JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES IN LINGUISTICS
Year:2015 | Volume:6 | Issue:2 (11)|Papers Count:6

The present study aims at investigating the nature of object indexed elements in Persian. This is an essential element for deciding about the layered structure of the clause in the framework of the Role and Reference Grammar.Because of the inefficiency of the mere formal approaches, we appeal to the Role and Reference Grammar, a functional-structural model which considers all morpho-syntactic units with regard to their usage in the context. The goal of the Role and Reference Grammar is to uncover the universal aspects of the clause structure, without imposing features on languages in which there is no evidence for them. The research is descriptive-analytic and uses the standard colloquial Persian as its data. To do this, the data of standard spoken Persian are extracted from various resources and then analyzed syntactically.The behavior of indexed elements signifies that they have not turned into the agreement markers, although they behave like them somehow. So in representing the clause structure of transitive sentences, we posit the indexed elements in INDEX node outside the AGREEMENT node. In the absence of overt object noun phrase, the indexed element can function as the argument in the clause.

This article studies verbo-pictorial metaphors in some informative Persian posters, based on Forceville's (1994 and 1996) cognitive approach to multimodal metaphors. In finding the appropriate required data, among eighteen informative categories in Hafteh Informative Poster Website, five items were selected. For each item (total N=236) one poster was selected. The research questions involve: How verbo-pictorial metaphors do appear in Persian posters? How do the existing pictures and texts interact to represent multimodal metaphors in the selected informative posters? And finally, what is the pragmatic effect of their interaction on conveying the poster message? The results show that the selected posters contain one or more cognitive mechanisms like metaphor, metonymy, symbol, and image schema. The verbal and pictorial metaphors have complementary, though proportionately various, roles in conveying the informative messages of posters. The similarity of source and target domains of verbo-pictorial metaphors are realized either through physical resemblance, filling a schematic slot unexpectedly, and simultaneous cuing of these concepts. Moreover, this study shows that metaphors of this small corpus play informative function in the posters. The pragmatic role of metaphors is performed by both pictorial and verbal modes, though the anchorage role of the text used in these posters is various and cannot be identified clearly.

This study investigates the ways in which the concept of anger is conceptualized in Persian by means of metaphor, one of the most effective devices of conceptualization. First of all, the anger metaphors in Persian are gathered from the utterances of Persian speakers in Tehran during 1390-1391 [2011-2012], and then the determined source domains in Persian are compared with 13 source domains introduced by Kövecses. Anger metaphors in Persian are divided into 3 groups based on Kövecses model (2000). Analysis of 72 metaphorical expressions shows that breakdown /destruction with the highest frequency and fire /heat, physiological change, and animal behavior /reaction with equal frequency are the most common source domains of anger metaphors in Persian. After dividing these metaphors into three groups, most of them are placed within the first group. In other words, the great part of metaphors represents emotional responses out of anger. Moreover, results of the analysis indicate the effect of cultural beliefs on the selection of different source domains among different communities, even within one community.

In lexical processing studies, nouns and verbs processing differences have always been investigated with respect to their different lexical features and the activation of cortical locations fundamental to lexical representations. Such investigations in bilinguals are of primary importance due to the mediation of L1 words to process L2 words. In this research, a comparative analysis between a first and a second language has been done, by considering the lexical processing levels, and by participation of eighty six Persian-English bilinguals. Picture naming task was used as the main cognitive measure and the latencies in object and action naming, in either of Persian and English languages were recorded in milli-second. With regard to the findings of this research, in both languages, verb processing is mostly under the influence of formulation stage and noun processing is mostly under the influence of conceptualization stage. Therefore, nouns have longer retention in comparison with verbs. In addition, acquiring a language (L1) or learning a language consciously (L2) does not influence the significant contribution of processing levels in bilinguals.

As pioneer trends in Iranian computational dialectology, the Levenshtein algorithm applied to Mazandarani dialect data - extracted from LAI – revealed regional dialect in the northern range of the Alborz Mountains. Current synchronic fieldwork aimed to determine vowels responsible for regional variation, and likewise reliability and validity of the research findings, through vowel frequency method. The linguistic material consisted of 113 interviews with NORM Speakers of 36 years old and primary level of education in average, 38% of whom were female. Representative and interpretive dialect maps validate the results obtained in previous studies with 0.84 Cronbach’s α, emphasize manifestation of regional dialect, and illustrate the front vowels /i/ and /a/ verses central vowel /ə/, impose uttermost difference index on regional variations.

This article investigates the position of the adjunct “chera” (why) in Persian. There are two different proposals to consider. According to the first proposal, “chera” is merged post-verbally before it obligatorily moves to precede the verb. According to the second proposal, first introduced in this article, “chera” is generated before the verb, but moves somewhere higher in the tree structure. In this article we employ the linear order of the phrases in the sentence and certain empirical facts to support the second hypothesis.We take “chera” as a wh-causal phrase merged in the adjunct position to the vP to the left before it moves to the Spec, Interrogative phrase along the lines of Shlonsky and Soare (2011).