LANGUAGE RELATED RESEARCH (COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE RESEARCH)
Year:2021 | Volume:12 | Issue:2 (62)|Papers Count:22

Iran is home to a treasury of languages representing diverse language families: Iranic, Turkic, Semitic, Indic, Dravidian, Armenian, and Kartvelian, as well as sign languages. Despite valuable research carried out by Iranian and western scholars, there is still no comprehensive publication depicting the geographic distribution and linguistic status of language varieties in Iran. In order to work toward this goal, the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) (www. iranatlas. net) was officially launched in 2015 as an international, online research programme. The present study opens with a historical overview of the research context and underlines the ongoing necessity of constructing such an atlas for the languages of Iran. The article then outlines the design of the Atlas, the methodology necessary to guide and organize the research project, and the results which are being generated. Specifically, we look at the Atlas bibliography, classification of Iran’ s languages, the design of a set of linguistic data questionnaires, and findings from fieldwork. Selected initial research results from fieldwork in Chahar Mahal va Bakhtiari and Hormozgan Provinces, where the research process is most advanced, are provided in the form of linguistic data maps.

The focus of this research is on lingual instruments which can be used for tracing a single identity through the text. 80 girls and women attended in this study and narrated the Pear Story. Pear Story is a universal nonverbal film which is designed by Chafe in 1980. The data were stored and were analyzed by statistical tests. For qualitative analysis the concept of Roach’ s basic level was used. Both groups were equal in using the hyponym words but they were different in using the opposite side. They also were different in tracing the identity of words. It means that they have referent to a word after its first mentioning, although equal referring to a word in all text had high frequency in both groups. It seems that children became similar in their vocabulary to adults; but based these results we have to consider the differences in every content.

The main purpose of the present study was investigating concrete, temporal and abstract meanings of prepositions "in" for Persian speakers and "dar" for non-Persian speakers. This study attempted to examine the impact of traditional approach compared to cognitive approach in learning different concepts of the prepositions. For this purpose, first the spatial and prototype meanings of preposition "in" were studied from Oxford Advanced Learner Dictionary (2016) and then the spatial and prototype meanings of preposition "dar" were extracted according to Farhang Sokkan (Anvari, 2002), respectively. Finally, sentences and phrases including these prepositions were chosen according to Vision 1 (2016) and Farsi Biamoozim (2009) in the intermediate level. Data collection, took place among 30 students of Noor high school and 30 non-Persian learners at Jame-e-Almostafa of Mashhad. Sample groups were selected randomly, then they were divided into control and experimental groups. Data analysis in Independent T-Test (comparison of pre-tests in control and experimental groups) displayed there isn’ t significantly improvement between prior knowledge of learners before teaching (control pre-tests 12. 57, experimental pre-tests 12. 43), whereas comparison of post-tests showed there is significantly more improvement between in experimental groups compared to control groups (control post-tests 12. 33, experimental post-tests 25. 73). The results indicated that compared to traditional approach, applying cognitive method had significantly improvement in teaching different concepts of the prepositions. The results of this paper suggests effective strategies in teaching prepositions for language teachers.

One element of the creation of meaning in fiction is the element of place. In order for the author to be able to use the element of place as an important tool to construct and reinforce the intended meaning, he reduces the reference and objective meaning of place. Abstract places can be important in some literary genres due to their imaginative and transcendental nature. The present research seeks to examine the types of places depicted in the Malakout novel by Bahram Sadeghi in a descriptive-analytical way and through a semiotic approach analysis. Then, while classifying these places, we will try to answer this question that how much the place element has served to induce the author's intended meanings. The results of this research showed that Bahram Sadeghi in his novel has recreated the myth of creation in a creative way and implicitly represents the desperate atmosphere of society in the post-coup period of 28 August 1332 in the mentioned myth. To achieve this goal, he paid special attention to the element of place and in this way and by using scary and imaginary spaces and by using all kinds of narrative, phenomenal, spiral and transcendental places, he has portrayed the failure, despair and hopelessness of the society.

