses. The relatedness of the uses of Sod-in provides further evidence for the claim in Cognitive Grammar that the passive construction is part of a larger network of related syntactic constructions and not derives from the active construction.

The information structure of a sentence is concerned with the formal expression of the referents and propositions in a given discourse. The formal expression of a referent is affected, among others, by such factors as the degree of mental identifiability of the referents, the pragmatic relation of referents in a proposition, etc. Based on the identifiability parameter proposed by Lambrecht (1994), the present study is intended to analyze the different lexico-grammatical codings of the mental referents and propositions in English and Persian. To do so, the first chapter of George Orwell's “Animal Farm” and its translation by Amir Amirshahi were analyzed based on the concepts of information structure theory.The findings revealed that the morphological coding in both English and Persian is affected by the degree of identifiability of the mental referents; in particular, identifiable referents were found to be represented by weak forms and unidentifiable referents by strong forms. In addition, English and Persian preferred morphological forms were found to be different. It was also found that identifiability parameter affects both the syntactic and prosodic patterns of the languages involved. The utterances with identifiable referents were mainly matched with subject position or were mainly coded as unaccented. In addition, it was found that, unlike morphological coding of both source language (English) and target language (Persian), identifiability parameter affected the prosodic and syntactic forms of both languages almost in the same way. Chi-square and Z test were used to show the significance of the statistics.