Journal of Language Research
Year:2012 | Volume:3 | Issue:1 (4)|Papers Count:7

Bactrian was the language of Bactria in northern Afghanistan. This language is considered as one of the Eastern Middle Iranian Languages which was used from the first to the ninth century. The remaining materials from this language include coins, seals, inscriptions and documents. In 1990s, many Bactrian documents were found amongst which the letters were of most importance as they gave much more information about the Bactrian language. These letters were mostly written on leather and cloth. In the present article, one of these letters named as “The Letter of Borzmihr” will be analyzed. This letter was written in thirteen lines and on very fine leather. First, the letter will be transcribed and translated into Persian and then a full etymological analysis will be presented.

A motivated derivational word is a word that its meaning is the result of the meaning of word stem and derivational affixes. In this paper, the hypothesis is tested that by the passage of time, motivation would be reduced and for this purpose, four itinerary passages from present and four equal passages from 200 years before are chose to understand ,under comparisons and statistical considerations, from 200 years before, derivational words in Persian language have been more motivated or not. Comparisons of results show that a meaningful increase is evident in the number of derivational words in present time, in the number of motivated words and in the number of partially motivated derivational words. therefore, we would say that from two hundred years before, derivational words in Persian language have been more motivation.

In this article, a small part of the Manichaean Sogdian parable known as "the deaf and dumb boy" is reconstructed. Mani narrated this parable for a Zoroastrian priest. The text of the parable contains some fragments in the Sogdian language and script from Leningrad manuscripts collection, which were published some years ago by A. N. Ragoza and later re-edited and reconstructed by N. Sims-Williams. Here the yet unpublished fragment Ch/So12400 from Turfan collection of the National Library of Berlin is reconstructed as a parallel of Leningrad fragment L83b to improve the text.

In contrast to the grammatical category of mood in Persian which has been subject to a number of studies, modality as a semantic category has not received the due attention it deserves. This study is fascinated to depict modal functions of tense in Persian. In a sense, it tries to take account of the structures used by Persian speakers to express their evaluation of the state of affairs. The results of the study show that real and unreal conditionals, deictic projection and subjunctives are among the structures in Persian in which a past or non- past tense is used to convey a wide range of modal meanings. The fulfillment of such a function by tense takes place in the presence of contextual elements and modal hedges. In other words, such factors seem to facilitate the use of tense in expressing modal content of the sentence rather than grammatical zing the time of the event. Moreover, it seems cognitive processes of conceptual mapping and mental space building, along with pragmatic and contextual factors are central to assigning a modal function to tense in Persian.

In the present paper, we are to put forth a paradigm for the systematic study of modality in Persian. With this end in view, we consider modality as a linguistic phenomenon that can be expressed at the level of sentence, at the level of constituents smaller than sentence and/or at the level of discourse. In such a system where sentential modality, sub-sentential modality and discourse modality are the main categories, each and every modal element can be studied with respect to its phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. Previous studies, meanwhile, have morpho-syntactically limited Persian modal system to modal verbs, modal adverbs and past tense, and among different aspects of modality, have mainly focused on semantic properties of modal elements. In the present pages, employing the proposed paradigm and introducing the three semantic dimensions of modal force, modal base and ordering source, and with regard to the literature on Persian modal system, we introduce modal nouns and modal adjectives to this system and briefly explain the semantic and morphological properties of Persian modal adjectives as well as some of the restrictions imposed on the nominal complements of these adjectives.

Except for personal clitics in past transitive forms, Sorani Kurdish has three verbal prefixes; næ- for negation, be- for subjunctive, and (d) æ- for imperfective. This article starts with bringing forth the question of why subjunctive marker in this language cannot appear with verbal negative or aspect prefixes while there is no problem with the co-occurrence of negative and aspect prefixes. After proposing some possible analyses, the author tries to analyze the question based on DM theory, saying that negation head moves downward, merges with the mood head, and the merged form gets one phonological content by vocabulary items. For imperfective appearing in the final position in past subjunctives, she analyzes that this aspect head moves to the final position of the verb in the presence of subjunctive marker. Both these movements happen in the morphological structure of PF –the first operates in terms of hierarchical structure and before the linearizational rules being applied and the second operates in terms of linear order and after linearization- hence they are named phonological rules, which are language-specific. As these rules changes –or sometimes add to- the syntactic structure, they are called readjustment rules too.

Grammaticalization provides a framework to study the genesis and development of grammatical forms in language. In this framework, it is argued that new grammatical forms are constantly developed from lexical items and the already formed grammatical items may go out of use. In spite of some counterexamples, this is often seen as a unidirectional and cyclic process. In this article the concepts of cycle and unidirectionality are touched upon. An emphasis is put on the nature of semantic change in grammaticalization. This is a point where grammaticalization and some frameworks of cognitive linguistics converge. In this connection, the framework of metaphorical extension is elaborated on. On the basis of this latter framework, some instances of grammaticalization in New Persian are touched upon. Our evidence shows that metaphorical extension plays a crucial role in the process of grammaticalization. The change from concrete to abstract meaning in the process of grammaticalization, as seen in metaphorical extension, is in line with the concept of unidirectionality. This kind of semantic change is almost without exception in New Persian.