This paper studies the errors produced by Azari-Turkish/Persian bilinguals using the inflectional morphemes of Persian verb, on the basis of 4-M model. The data were collected from 50 primary bilingual students’ writings in Meshkinshahr villages. The inflectional morphemes of Persian verb were classified in two types: early system morphemes (negative, causative, imperative and passive morphemes) and late outside system morphemes (person/number, tense, aspect, subjunctive morphemes) according to 4-M model. The data Analysis indicates the late outside system morphemes of Persian verb are acquired harder and later than its early system morphemes by bilingual students. It seems there is a relation between different morpheme nature and their acquisition order. Late outside system morphemes are activated later in the production process as required by the grammatical frame of the target language. While early system morphemes are indirectly elected at the same time that content morphemes are directly elected by the speaker’ s intentions. The results match Wei (2000) explanation of different morpheme acquisition order based on 4-M model.

“ Tamiz” is a term getting used in Arabic and Persian syntax. The term in old Persian grammars was equivalent with its meaning in Arabic, but over time was getting used for object complement, mean a grammatical function which make verbs like “ danestan” (to know), “ namidan” (to name), “ pendashtan” (to assume) etc. clear objectively. Today “ tamiz” means the same grammatically in Persian. This paper means two, first to determine when the word, tamiz formed and by who? And what are equivalents of that? Second to describe tamiz and its related verb and object. In order to attain the first, the author investigated Persian grammars (in a historical order), and to attain the second the author used a corpus-based investigation. Some of the results are as such: Tamiz often appears in the format of noun phrase and in second place in the format of adjective phrase and prepositional phrase. It rarely appears in the format of pronoun and clause. Almost all, tamizs have direct object and a few have prepositional object. Object is a necessary component of a sentence; so these verbs in passive form lose their tamiz except verbs like “ yad shodan” (be reminded), “ gofte shodan” (be said) and “ etlagh shodan” (be predicated) which keep their object in passive form too.

The four elements have a key position between ancient myths. Also they have gained the attention of many philosophers, physicians, and mysticians. These elements have also represented in literature, and Gaston Bachelard categorizes human material imaginations based on the elements of water, fire, soil, and wind. According to Bachelard, to recognize the original poets one should consider their closeness from these elements and their distance from these elements. He beleives that the artistic works get their dynamics from the dept of relation with four elements which widely represented in an artistic form in Surah Al-Qasas. The semiotic square depicts the dynamic verbal process and relies on the speech relation. The aim of the present research is to find the effect of four elements on semiotic transformation to discover their effects on the hidden and abstract layers of the text. In this way the authors have attempted to study the function of these natural elements within the story of Moses and Pharaoh by adopting a descriptive-analytical research methodology. The results showed that the four elements have considerable similarity to the target community of Moses Prophecy (Egyptian society). Water is the beginner of sloving humanity. Fire is a sign of change and rebirth. The highest frequency belongs to the element of soil. Also the four elements of the communication axis figure out contradiction opposition in the semiotic axis of mission and guidance.

Many studies have been conducted to investigate the effect of gender on language. Some have considered elements of feminine and masculine styles in this regard, while others have considered language to be non-gendered. The discussion of feminine writing style that emerged from the views of those like Lakoff is based on feminist and postmodern ideas. In this article, while reviewing the basics of gender linguistics and a brief outline of the components of Lakoff on feminine writing style, we do a comparative study on the researches done in Iran in this field on translated and compiled literary works. Finally we study 12 articles, analyzing the general state of these studies and their results. In general, the shortcomings of researches, (translation and compilation), in Iran include the sheer field of research results, the lack or weakness of analyzes based on social, psychological, and cultural theories, and their non-generalizability. Regarding researches on the impact of gender on translation, it should be noted that in addition, the number of studies is not high and some points are ignored or the methodology is inadequate.

