Journal of Language Research
Year:2018 | Volume:8 | Issue:2 |Papers Count:7

The impact of power in the criminal court discourse and the interrogation process is manifested in many factors such as context-specific conditions and differences in social position between a police investigator and the accused. This study intends to use politeness strategies by Brown and Levinson (1987) to explore and describe the role of politeness in the interrogation process. The aim of this study is to describe the relationship between power and politeness in promoting the interrogation process because politeness is embedded in power relations. Corpus consisted of eleven transcripts of the hearing randomly selected from criminal cases in public justice administration in Bushehr. The results showed that with the observance of politeness (Brown and Levinson's strategies), the interrogation route could not be well advanced, because the defendants refrain from answering questions due to lack of pressure and threat. But with pressure and harshness of the signs of power, the interrogation route can be well advanced.

In modern Persian the preposition "az" signifies the concepts instrument, method, cause, nature, possession, part-whole relationship, source, path, separation, comparison and topic. "az" is the remainder of the preposition hača in Avesta and sačā in Sanskrit. This preposition has been taken from the root "sac/hak" meaning accompaniment and has been used in Middle Persian and Parthian as "az" and "až". In Sanskrit sacā has been used to convey accompaniment. This preposition has undergone two levels of grammaticalization over time: in the first step noun has been converted to preposition to mean “accompanied with” and other meanings derived from it, and in the second step it has been used to convey other meanings such as source and other related senses. The present paper is an attempt to investigate the polysemy of "az" based on the conceptual transfer model.

Vowels of a language can be characterized within an acoustically defined space according to native listeners’ perceptual intuition. This study investigated Persian listeners’ perception of a synthetic vowel space in which F1, F2, and F3 varied in a systematic manner. Our experimental design was based on the “Simple Target Model”. In an identification task thirty subjects heard each stimulus once in random order, and responded by choosing orthographic signs of Persian vowels. The identification of vowels depends on F1 and F2 (p<0.00001), but not on F3. Our results highlight the importance of F1 and F2 in distinguishing Persian vowels, in agreement with those obtained in previous production experiments.

Light verbs are generally considered a special grammatical category which have little semantic contribution to verb phrases, and therefore few studies have explored the light-heavy verb semantic relationships. Drawing on Brugman’s version of force-dynamics, cognitive lexical semantics and examining around 130 compound and light verb constructions formed by gereftan, this paper showed that although this light verb is not as lexically rich as its heavy counterpart, there remain systematic semantic relationships between the two. Given the limited number of Persian simple verbs, heavy verbs allow the expression of new concepts by making complex predicates, and therefore it is expected that the heavy verb gereftan will participate in numerous compound and light constructions and lose aspects of its meaning in the process. However, this paper showed that the light verb gereftan not only maintains various aspects of meaning including force-dynamic ones, different light verb usages are also a function of the heavy verb’s polysemy.

According to optimal innovation hypothesis, pleasure hinges on recognizing the familiar in the novel. This is like deviation and foregrounding in the literature and language. This research is to test the hypothesis that pleasure in "a Poem for the War" by Qeisar Aminpur is due to innovation and familiarity not mere innovation. First, deviated samples of this poem were extracted according to Leach's template and two Persian literature experts adjusted reliability in form and content. Then, using questionnaires, the participants were asked to rate the familiarity of each expression on a 1-7 familiarity scale. The results showed that deviated expressions in the mentioned poem are not fully innovative and have some shades of familiarity. Therefore, the hypothesis was adjusted.

In this paper, the Mukriyani’s layered structure of NPs (one of the Surani’s Kurdish dialects) has been examined according to Van Valin’s (2005) framework. In this framework, NPs consist of two projections: a constituent projection consisting of a Nucleus and a Core plus one or more Peripheries for each of them, and a grammatical projection consisting of operators. This research is a descriptive-analytic one in which the data have been extracted from the written sources of Mukriyani dialect, and also from the intuition of one of the researchers who is a native Mukriyani speaker. These data have been analyzed according to the mono-layered pattern of RRG and finally the proposed Mukriyani’s NPs pattern has been offered. Among the results of this research, we can refer to the independence of NPs’ structure from the linier order of their elements; however, the enclitics attached to the NUCNreflecting the number or definiteness are among the Core or NP operators. Another result of the research shows that in Mukriyani, the post-Nucleus adjectives make the Nucleus peripheries and the pre-Nucleus adjectives are among the Core operators.

Providing knowledge for effective communication cannot just be limited to teaching linguistic information, and pragmatic competence should also be considered. Since the main goal of teaching foreign languages is related to teachers, their proficiency and pragmatic awareness are very important; Nevertheless, the conditions for the acquisition of speech acts is not provided adequately. In this regard, the present study aims to analyze the pragmatic competence of Iranian EFL teachers considering the strategies of expressing speech act gratitude in English. In order to evaluate the use of strategies of expressing gratitude, a Discourse Completion Task questionnaire (DCT) and a coding scheme proposed by Cheng were used. Also, the Gratitude Questionnaire-Six Item Form (GQ-6) was employed to study the influence of personality on expressing gratitude. The questionnaires were distributed randomly, and the male and female participants were asked to fill the discourse completion task. They were expected to write down as many words or utterances as they wanted to express their gratitude towards the situation in a limited time. Finally, 133 completed questionnaires were collected. Then, responses were coded based on the Cheng coding scheme. The findings showed that all 8 gratitude strategies of the Cheng model were applied by teachers. The "Thanking" strategy was the most frequent (39.9%). Also, the results of the Kruskal-Wallis H test showed that the three groups of instructor's field of study (academic discipline) do not show any significant difference in expressing their gratitude strategies.