Journal of Language Research
Year:2019 | Volume:10 | Issue:1 |Papers Count:10

This paper investigates intonational characteristics of yes/no questions in contrast to statements in Persian. Based on Tilt model, acoustic variables including duration, pitch amplitude and tilt are compared between these two sentence types. Since studies (Eslami, 2000; Mahjani, 2003; Mahootiyan, 1997; Sadat Tehrani, 2007) have shown the difference between yes/no question and statement is in the last intonational event, the goal is to determine which acoustic parameters are conceptually important in identifying the type of the sentence. To achieve this, at first, in the production stage, we used statistical analyses in relation to different levels of duration, pitch amplitude and tilt in questions and statements. Then, in the perception stage, first, we manipulated acoustic variables (duration, pitch amplitude and tilt), then perceptual tests were used to measure the success of work. In the production stage, 40 yes/no questions and their corresponding and statements were read by five Persian speakers, and then through Praat software, the data were analyzed and the acoustic parameters measured. In the next step, by means of Student's t-test, we compared the mean of different variables in the questions and statements. The results of our statistical analyses showed that the average of duration and pitch amplitude except tilt variable were higher in final peak in questions. In the next stage, we manipulated the target points, including: edge f0, final peak, rightmost valley and penultimate valley in order to change the question to statement. Perceptual salience of these acoustic cues was investigated through questionnaire identification tests. The perception tests indicate that only the utterance-final edge F0 is a strong perceptual cue to make a distinction between question and statement. And simoltaneovs manipulation of all target points showed greatest effect on identifying the type of sentence.

This paper deals with the sincerity of Persian language Ta’ arofs across genders. The sincerity is evaluated by means of cultural schemas. Data that is gathered from different conversational contexts and Iranian films is analyzed by conversation analysis method. Using emic approach, the researchers identify fifteen underlying cultural schemas for Persian Ta’ arofs and represent a model. To fulfill this aim, the Ta’ arofs with similar illocutionary forces are identified and classified as cultural micro-schemas. Each class is given a title and the first encoding is done. To make sure about the validity of the classifications two inter-raters are employed. Then the concepts which are considered as the basis for these micro-schemas in Iranian culture are identified and labeled as macro-schemas. The Ta’ arofs are evaluated in questionnaires in terms of sincerity they are associated with across genders. Ta’ arofs and their contexts are presented in the questionnaire and the subjects are asked to evaluate the sincerity of Ta’ arofs. Ta’ arofs are chosen from both genders’ conversations equivalently and distributed in the questionnaire with different cultural schemas. The evaluation of data demonstrates that despite the common belief that men’ s Ta’ arofs are more sincere than women’ s, there wasn’ t any significant difference between their degrees of sincerity. Moreover, considering that the most and the least sincere Ta’ arofs belong to women, we can say that the range of sincerity of Ta’ arofs is wider in women than in men. The underlying micro-schemas of the most sincere Ta’ arofs in women and men are respectively sympathy (Hamdeli) and compliment (Tahsin); and, the underlying micro-schemas of the least sincere Ta’ arofs are respectively hospitality (Mehmannavazi) and Shekastehnafsi in women and men. Although the underlying micro-schemas of the most (in) sincere Ta’ arofs are different in the two genders and reflect social and psychological differences between them, the underlying macro-schemas obey the notion of distributive cognition.