Classic literary texts are of special cultural importance. Although Persian speakers still can read and understand these old texts after hundreds of years, for the younger generation and recent Persian learner is hardly possible due to lexical and slightly syntactic changes. Therefore, many of these texts have been simplified for children and even adults. This research tries to compare some stories of Kelile and Demne with their simplified versions to examine the changes of the literary text through the process of simplification, and at the same time, to extract patterns of simplification. The reason for picking up Kelile and Demne is that on the one hand, it is one of the technical and ornate literary texts in Persian, and on the other hand, it is recurrently simplified. In this research, changes have been classified in four levels of morphology, syntax, lexicon and text. As result, three different approaches to the mechanism of simplification of old literary texts of Persian were observed: 1) The tendency to keep both the content and the form of the original text 2) The tendency to keep the content unchanged, but manipulate the form of the original text 3) The tendency to manipulate both the content and the form of the original text Thus, the form has been always under change. The maipulations can be grouped into four levels of lexical, morphological, syntactic and textual changes.

The present study attempts to carry out a contrastive analysis-within the framework of anthropological linguistics-on idioms formed in relation with common concepts in Spanish and Persian, based on how natives speakers of these languages deal with the objects around them. In this approach, the possible similarities and differences between linguistic components are analyzed according to the native speakers' cultural and sociological issues. This approach, more than anything else, is indebted to the theory of linguistic relativity, a theory based on the influence of language on thought and, in particular, on the individual's attitudes towards objects, and how his/her language treats objects around him/her. The main question of the present research is what impacts do objects and artifacts have on the creation of possible similarities and differences in idiom formulation, in native Spanish and Persian speakers' culture. Since idioms are an inseparable part of folklore and popular knowledge, and perhaps the most culture-bound part of language, the authors try to assess the effects of cultural interaction with objects around Spanish and Persian native speakers on their idiom formulation referring to common concepts, through the contrastive analysis of object-containing idioms in Spanish and Persian, in order to present a model for an inter-linguistic analysis within an anthropolinguistic framework. The main objective of this research is the comparison of the idioms containing objects in Spanish and Persian in order to show how the attitude of the speakers of those languages towards objects, is reflected in the form and content of idioms under the influence of the context and cultural characteristics. Based on the analysis carried out in this study, in Spanish and Persian, idiomatization referring to a common concept according to the special interaction of these native speakers with the objects around them, tends more towards cultural differences than similarities, and the focus of idiomatization similarities has been based on objects and artifacts that are used in the household.

One of the hotly debated topics within the field of pragmatics is the evaluation of speech acts. However, few studies have attempted to compare the inclusion of speech acts in international published books and internal publishing books in the Iranian context. Therefore, the present study aimed at investigating two important speech acts of compliment responses and thanking in pre-intermediate Iran Language Institute (ILI) and Touchstone 3 books. 12 dialogues of Touchstone 3 and 27 dialogues of ILI preintermediate textbooks were analyzed and the number of the instances and the mean of each speech act was tallied. The results indicated that there was statistically significant difference between the frequencies of the thanking expressions in ILI pre-intermediate textbooks and Touchstone 3, while no statistically significant difference was found between the frequencies of the compliment responses in ILI pre-intermediate textbooks and Touchstone 3. The findings also revealed that Touchstone 3 enjoyed a higher mean in the compliment responses than ILI pre-intermediate textbooks, whereas the mean of thanking in ILI pre-intermediate textbooks was higher than that of Touchstone 3. The findings have important implications for EFL teachers, material developers, and policy makers to be aware of pragmatics issues in textbooks.

