JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES IN LINGUISTICS
Year:2021 | Volume:12 | Issue:2 (23)|Papers Count:11

This study investigates the nature and structure of Persian incorporation within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM) as a fully synthetic approach that considers morphology as syntax. In this approach, the Root selects for an argument, and then the Root must be merged with that argument or adjunct before it merges with its category-determining feature bundle. So Roots allow being incorporated into them. They are not yet included in any category. In order to become nominal or verbal, they have to incorporate further into a category-creating head. Some linguists (Arkan, 2006; Karimi, 1997; Shaghaghi, 2007; Spencer, 1991, 1995) considered the incorporation process as a morphological phenomenon because within the framework of Baker's synthetic theory, data from their understudied languages violates Baker's syntactic principles, but DM can describe incorporated constructions inconsistent with syntactic conditions of Baker’ s synthetic theory. It seems that DM, unlike previous approaches, can solve some challenges, such as combining the syntactic function of incorporated construction of concrete structures (Gerdts, 1988), changing the syntactic function of the element derived from incorporation (Baker, 1988), and some restrictions on modifier stranding for merging with verbs (Baker, 1988, 1996). The analysis made in this article shows that syntactic approaches need to be reconsidered to explain incorporation.

The durational variability of phonetic intervals is considered as one of the properties of speech rhythm. These intervals include segmental, vowel, consonantal, vocalic, intervocalic, voiced, unvoiced, syllable, and syllable peak intervals. The durational variability measure for some of these intervals, such as vowel, consonantal, vocalic, intervocalic intervals, determines the classification of languages based on their rhythm. Besides, in some cases, the speaker identification is only possible through the person's voice. The segmental and suprasegmental properties of a language can be used to identify the speaker. In this study, the acoustic correlations of Persian speech rhythm in a reading text are calculated by various durational measures. Also, the between-speaker rhythmic variability is considered to find the best rhythmic measures for Persian speaker identification. The results confirm that Persian is near to the syllable-based languages. Moreover, the results from segmental and supra-segmental consideration demonstrate significant between-speaker variability in Persian. Among phonetic intervals, nPVI-VC and V% (percentage of vocalic intervals) best discriminate between-speaker variability in Persian.

This paper addressed the acoustic factors involved in distinguishing simple past and present perfect tenses in Persian. The pronunciation of Persian simple past and present perfect tenses in colloquial speech are the same segmentally but different in terms of the position of stress. In an experimental study, the pattern of distribution of some important prosodic parameters, including F0, intensity, and duration, was investigated in a speech corpus consisting of 24 sentences. Results suggested that none of the study parameters could differentiate simple past and present perfect tenses reliably and consistently. After normalizing F0 and computing the average pitch for all acoustic data per speaker, it was found that it is the value of F0 peaks and valleys in the target syllables that makes a fundamental distinction between simple past and present perfect. Results of statistical tests confirmed this finding, suggesting that the local F0 value is a reliable and consistent parameter that distinguishes simple past from present perfect in both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes.

State verbs, with the characteristic of non-dynamicity, denote no action and usually describe internal feelings, possession and place. They lack internal structure, stages and end point. The present study, within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), investigates the interaction of state verbs and different grammatical aspects in Persian to see whether the interaction of subdivisions of state verbs with the grammatical aspects is the same. The subdivisions of state verbs in the current paper include Existence, Cognition, Emotion, Possession and Perception verbs. Data are gathered from the Internet, books, newspapers and daily conversations. Considering data indicates that the behavior of these subdivisions with different grammatical aspects is not the same. In perfect aspect all these verbs can be used without limitation. Although in most cases the progressive form of state verbs is regarded impossible, in cases such as “ waxing or waning situation, agentivity and temporary state” , some of them can be used in progressive form. State verbs in perfective aspect, show functions such as experiential, universal, evidentiality and hot news. Positive form of the sentence and temporal adverbs denoting to some future time, pave the way for some state verbs to be used in prospective aspect.

Anderson (2013) believes that Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998, 2002) is potentially capable of analyzing proverbs by incorporation of two blending processes to account for the cultural, cognitive and contextual aspects of their meaning. This article aims at applying Anderson’ s (2013) Cognitive Proverb Model on six figurative proverbs of Delvari Dialect in an attempt to shed light on cognitive processes involved in their meaning construction. These proverbs were selected by a self-selection process. The rationale behind this process was to have a more coherent discussion and to focus only on one type of proverbs. The findings show that the wisdom meaning is the product of conceptual blending of animal and human affairs in two input spaces organized by a general space. The general space contains the commonalities between the input spaces. All these spaces are projected onto the blended space and create an integrated meaning package called base meaning or the “ wisdom” . Base meaning integrates with the referential meaning and constructs situational meaning. Proverb use is actually an action like praise, advice, etc. This research shows that ecological and cultural features are in input space 1, without which construction of base meaning, situational and performance meanings looks impossible. HUMAN AS ANIMAL metaphor instigates mapping of input space 1 properties onto input space 2. This model clearly shows the role of cognition, culture and situation in the construction of proverb meaning and confirms the applicability of a cognitive model in explaining semantic and pragmatic complexities of language.