Conditions governing Ezafe/possessive marker allomorphy in Sanandaji Kurdish are of vital importance. There are four possible cases for the head noun of Ezafe construction; i. e. it can be definite and accompanied by an adjective; definite without any adjective complement; and indefinite with or without an adjective complement. Also, there are two possible cases for the head noun of possessive constructions; i. e. it is always definite, but it may be accompanied by an adjective complement or not. Amongst them, there is just one case with an evident case marker «=æ »: A definite noun phrase accompanied by an adjective reflects the Ezafe/possessive relation by linker «=æ », otherwise «=i» inserts. Hence, the rationale behind the aforementioned morpho-syntactic conditions is a challenging issue in Ezafe/possessive constructions. Furthermore the distinctive interpretation of the two constructions; is not to be disregarded just the possessive construction bears the meaning of possession. The present paper aims at investigating Ezafe/possessive constructions from a Distributed Morphology view and provides an analysis of their derivations which explains the structural similarities and constraints determining the alternation of case marking. It is supposed, the value of features in «Ez» determines the winner of the competition between «=æ » and «=i». Accordingly, when uninterpretable features in node Ez are valued as [Ez, +MOD, +DEF], «=æ » inserts into the node, and in other three cases, based on the under-specification principle «=i» inserts. Also, the difference in morphological features of the Complement of EzP nodes is responsible for the distinctive meaning of Ez-and Possessive constructions. In possessive constructions, the head of the adjective phrase, as a complement of EzP, contains an uninterpretable feature [POSS] which must be satisfied by merging EzP node with a possessive complement. Therefore the difference is related to the complement of EzP not the Ez node itself.

Deconstruction is critiquing the hierarchical oppositions which comprise the basis of the western ideology system; oppositions such as in / out, presence / absence. To deconstruct and opposition is to show that it is not natural and inevitable but a construction, produced by discourses that rely on it, and to show that it is construction in a work of deconstruction that seeks to dismantle it-that is, not destroy it but give it a different structure and functioning. As a mode of reading, that is a "teasing out of warring forces of signification within a text", an investigation of the tension between modes of signification, as between the performative and constative dimensions of language. Semiology is a method of reading texts, such as deconstruction, which can be employed in a myiad of approaches while treating a text. Considering that semiology is the study of signs in a discource, the current research does a semiotics reading of the young adult novel ''Mosabeghe. com'' through the lens of Derrida’ s deconstruction, as one of the most significant poststructuralist approaches. Since a poststructuralist analysis aims to introduce possibilities of new significations in the text, the poststructuralist reading of the named text results in a new reading, opposing the dominant method of reading texts. On the one hand, Derrida agrees with Freud that the structure of experience, as that of the trace, rests on absence and distance; thus, to do a psychoanalytic treatment of the text, the present research studies the relationship between Freud’ s tripartite model, id/ego/superego, and Derrida’ s method of «deconstruction» in the abovementioned story, as well as the relationship between Nicolajeva’ s tripartite model-children’ s story, prelapsarian / carnivalesque / postlapsarian, poststructuralist semiology. Considering noticeable lack of research in the field of semiology in children’ s literature in Iran for the first time, and also strategically deconstructs the relationship between poststructuralism and psychoanalysis.

The present paper is an experimental study that addresses the insertion of the palatal glide [j] and glottal consonants [h] and [? ] to prevent vowel hiatus in Persian. Data included Persian words involving the sound sequence V1-V2 where V1 was the last sound of the root and V2 was the beginning vowel of a suffix (either derivational, inflectional or enclitic). In the previous literature it has been assumed that the insertion of a consonant in VI-V2 sequences in Persian is sensitive to the phonetic specification of the first vowel. Thus, words were selected such that V1 was any of the six vowels of the Persian sound system. Acoustic analyses of the data included measurement of variation of the first and second formant frequencies as wells as variation of energy in the FFT spectra (overall intensity and intensity in the higher frequency bands). Results suggested that while the insertion of [j] changes the frequency of the first two formants F1 and F2, the insertion of the glottal consonants fails to trigger frequency changes in the spectra. The results further suggested that the intensity of higher formant frequencies is more highly to reduce due to the insertion of mediating consonants than overall intensity or the intensity of lower formant frequencies. The results were interpreted to suggest that variation in phonation type is the most noticeable acoustic change that occurs when the glide [j] or the glottal consonants [h] and [? ] is inserted in V-V. This change is the least phonetic change that is required to reform vowel hiatus in Persian by turning the ungrammatical sequence V-V to the grammatical VCV one. From the phonological point of view, the findings presented in this research are in line with Chomsky and Halle's (1968) model of phonetic features in which glides and glottal consonants are represented by the same features [-vocalic] and [-cons].