Analysis of Oral Discourse Based on Hyme's Speaking Model that unvestigates the interwoven relation between culture and language has long been discussed by anthropologists, pragmatists and sociolinguists. One of the new areas of research on this type of relation is the study of cultural representation of a language or cultuling. This research aimed at investigating respect cultuling with regard to the status of etiquette in the Iranians Islamic-Iranian culture. The objectives of the study were to identify the realizations of the current culture of the Persian-speakers in respect cultuling and to probe what aspects of etiquette were mirrored in it. Accordingly, 140 excerpts pertaining to etiquette were selected from a pool of 320 oral discourse excerpts recorded in different situations. They were ShadGan, Tabriz, Rasht, Herand, Dehloran, Kermanshah, Khoram Abad, Sarepol Zahab, Brojen, Aran Bidgol, Najaf Abad, Eizeh and Miandasht. They had various educational backgrounds (illiterate to highly educated) and also various occupations as: housewife, school student, university student, teacher, engineer, clerk, physician, nurse, retired, and selfemployed. Having been recorded, the excerpts were then transcribed into forms using conversational transcription conventions highlighting pauses, interruptions, etc. Hymes' (1967) SPEAKING model was used to study respect cultuling. Data analysis based on this model showed that the frequency of use of this cultuling in public situations is higher than private ones and is more common among unequal participants (formal and informal) than people with equal social status. Regarding the purpose of pragmatics, expressing interest and devotion (love and affection), praisecollected from the individuals (132 females and 169 males) whose ages ranged from 15 to 61. They came from different cities in Iran as Arak, Isfahan, Shahre Kord, Tehran, Ghom, Saveh, Gplpaiegan, , reverence, invitation, modesty and flattery had the highest frequency in this cultuling. Deeper study showed that respect cultuling has to be distinguished from power cultuling. In addition, it overlaps power cultuling and ambiguity cultuling, despite it's an independent concept. In addition, it is influenced by collectivism metacultuling and class society metacultuling. The results also indicated that the respect cultuling, as being reflected in the data, was justifiable in terms of power and interdependence as two axes of etiquette, and its intensity and variety were simultaneously determined by these two factors.

The antiquity of stylistic studies in Iran is seriously owed as an independent field due to the persistent and research efforts of the Malek osh-Shochr(chr('39')39chr('39'))ara Bahar. By studying the research literature, we find that Baharchr(chr('39')39chr('39'))s Stylistics has not been properly studied and his theoretical stylistic approach has not been discovered and extracted yet. Therefore, the aim of the authors was to acquire the theory or theoretical approach of Bahar, and discover and recognize the variables and components of the stylistic theory of him, categorization, hypothesized, and presenting a model based on it by the method and technique of qualitative-deep content analysis. According to the purpose, the works of the Malek osh-Shochr(chr('39')39chr('39'))ara Bahar in the field of stylistics were studied based on purposeful sampling and theoretical saturation criteria. From the content of these works by deleting, adding, modifying, and summarizing, 409 basic codes were obtained. Finally, during the three coding steps, a model of code was extracted that represents the two blocks "texture and context", and "stylistics"; It also shows the main hypothesis of how “ texture and context" affect "style". The findings of this study showed that according to Baharchr(chr('39')39chr('39'))s view, "texture and context" has a significant impact on "style" and "stylistics", that this connection and influence has been neglected. Finally, the variables and concepts of his approach, as well as the relationships of these variables with each other are discovered and eventually lead to modeling, and reinforcing the assumption that he was a connoisseur in this field.

