Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Year:2020 | Volume:7 | Issue:4 |Papers Count:6

Our purpose in this article is to investigate the formal mechanisms of causative constructions of Modern Persian language based on Dixon (2012) typology. In this diachronic study, a corpus of more than 330000 words and 4151 causative constructions extracted from 30 books of 4th to 7th and 13th and 14th AH centuries. The analysis of Persian causative constructions shows that this language uses three known lexical, morphological, and syntactic mechanisms in order to express the causative meaning so that lexical mechanism has the highest occurrence frequency among them. The data shows that syntactic causative application is restricted to the recent centuries so that no construction of this type has been found in early centuries. Our findings also prove that 4th century has the most frequency of causatives and we can see a decreasing rate of these constructions so that 13th century has the lowest position and again we observe an increasing rate in the current century. The results also indicate that morphological causatives have had a decreasing frequency so that some verbs like "faramushandan", "shanavandan", "agahandan" and… have been omitted from speakers’ vocabulary. Another result is that although existence of a causative verb is necessary for a construction to be regarded as a causative, it is not enough.

Code switching, as an outcome of linguistic contact, can be seen in most of the multilingual societies. The present field study was conducted in Urmia, a multilingual city of Iran. The purpose of the study was to compare the frequency and direction of code switching among female elementary and high-school students representing high, middle, and low social classes. Applying a non-participant observation method, the required data was extracted from the casual conversations of the students through voice recording. The extracted data was then, exposed to statistical analysis using SPSS software. According to the findings, there was a statistically significant relationship between the direction of code switching and social class of the participants, i. e. the dominant code switching direction among high-class was Fasri-Turkish, while students in the low and middle classes mostly switched in the reverse direction. Furthermore, the results showed no significant relationship between sex and frequency of code switching. Also, no significant relationship was observed between sex and direction of code switching neither.

Prototype theory inspired by cognitive framework has offered a new definition of categories and their members. According to the prototype theory “ prototypes” are the best examples of each category and are more central than the other members, while less prototypical and peripheral members show less features of the category. Givon, a functional linguist, has used prototype theory to define linguistic categories. 77 verbs have been classified into prototype, less prototype and peripheral verbs based on Givon’ s semantic criteria. The verbs have been driven from “ Persian core vocabulary based on Iranian children” and examples offered by Givon (2001: 52). Moreover, the authors of the present study have attempted to draw spatial images of verbs by means of giving numerical values to each criterion. This method gives a holistic picture of each verb based on semantic criteria. Thus, different prototypical verbs can be compared with each other in a more concrete way. Finally, various spatial drawings of verb “ give” as a prototype verb in different contexts have been presented. The comparisons of spatial drawings of “ give” showed that a verb cannot be called absolutely prototype, because the status of a verb in each criteria is determined by its participants. The consequence is that each verb is a category by itself with infinite members. The members are the contexts in which a verb appears and “ participants” are the ones which in each criterion close a verb to prototype or not.

The Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998) is a theory that explains the way in which language is produced by the learner. It has extensions one of which is the Topic Hypothesis. The hypothesis predicts the manner and procedure of topicalization in different stages of language learning and posits three stages for it. According to the Topic Hypothesis, the learner does not differentiate between the grammatical function TOPIC and SUBJECT. At a later stage, adjuncts appear in sentence-initial position. Finally, the TOPIC function is assigned to a non-subject core argument. The aim of this study is to direct attentions to how significant it is to be conscious of the relatively free word order in Persian sentences. The problem of the study is to survey topicalization in different levels of Persian learning according to the Topic Hypothesis. To this end, 48 audio-files obtained from the online administration of the speaking placement test of two Persian Language and Literature Refresher Courses were first put into different levels. Then, 482 sentences involving subject and complete argument structure were extracted for analysis. Analyzing the final data indicated that the Topic Hypothesis was not fully supported against the development pattern of L2 Persian topicalization.

The present descriptive-analytic research uses the semantic model (Antonano, 1999 and 2002) and the semantic network of perception verbs (Afrashi & Asgari, 1396) to describe and analyze the polysemy of the perception verb “ see” . For this purpose, the meanings of the verb “ see” in Persian were compiled using Dehkhoda dictionary, Moein dictionary, and Persian language databases. At this stage, 4500 sentences were used from the Persian language database, classified on the basis of extended meanings. Analyzes of this paper, which take more into account the capabilities of the human senses and the way we perceive the world around us, show that 'embodiment' is the source of the metaphorical conceptualization and semantic extension of 'see'. The polysemy of “ see” is the result of the interaction of the semantic content of the verb with other elements of the sentence level. The findings of this study are in line with Antonano (1999) and Afrashi and Asgari (1396). There were also cases that Antonano (1999 and 2002) did not mention. On the other hand, the findings of this study are in line with the ideas of Antonano (2002), Evans & Wilkins (2000), and Koveceses, (2005) that have challenged Sweetser's (1990) idea of the “ universality of the semantic extension of perception verbs” .

In this research, inflectional affixes in Kurdish Bijar Garroos on the basis of Stump (2001) theory, known as “ Paradigm-Function Morphology” , have been studied. Research method is descriptive and the approach of the research is synchronic. To gather the data, we used field, library method and intuition as well. Analyzing the data showed that in spite of Stump classifying of inflectional properties, in Kurdish Bijar, some of the properties are not inflectional. In this respect, properties of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs of Kurdish language according to Stump (2001) theory are studied.