The objective of the present paper is to investigate the production of humor in pre-school children in linguistics point of view on the basis of Logical Mechanism Knowledge Resource. Logical mechanisms, along with and after Script Opposition, is the second most important variable in the General Theory of Verbal Humor. In this theory, Logical Mechanism accounts for the incongruity between two script oppositions. Participants in the present paper are 100 pre-school 4-6 years old children (50 girls and 50 boys), who were asked to tell a funny memory that happened to themselves. The children’ s memories were video recorded and transcribed in special tables. The reason for a memory to be considered funny from children’ s point of view is the incongruity of children’ s memory. This incongruity was investigated on the basis of Warren and McGraw (2015) which is the most recent method of analysis for incongruity. In Warren and McGraw’ s classification, the incongruity includes four logical mechanisms: surprise, atypicality, juxtaposition and violation. The results of the present investigation revealed that the participants used logical mechanism of surprise more than the other logical mechanisms. Logical mechanisms of atypicality and violation after logical mechanism of surprise are the most frequent logical mechanisms in children’ s humorous memory constructions, while the logical mechanism of juxtaposition was the least functional in children’ s humor productions. Regarding gender differences, it can be concluded that in pre-school children there was no meaningful difference in the types and numbers of humor productions between males and females. It was also revealed that logical mechanisms of surprise and atypicality had the highest frequency in children’ s humor productions. The more frequent use of these two logical mechanisms showed a basic oppositon which is approvable in cognitive theories.

Antonymy is a kind of lexical-semantic relationship between two words that are similar in many aspects out imply opposite meanings. The few previous studies as well as the authors’ initial study on the oral and written corpus reveal that antonyms’ sequence is subject to a hidden regularity. In the study of antonyms’ distribution, their sequence, i. e. A-B or B-A is considered. Earlier studies and observations of writers regarding oral and written corpus indicates a hidden order in the sequence of antonymous pairs. Jones (2002) attempts to reveal this order in light of seven rules, i. e., morphological derivation, positivity, magnitude, chronology, gender, phonology and idiomaticity. In this study, we investigated the sequence of antonymous pairs in a researcher made Persian corpus. The detected and extracted samples include 4000 sentences taken from written and oral genres produced since 1970s to 2010s in Iranian mass media. The texts include journalistic, narrative and scientific texts as well as oral files extracted from movies, TV, and radio programs. To consider radical changes in Persian language, texts exchanged in virtual space such as facebook messages are also taken into account. The diversity of subject and historical order of the texts would help up to work on a natural, well-balanced corpus, and would provide us a platform for a diachronic approach. The samples are collected randomly. As far as the part of speech is concerned, in forming antonymous pairs, the category of nouns tops followed respectively by verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. The findings indicate that the framework introduced in Jones (2002) could explain almost half of the sequences attested in the corpus. Rules of idiomaticity, phonology, positivity, morphological derivation are more effective and in some cases the cultural and contextual differences may explain the sequence. It was also revealed that the unmarked member mostly precedes the marked one. This finding is consistent with previous studies conducted on markedness.