Halliday`s Systemic Functional Grammar analyzes text in context. Based on this theory, in the study of texts, , we are faced with three metafunctions: Ideational metafunction, Interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction, that Ideational metafunction divided into experiential and logical ones. In experiential metafunctions the six processes, participants, and circumstances are analyzed. According to some experts, Garshasbnameh is the best heroic poem after Shahnameh among heroic texts. For this reason, in this study, the Tahmidiyehs of Shahnameh and Garshasbnameh have been selected for comparison based on Ideational metafunction of the Halliday`s Systemic Functional Grammar to determine how similar the Tahmidiyehs of these two works are linguistically and if we assume that Asadi has tried to write a work like Ferdowsi’ s Shahnameh, how much has he achieved his goal? After the study, it was found that in both Shahnameh and Garshasbnameh, the material process has the highest percentage. According to the genre of these two works, which is epic, this result and attention to the material process is predictable. Since the nature of Tahmidiyeh is to praise God, God is the main participant in most of these processes and the percentages are almost equal. It can be acknowledged, with a little forgiveness, Asadi has been able to follow in the footsteps of Ferdowsi in composing the Tahmidiyeh of Garshasbnameh, and the Tahmidiyeh of Garshasbnameh is equal to the Tahmidiyeh of Shahnameh from the view point of Ideational metafunction.

Given the significant role of conceptual metaphors in understanding abstract concepts in the children’ s development, the present study was conducted for designing and standardization a test of embodied conceptual metaphors in the Persian language. The test administrations will allow us to investigate the process of understanding abstract concepts in normal five-to-seven-year-old children. In the present study, 171 embodied conceptual metaphors were extracted from the Persian dictionaries. The metaphors were related to four sensory-motor organs i. e. ears, eyes, hands, and legs. The researchers attempted to investigate the understanding of abstract concepts by using conceptual metaphors in 30 five-to-seven-year-old children having a normal development. 39 metaphors having more than 30% of correct answers were selected. In the next phase, a test was designed that was composed of two parts (audio and visual) based on these 39 metaphors; the understanding of abstract concepts were investigated in 200 five-to-seven Persian speakers. Based on the mean score acquired from both age groups, given the development process of abstract concepts, it was indicated that in comparison to five-to-six-year-old children, six-to-sevenyear-old children showed a better performance for understanding abstract concepts; the difference was significant. Moreover, the findings of the present study indicated that in comparison to the visual test, children had a better performance in responding to the audio test. Moreover, the boys and girls were not significantly different regarding understanding abstract concepts. The findings of the present study can be applied in rehabilitating and treating the disorders related to the understanding of abstract concepts.

Ellipsis constructions are formal patterns in which certain syntactic structure that is expressed to convey the intended content is omitted. The aim of this paper is to provide the basis for a cognitive construction grammar description of coordination ellipsis and gapping in Persian language. Therefore, the present research is based on the descriptive-analytical method, and since ellipsis is widely used in both written and spoken Persian, our corpus will include both types and it adopts cognitive and construction-based approach. The results show that Persian data can be analyzed, using the concept of access and activation introduced by Langacker (2012). Nonconstituent coordination is analyzed in the context of other sorts of clausal reduction, including the accentual reduction of unfocused elements as well as ellipsis, where overlapping content is left unexpressed. A pivotal desctiptive notion is the differential i. e. the content appearing in one clausal window that does not appear in the prior window. The results, also, show that the placement of the differential, when it intrrupts the baseline clause, is important. So, It can easily say that the differential directly follows the anti-differential.

The main question of this inquiry is the psycholinguistic reality of evidentiality hierarchy arranged from direct(witnessed) to indirect (reported, inferred, argued, etc). This study investigates processing of sentences containing evidentials by the cross-modal lexical decision method run by DMDX software. The theoretical framework is mainly based on episodic processing in which mental representations of linguistic items are not as abstract as it seems, but it is subject to the sensory input by which the representation is formed. The independent variable is evidential type and the dependent one is the subjects' reaction times to the visual stimuli. Subjects were 30 university students aging 20 to 22 classified into two groups of male and female. As for the results, they show that in Persian along evidentiality hierarchy, sentences containing direct witnessed evidentials are processed later and longer than the second-hand inferred evidential, besides the fact that there is a significant difference between sensory and non-sensory/ second hand evidentials. The explanation is that processing a direct evidential needs much more cortical activation areas like memory and attention leading to much more cognitive load than inference which is limited just to frontal lobe. Findings approve the psychological reality of this theoretical hierarchy in Persian classifying them into direct/sensory and indirect/non-sensory evidentials. The aim is to examine the psychological reality of evidentiality hierarchy experimentally.

