Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Year:2023 | Volume:11 | Issue:2|Papers Count:6

Persian has six vowels among which /u, /, /i, / and /, , / are long. The hiatus caused by adding the plural morpheme /-, n/ to the nouns ending with /u, / is resulved by the glide [w], while the hiatus in nouns ending with /i, / and /, , / is resulved by the glide [j]. Although the high vowels /u, / and /i, / are pronounced shorter, there is no change in the length of the low vowel /, , /. In this regard, the present research aims to figure out what occurs between the phonemic and phonetic representations. In so doing, two hypothses are being analyzed. According to the first one, a part of the high vowels /u, / and /i, / forms a corresponding glide i. e., [w] and [j] respectively, to act as an intervocalic consonant. However, in accordance with the second one, hiatus is resolved by directly inserting an intervocalic consonant that results in compensatory shortening. After arguing that the second hypothsis is correct, it is analyzed within Optimality Theory.

As one of the most important and also the most challenging processes in morphology field, inflection has been under scrutiny from different points of view. Construction Morphology (CM) as one of the subsequent approaches in morphology with a structural perspective attempts to establish a systematic relationship between form and meaning and in this regard it introduces a means to analyze miscellaneous morphological processes, including inflection. The present study depicts the inflectional forms of verb in Sanandaji dialect of Kurdish in the Construction Morphology framework based on data taken from 1000 sentences, including 100 simple Sanandaji Kurdish verbs compiled by authors. What this paper copes with is the inflectional constructions analysis of simple verb in Kurdish using the constructional schemas. As a result, it is indicated in some cases by which there is no common basis between present and past stem of the verb, second-order schemas are capable of establishing such relationship properly.

The text world theory is one of the theoretical frameworks in cognitive poetics studies which provides the context for the study of literary discourse through the analysis of conceptual structures. This theory was first presented by Paul Werth in 1999 and was mainly developed through the works of Gavins and Stockwell. The main problem of the current research is to explain some structures of this theory, i. e. world-building elements and propositions in the fluid style of the mind in three Persian stories, according to text world theory. by analyzing and comparing three stories in the mentioned format. This research tries to show how the structures of this theory work in creating space and moving between the spaces of the narrative text. For this purpose, the world-building elements including time, place, character and objects used in it, as well as functional advancing propositions and sub-worlds were analyzed. The findings of this research indicate that amount of functional advancing proposition of action-event which are actually more extensive are more noticeable. The sub worlds in the stories in the style of stream of consciousness are more of the type diectic than the attitudinal and epistemic sub worlds.

The phonetic forms of morphemes may undergo changes depending on the phonetic context they are situated in. These changes are more prominent in verbal structures. The present article investigates two processes of vowel elision and assimilation in Kalhori Kurdish subjunctive/imperative prefix. To this end, after collecting relevant data through interviewing 10 Kalhori Kurdish speakers living in Eslamabad-e Gharb, the alternating forms of this prefix were extracted, and the underlying form was obtained. The phonological changes were analyzed in Optimality Theory, with the phonological form as the input. The results from the collected data show that of the subjunctive/imperative morpheme /bə,-/, three phonetic forms of [bə,-], [b-], and [bu-] are obtained, with the last two formed by elision and assimilation processes, respectively,and for them to be formed, markedness constraints have to dominate faithfulness constraints. It was also revealed through the analyses that for explaining assimilation in Optimality Theory, the whole place of articulation must be targeted rather than the individual phonological features.

The aim of this research is to investigate the role of pictorial metaphors in expressing and conveying the message of citizenship cartoons. To achieve this goal, in the form of a case study, seven cartoons published in Persian-language websites were extracted and analyzed in the framework of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999,Lakoff, 1993) and multimodal metaphor theory (Forceville, 1996,2008,2009). The subject of all these cartoons is ‘, the environment’,and the main question of the research is what conceptual metaphors and what pictorial metaphors have been used to express the importance and necessity of environmental protection and what are the source and target domains of these metaphors? The results show that cartoons are divided into two categories in terms of their source domain. In one category, the source domain refers to negative and unpleasant concepts (such as smoke and garbage), and their underlying conceptual metaphor is ‘, pollution is death’, . In the other category, the source domain refers to positive and pleasant concepts (such as respiratory aids) and is based on the conceptual metaphor of ‘, tree is life’, . Thus, the conceptual contrast between the tree and pollution on the one hand, and between the concepts of life and death on the other, form the main basis of the cartoons message.

The present study introduces and examines the characteristics of different types of Left Dislocation constructions in Persian language. Left Dislocation (LD) is a construction in which an element instead of being in its original position of sentence is located at the beginning of the clause and a resumptive element takes its canonical place. This study, which is based on the criteria introduced by Cinqué,(1990) and Westbury (2016) to identify and determine the types of LD, shows that the Persian language has two types of such construction: Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD) and Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD). In order to prove the existence of these two types of LD in Persian language, this research studies the structural differences of these two constructions from two aspects: syntactic connectivity and distributional constraints governing them. This study shows that in Persian there are more distributional constraints on HTDL than CLLD. On the other hand, there is less syntactic connectivity between the initial element and the continuation of the clause in HTLD compared with CLLD.