In Nanosyntax theory, terminal nodes contain syntactico-semantic features which are smaller than morphemes. Most of the morphemes are spread over several terminal nodes. Therefore, morphemes project on subtrees rather than the terminal nodes. Each terminal node comprises one specific feature. The features are arranged in a universal hierarchy namely functional sequence and follow the principle one morphosyntactic property-one feature-one head. In this theory, following cartographic approach, the universality of underlying syntactic structures and the fixed order Determiner-Head-Complement are adopted. Also, the lexicon encompasses subtrees which contain conceptual and phonological information. In this regard, a lexical entry will be minimally of the form: . In addition, Spell-out is an operation through which the derived syntactic trees are linked with saved subtrees in the lexical entries in lexicon. This article analytically studies the syntax and semantics of some Kurdish simple prepositions based on nanosyntax. As morphological complexity mirrors the syntactic complexity and in some languages the relationship between the morphemes and the syntactic head/semantic features representing them is one to one, this relationship should be induced in the underlying syntactic structure of all languages. Studying the present research data according to Baker’ s mirror principle and Chomsky’ s uniformity principle shows that though simple prepositions in Kurdish are monomorphic, all of them, except for the preposition l{ (at) with one feature (Place), include more than one feature, that is, there is no one to one relation between their syntactic head/semantic features and their morphology. The preposition bO: (to) contains Place and Goal, the preposition l{(from) contains Place, Goal and Source, the preposition b{r{w (towards) includes Place, Goal and Scale and the preposition ta (till) is made up of Place, Goal and Bound features. The preposition w{/b{ (by, to) as an instrumental preposition contains instrument, dative, genitive, accusative and nominative features and when denoting dative, it includes dative, genitive, accusative and nominative features. The present study also presents the feature arrangements of these prepositions and the reasons of syncretism in l{ and w{, as well.

Ezafe construction is considered as one of the most important issues in various linguistic theories including phonetics, morphology and syntax and many Iranian linguists have analyzed this phenomenon from these different aspects. Ezafe marker is usually not written in Persian text. So, not only does it result in a high degree of ambiguity in reading, analyzing, and understanding Persian documents, but also it causes serious difficulties for a large number of natural language processing tasks (NLP) such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging, Named-Entity Recognition (NER), Co-reference Resolution, Converting Text to Speech, Machine Translation, syntactic parsing and so on. As a result, determining the positions of Ezafe in a given sentence is viewed as a controversial and challenging issue especially in these applications. Using a corpus-based analysis and dependency grammar, the current paper sets to study Ezafe positions. Due to the fact that dependency grammar applies a simple parsing, uses low memory and speeds up computer operations, this grammar is regarded as one of the important and practical grammars in the field of computational linguistics. Accordingly, this study will use a rule-based method within this framework to recognize Ezafe positions. For this purpose, all Ezafe constructions which are provided in Uppsala Persian Dependency Corpus (UPDC) are analyzed based on dependency relations. In the next step, only seven Ezafe rules are formulated consisting of such non-verbal phrases as noun phrases, adjective phrases, prepositional phrases, adverb phrases, phrases with more than one post-modifier, phrases with more than one post-modifier as a phrase and co-ordinations. The proposed rules can be used in Persian dependency corpora and a great number of language processing tasks which are based on dependency relations. In addition, in the present research, Ezafe positions which have not been mentioned in previous theoretical and computational studies will be elaborated.

This research, conducted in the field of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, aims at the describing and analyzing the type and number of request strategies in Kurdish, Mokri dialect, regarding the effectiveness or non-effectiveness of social factors as the gender of user and the power of addressee. To this end, for data collection, a revised version of Discourse Completion Test (DCT) including 12 situations was distributed among 130 (65 males and 65 females) Mokri Kurdish speakers in Mahabad city located in the southern of West Azabayejan province. They were in the age range of 25 to 35, holding at least a bachelor degree. Besides the questionaire, direct observation consisting of 7 hours of everyday normal conversations in various situations and different contexts was employed to collect more natural and reliable data. As the main theoretical framework for the present study, Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) coding scheme used by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) was employed and Brown and Levinson’ s (1987) politeness theory was used as the peripheral framework. Results of the research showed a significant difference across genders in selection of the type of request strategis and the power of addressee had a significant effect on choosing the strategies. It was also shown that power and gender had an interactive effect on the selection of these strategies. According to supporting strategies of the "negative and positive faces" in Brown and Levinson’ s (1987) theory, it was found that Kurdish people as the members of one cooperative group mostly employed positive face saving acts in their communications and interactions. The research findings indicate that it is about time for linguists as educational planners to consider these sociolinguistic differences in teaching Kurdish language to non-Kurdish people in order to prevent any probable mishaps in their communications and interactions with Kurdish speakers.