The Persian question word [ku] which means “ Where is/ are… ? ” is used for both third person singular and plural nouns. In the standard spoken Persian, upon the addition of the [ ] formative it changes to [ku ] and upon the multiple addition of this formative it changes to [ku e ], each with different applications. With regard to other persons, in addition to the [ ] formative, enclitic verbs of “ budan” (to be) attach to [ku] and create [ku am] “ Where am I? ” , [ku i] “ Where are you[singular]? ” , [ku im] “ Where are we? ” , [ku in] “ Where are you[plural]? ” , and [ku an] “ Where are they? ” . This research aimed at identifying the [ ] formative and then explaining the phonological processes which create different pronunciations of question word “ ku? ” derivatives within the framework of optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004). In so doing, it presents the constraints whose interactions cause these phonological processes. The constraint rankings are completed step by step until it comes up with a single inclusive ranking capable of explaining all different pronunciations of question word “ ku? ” derivatives.

This study investigates the functional complexity of the discourse marker “ â xe” (‘ because’ /‘ but’ ) in Persian to express causal relations from the perspective of (inter) subjectification. To this end, we have adopted a descriptive-analytic approach to conduct the research. The data of our investigation come from certain synchronic corpora of every day conversations found in the Persian weblogs, talk shows & interviews, as well as notes taken from every day talks. The findings indicate that “ â xe” has undergone grammaticalization at both sentence and discourse levels, and it has reached the advanced stages of (inter) subjectification. In fact, in line with Sweetser (1990) and Degand and Fagard’ s (2012) models, “ â xe” expresses both objective and subjective causal relations. In fact, Persian speakers make use of this expression to express epistemic, speech act, and textual justification. These functions are indicative of increased dependency of “ â xe” on discourse situation, showing the increased grammaticalization and (inter) subjectification it requires to materialize such discourse functions.

Of the influential features in determining the type of lexical aspect are dynamicity, durativity, telicity, homogeneity and atomicity of the verb. This qualitative and descriptive-analytical research is based on the data obtained by participatory observation and unstructured and semi-structured interviews with Laki speakers in Darehshahr (Ilam). Based on aspectual approaches of Rostein (2004), Filip (2004: 2012), and Croft (2012), the present study attempts to examine the impacts of these semantic features in determining aspect types in the given dialect. It focuses on those semantic features contributing into determining the lexical aspect types in Laki. It shows that in Laki dialect of Darehshahr, like many Indo-European languages, the mentioned features are influential in determining the lexical aspect type and based on them the situation aspect can be determined. It also shows that in order to explain the factors influencing the situational aspect type, not only the verb and its arguments, but in some cases the semantic and even the pragmatic context should be considered.

Kalkal or kal andā khtan (lit. ‘ throwing a kal’ ) is a ubiquitous culturally shared practice in the Iranian culture that has not yet caught the attention of linguists. In this research, conducted within the discipline of interpersonal pragmatics, and based on the analysis of 20 instances of kalkal in the reality TV talk show Dorehami, it has been shown that kalkal displays the features of relational interactional rituals as defined by Ká dá r (2013, 2017). Entertaining Kalkal is shown to be a recurrent performance with a schematic structure recognizable to cultural insiders with certain formal and functional features; it symbolically embodies the moral order of the situated interaction as well as the moral order of the larger institution and the Iranian culture that pre-allocate roles and resources to its participants; it is liminal in the sense that the participants go beyond the border between what is perceived to be ordinary and the extraordinary; finally, it arouses the emotions of its participants and audiences.

One of the most important aspects of word-formation is considered as productivity which is a continuum concept in morphology (Bauer, 1996, and Baayen, 2009). Booij (2007) says that the frequent process in word formation is derivation. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, only a partial number of Persian derivational affixes have been investigated in previous studies so far. In this regard, the following corpus-based study is done to discuss more affixes of Persian language and to reach more comprehensive results. The current study tries to answer the following two questions: 1. What are the most and the least frequent affixes in Persian language? 2. Is there any relation between productivity and word meaning prediction? To fulfill the aims of the research, 166 affixes, consisting of 28 prefixes, 72 postfixes and 66 affixoids were collected by a python code which searches through the Monitor corpus. In this study, Baayen measurement (P*) was used to measure the productivity. Results of the study showed that the theory of Bauer (2004) about productivity and predictability of words is true in most cases but with few exceptions.

Based on source-filter theory, the present research attempts to investigate between-and within-speaker variability in simple vowels of Persian using experimental phonetics tools. This research aims to discover which of the simple vowels of Persian represent more speaker-specific information and which acoustic parameters can better distinguish Persian speakers. To test between-and within-speaker variability, two types of acoustic parameters, one related to the larynx, i. e. fundamental frequency, and the other related to the vocal tract, i. e. formant frequencies, were selected. Fundamental frequency as well as formant values were extracted from the steady state point of the vowels uttered by twelve Persian-speaking male speakers. Speech data were recorded non-contemporaneously in laboratory environment on two different occasions separated by one to two weeks, thereby allowing for analyzing occasion-to occasion withinspeaker variability. Speech tokens were acoustically measured with PRAAT version 5. 2. 34 and statistical analyses were carried out with SPSS version 21 and R version 3. 3. 3. Results of the study indicated that the low front vowel /a/ and the third formant frequency convey more speaker-specific information compared to the other vowels and formant frequencies. In addition, discriminatory power of fundamental frequency was reported to be stronger than formant frequencies. The results also revealed that fundamental frequency is correlated with the first formant frequency which is subsequently indicative of interdependence between the source and filter sections.