Locus of Control (LOC) is a psychological construct that deals with people's perception of the extent to which they are in control of what happens to them and it has been proved to play a crucial role in one’ s success or failure in various aspects of life. Although LOC is by no means a stable construct, the current body of research had a linear one-shot cause-effect perspective towards it. Hence, framed within a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST), this case study tries to revisit Iranian university students' LOC through the application of Dynamic Ensemble (DE). To this end, five students from Bojnord university who were attending their General English (GE) course participated in this study. The data collection was done through semi-structured interviews, task-motometers, students' journals, and participant classroom observations during seven classroom sessions. The collected data were qualitatively content analyzed by the application of MaxQDA software. Having analyzed the collected data, several macro-systemic, micro-systemic, and contextual factors were identified as being influential on the students' internality or externality of LOC. Considering the fact that many scholars believe internal LOC is the healthier attribute, this study focuses on the factors which can help teachers lead their students to become internalizers.

Russian and Persian languages, regardless of the linguistic worlds, are special languages in terms of phonetic system, grammar, vocabulary, etc. and have differences with each other Since the learners have already internalized the linguistic knowledge of the first language in their minds, they are very likely to commit errors in the process of learning a second language. This phenomenon, which is mostly natural and unavoidable, is referred to as interference. The present study aims to explore the effects of interference on the errors by providing evidence from the usual errors committed by the Persian-speaking learners of Russian in the elementary level. First, the authors attempt to detect and classify the speaking errors of the learners in terms of the type of interference, and then the authors provide an analysis of them. Phonetic tests are used to collect the data. The participants of the study were 51 elementary level students in Isfahan, Guilan and Gonbad universities. The analysis of the data suggests that the target language (Russian), as one of the influential factors contributing to interference, has a drastic impact on the errors committed by the Persian-speaking learners of Russian.

Ideology can increase the rivalry or socio-political clashes between political powers within a society. People, political parties and organizations set their policies following a dominant ideology. News agencies are among the highly influential organizations which can affect ideological and political thinking. News agencies, by means of translation, try to direct people’ s way of thinking toward a special direction. Therefore, the role of translation in highlighting political rivalry among parties is undeniable. Meanwhile, translators’ word choice can reflect the differences between the Reformists and the Conservatives. The aim of the current study is to examine the representation of ideological foregrounding in journalistic translators’ word choice. The corpus includes 200 journalistic sentences collected from foreign news websites. Then collected data were analyzed based on Fairclough’ s three-dimensional model. The results showed that the conflicts between two main parties are reflected in translators’ word choice. The phenomenon can potentially increase clashes and tensions in a society and challenge social stability.

The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of child gender, fathers and mother’ s education and job, the number of siblings and parenting styles on language development components (semantics, syntax and word articulation). The population were normal preschool children and their parents in Karaj, Iran. Participants were 98 children and their parents which selected by convenient method. Test of language development (3 edition) administered on children and parents asked to response to demographic questionnaire and Parenting authority questionnaire. Results showed that girls compared with boys had better performance in syntactical understanding, grammatical completion and relational vocabulary. There were not significant differences between families with different number of siblings. Father’ s job did not influence language performance of children, whereas mother’ s job had a positive influence on the components of language development. Father and mother’ s educational level had a positive effect on the syntactical understanding, grammatical completion and relational vocabulary. Furthermore, authoritative and permissive parenting style could positively predict sematic and syntax development, whereas authoritarian parenting style could negatively predict semantic and syntax development. It could argue that parental socioeconomic status (especially parent’ s educational level and mother employment) and parenting styles could influence language acquisition in semantic and syntax domains. Moreover, girls outperformed boys in semantic and syntax in preschool period.