ZABANSHENAKHT (LANGUAGE STUDIES)
Year:2015 | Volume:6 | Issue:1|Papers Count:6

Much of poetry of Iran in middle period has been composed by Manicheans in middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian languages. These poems are praise and liturgical or mystic hymns that narrate the story of strangeness of light in the prison of Matter. In the latter, because of more connection with human, the emotion and imagination element are clearer, and the poetic art can be better observed in them. The figures of speech, both figures of word and figures of thought have been greatly used in these poems. Apart from existing the figures that are expected in every poem and are in the nature of poetry, the specimens can be seen that they are correspond even with the definitions of rhetorical books in Islamic period. The figures of speech in Manichaean poems can be divided in two groups; the sound music (figures of word), and spiritual music (figures of thought). It has been used in the figures of word field, the repetition (words, sentences and phonemes); and in the figures of thought field, the figures such as antithesis, amphiboly and apostrophe. It has been attempted in this article to show the quality of use of figures of speech in Manichaean poems surviving in Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian languages, along with citing the specimens.

Cognitive strategies, first introduced in Cognitive Semantics, are cognitive devices like conceptual metonymies, conceptual metaphors, image metaphors and schemas which structure abstract concepts in our minds and facilitate our understanding. This paper aims to study examples of these strategies in the language of Sahife Sajjadie. For this purpose, I have analyzed cases of structural, orientational, and ontological metaphors, as well as conceptual metonymies, image metaphors and image schemas in this religious text to find out two things. What is the role of these strategies in conceptualization and understanding of abstract concepts, and to find whether the analyzed language is a literary language or not. Analysis of the selected metaphorical data shows that religious abstract concepts are represented both literally and non-literally. Non-literal representations of concepts are structured by using cognitive strategies of metaphor, metonymy, image schemas and metaphors. In addition, language of Do’a in this book has used the same metaphors as ordinary conventional language, though it has used extending, elaboration, combining of metaphors, as well as personification and metaphorical images which assimilate it to a literary work.

The Impersonal verb is a verb which is always inflected in the third singular and its logical subject does not appear in the nominative case. These verbs often express physical or mental/cognitive experiences which the logical subject experiences without having any control on them. Thus the subject in these structures is called "experiencer". Another element which has a role in impersonal sentences is the source of the events, activities and experiences. It's presence in the sentence depends on the meaning of the verb. In Sogdian beside some of the modal verbs which are in accordance with the definition of impersonal verbs, there are two other verbs which are impersonal too. These are rēž- and nam-. As will be shown rēž- is appeared as an impersonal verb approximately in all the remaining evidences, but nam- has impersonal use just in one of it's evidences. In this article I will study and analyze these two verbs.

Urartians left pieces of evidence of their domination in North West of Iran. They were extraordinary metalworkers and sometimes wrote the name of the Urartian king on their objects. They sometimes decorated or even inscribed horse equipment with short inscriptions. Some discs from horse harnesses, with or without inscriptions, are found from Urartian kingdom. A similar object exists in Eastern Azerbaijan Museum which is a bronze disc from the horse harness with the inscription of Argishti I. This disc is dedicated to the museum by a rural from Varzaghan. Although the name of the king’s father is not written but epigraphically it is from Argishti I.

This paper aims to investigate markedness in nominal and pronominal morphology of modern north-western Iranian languages from a diachronic perspective based on Hawkinʼs (2004) minimized forms principle. Based on this principle marked forms ocuupy the lowest and unmarked forms the highest position in performance-based hierarchies. Forms are ranked based on their frecuency in performance-based hierarchies. The reason that there exist these different frecuensies can be attributed to communicative reasons, complixity and different occurances of linguistic units in outside world. In this paper, we have shown that markedness changes in number and gender hierarchies are in line with minimized forms principle and its predictions in the investigated languages, but there are some exceptions in case hierarchy, which is not in line minimized forms predictions.

Prepositional phrases have a significant place in different syntactic theories. In Role and Reference Grammar these constituents are categorized into three classes namely Adjuncts, Argument markers and Argument-adjuncts. Adjuncts PPs offer semantic information for the sentence in which they occur. They are adverbial elements modifying the event or situation described by the predicate. Argument marking PPs mark an argument of the predicate. In this class the preposition itself does not contribute semantic information. Argument- adjunct PPs contain predicative adpositions that add to the meaning of the sentence. Also, they introduce one of the participants in the event. This paper examines different PPs in Persian based on the classification of RRG. It will be demonstrated that PPs in Persian do not always function as adjuncts, but they play as markers of arguments in ditransitive clauses or even as direct objects with some predicates. To conclude we will show that RRG accounts for prepositional phrases in Persian.