Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Year:2018 | Volume:6 | Issue:22 |Papers Count:6

This paper deals with the impact of sociocultural changes on the corpus of personal names in Baneh from a socio-onomstic perspective. Corpus of personal names means the body of names selected by parents in the target society to name their children. The research method is descriptive-analytic and the universe includes the sum of selected names in the target society from 1921 to 2017. Therefore, using descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage), inferential statistics, and SPSS software, we first analyze the changes in naming practices in Baneh based on defined periods, and then we try to provide a comprehensive analysis of the whole era, i. e. the last hundred years. The description and analysis in this research is based on the classification of the names as "religious", "national", "ethnic", and "non-religious names derived from non-Iranian languages". The results of the research indicate that the percentage of religious names has been decreasing in the recent century; on the contrary, the percentage of national and ethnic names has shown a rising trend. However, the percentage of ethnic male names has dropped slowly in recent few years. Conceptual Arabic names have also had a dramatic decline, and in the past few years, especially since the early 1390s, non-Iranian (considering the language family, i. e. Turkish, Hebrew and European languages) names have been used. These changes indicate that in the target society, tendency towards detraditionalization and, as a result, individualism has increased, moreover, the change in people’ s taste in names and naming reflects changes in socio-cultural structures.

The purpose of the present research is to analyze the Persian suffix ‘-ɑ ne’ and to examine its various structural and semantic/functional aspects. The study adopts a construction-based approach and uses the framework of Construction Morphology theory which tries to explain the word formation patterns using the notions of “ construction” and “ constructional schemas” and to shows hierarchical relations among constructional schemas and subschemas in a systematic manner. The data includes 944 derivative words with the suffix ‘-ɑ ne’ which are adapted from author’ s own morphological corpus (including more than 10000 Persian compound and affixed words), Farhang-e Zā nsoo (Reverse Dictionary, Keshani 1993) and Farhang-e Pasvand dar Zabā n-e Fā rsi (The Dictionary of Persian Suffixes, Ravaghi 2009). The findings of the research show that the suffix “-ɑ ne” has a remarkable semantic diversity and can appears in 12 constructional subschemas to form new nouns, adjectives or adverbs. This polysemy is not explainable at the level of concrete words but at the level of abstract constructional schemas, and therefore is called “ constructional polysemy” .

The present study is an investigation in sociolinguistics, aimed to study linguistic differences in certainty in the speech of Kalhori Kurdish (one of the basic west-south speeches, common in west of Iran) speakers. One of the related outstanding approaches in gender linguistics, is Lakoff’ s Dominance Approach (1975, 2004), in which 9 linguistic features are introduced to entitle women’ s speech as “ powerless speech” . Lakoff believes that it occurs because of some social inequalities. According to her, the speech and writing of women and men seem to be different in using rising intonation in declarative sentences, exact color terms, empty adjectives, hyperpolite forms, weak qualifiers, fillers, indirect requests, tag questions and emphatic stress. The present study tries to show if the mentioned approach can be confirmed in Kurdish community or not. For this purpose, based on field research and using questionnaire, 8 different social groups, including thirty two women and thirty two men were interviewed in two different age and educational groups. The findings of this investigation shows that women are more likely than men to use the linguistic variables of powerless speech. Therefore, the Dominance Approach was confirmed in this study.

the present research is aimed to analyze the compensatory lengthening process in Delfan Laki dialect by the use of optimality theory and it wants to answer this question: Is there compensatory lengthening in complex words or not? the research method is descriptive-analytic one. the data has been recorded and gathered by the field method and written their phonetic according to IPA. the above-mentioned process is explained and the constraints are extracted. the results reveal that compensatory lengthening only happen in simple words and it cannot happen in complex words. the present research is aimed to analyze the compensatory lengthening process in Delfan Laki dialect by the use of optimality theory and it wants to answer this question: is there compensatory lengthening in complex words or not? the research method is descriptive-analytic. the data has been recorded and gathered by the field method and written their phonetic according to IPA. the above-mentioned process is explained and the constraints are extracted. the results reveal that compensatory lengthening only happen in simple words and it cannot happen in complex words.

This research is aimed to describe and analyze the representation of phoneme /r/ in different phonological environments in Ajabshir Turkish dialect within Optimality theoretical framework. Optimality theory describes phonological processes with interaction of faithfulness and markedness constraints. Data of this research is gathered from illiterate and old native speakers of Ajabshir. It should be noted that phoneme /r/ has no vocal presentation in any phonological environments in this dialect and consistently either converts to phoneme /j/ or deleted. The aim of this research is to clarify the positions in which phoneme /r/ converts to phoneme /j/ or the phonological positions in which deletion occurs; and what are the active markedness constraints in describing this processes; and what is the ranking of this constraints. Analysis of data within Optimality theoretical framework shows that phoneme /r/ in onset and coda position of syllable converts to phoneme /j/; which means *trill markedness constraint is active in this dialect and has a higher rank to IDENT(trill) faithfulness constraint, additionally if /r/ is the first consonant of the coda position in consonant cluster and the vowel of the syllable has [+back] feature, consonant /r/ will be deleted, but if in the same position the vowel has [-back] feature consonant /r/ will convert to /j/.

In this paper, we have analysed the aspectual system of three dialects of Luri, a west Iranian language which is spoken in south western, and in some areas of western part of Iran. About the classification of Luri dialects different opinions have been provided by various scholars. In this research, we follow Anonby (2003)’ s classification, who has considered Luri as a language continuum consisting of three distinct languages: Luristani, Bakhtiyari and southern Luri, but we call them dialects of Luri. Despite their similarities to standard Persian, the Luri dialects share features that set them apart as a group from the standard language (McKinon, 2011). In this research, we have looked at the verbal construction in Luri and its aspectual system. Aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation' (Comrie, 1976: 4). Hewson & Bubenik (1997: 14) distinguish analytic and synthetic aspects in the Indo-European languages. In analytic aspect, there is an auxiliary which carries the tense marker, to which the lexical verb is dependant. On the other hand, in synthetic aspect, there is only a single word which may be marked for both tense and aspect. In these three West Iranian dialects, there are synthetic aspects as well as some analytic aspects, like their sister language Persian. The idea of the appearance of some periphrastic aspects and serial verb constructions to show the progressive aspect in some dialects of Luri can be considered as the impact of language contact, in which these dialects are getting influenced by Persian, the standard language of the country. Aspectual system in all of these three dialects is based on the ternary division between Perfective, Imperfective and Perfect aspect, like other Indo-European languages (see Hewson & Bubenik, 1997) It should be mentioned that we distinguish grammatical and lexical aspect and we are just looking at the system in grammatical aspect of Luri in this research.