Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Year:2021 | Volume:8 | Issue:4|Papers Count:9

Relative clause construction in Iranian languages appears mainly in sentences as a subordinate clause and acts as a describer for the preceding noun. Following Dixon's (2010) framework, our aim in this paper is to study and describe the relative clause construction in Kurmanji dialect of Kurdish. This construction is generally of two types which can be considered as canonical and non-canonical with their own syntactic features. Relative clauses can be either restrictive or non-restrictive according to the information given about the head. Restrictive clauses cannot be omitted, because they give new information, while non-restrictives can; since the information they give are not always necessary. In Kurmanji, a third type can be identified which is called cleft relative clause in which the head is focused. In this dialect, relative clauses are absolutely in accordance with a head. These clauses are external and come after the head. The data on which this study is based on interviews with native speakers of Kurmanji as well as a book called Az Ensanə m.

Tabibzadeh and Baradaran Hemmati (2015) argue that the Persian Genitive constructions can be divided into attributive genitives and nominal genitives based on six criteria including the possibility of displacing the nominal and attributive dependents, adding the plural suffix, and the possibility of scrambling or topicalization. Attributive genitives can both precede and follow adjectives. Nominal genitives, on the other hand, do not precede adjectives except for the cases that result in a meaning shift or ungrammaticality of noun phrases. They emphasize a peculiar characteristic of Persian Ezafe constructions, but they are not successful in providing a proper explanation of it. In this article, we attempt to provide a brief account of their position, show some mistakes in their syntactic arguments, and criticize the difference between attributive genitives and compound nouns.

Persian and Kalhori Kurdish, display some differences in the phonetic forms of names containing glottal consonants. This article attempts to analyze the deletion of glottal consonants of post-vocalic /h/ and /ʔ /. The data was collected through interviews with 10 native speakers of Kalhori Kurdish, and the names with different pronunciations from those of Persian were identified. One of the big differences between Persian and Kurdish in this regard lies in the sequence of a vowel and a glottal consonant. Kalhori Kurdish drops the glottal consonant and modifies vowels in order to save the syllable weight. After the elision of the glottal consonant, the vowel preceding it meets either another vowel or a consonant. This article investigates the cases in which the vowel meets a consonant. When the vowel meets a consonant, three processes of replacement of the short vowel with a long one, lengthening the short vowel, and vowel harmony may occur. This article attempts to explain these changes in Optimality Theory. The analysis of the data shows the dominance of the markedness constraint of *V/GLOT over the faithful constraint IDENT(V). These changes are allowed to take place as long as the vowel system of Kalhori Kurdish permits it.

Local languages and dialects, as a part of the culture and civilization of any nation, are being destructed on reasons such as, immigration of native speakers. Therefore, in order to revive and record these languages and dialects, scientific studies should be conducted by linguists. In the present study, clitics in KhorramAbadi Lori are introduced, investigated, and divided into two classes of ‘ second-position’ and ‘ phrasal affix’ , in terms of their position of attachment to the head, dependent or phrase. The research method includes: preparing a (215)-sentence questionnaire, interviewing with native speakers, extracting and investigating clitics of this language variety using Shaghaghi's model (2013). Of course, foreign models have also been surveyed. The findings revealed that clitics in this dialect are incorporated at the end of their own host. Also the morphemes of genitive /e/, definiteness or indefiniteness, indefinite allocation, and endoclitical pronouns are placed in second-position endoclitics, while morphemes of definite object, coordinations, verb emphasis, adding adverb, and endoclitical verb are placed in phrasal affix endoclitics. Results show that in this language, phrasal affixes as regards their position, are closer to affixes on a continuum, in comparison with second position endoclitics.

The classification of words for organization and easy access to their various dimensions, as well as the aggregation of information, is one of the topics that has long been the focus of attention of researchers in the field of conceptoloy and terminology. This research has two objectives. First, to classify a selection of content words in Moein Dictionary based on the approaches of Felber (1984) and Langacker (2008, 2013), in order to examine the capability and efficiency of approaches in classifying the general words of dictionary, as well as the possibility of combining the approaches and achieving a more comprehensive paradigm. Second, to identify and categorize the underlying concepts of the entries extracted from dictionary via conceptology, and compare the advantages and disadvantages with the classifications of Felber and Langacker. The data includes 990 content words extracted from the Moein dictionary, by the random sampling method. The results of the study show that Felber and Langacker’ s classifications and the combination do not possess the essential efficiency to classify all words in the dictionary. Thus, the solution found in the conceptology of lexical entries, as a result of which 45 concepts were identified and presented as a unified model.

The present paper aims to determine the position of the Q-particle ‘ aya’ in Persian within the Minimalist framework (e. g. Chomsky, 1995, 2001). To this end, first, evidence is provided against the idea that the Q-particle ‘ aya’ is in the head of the Complementizer Phrase (CP) (Lotfi, 2000; 2003). Then, the paper employs some pieces of evidence including the different distributional behavior of ‘ aya’ compared to the mood markers, their co-occurrence in the sentence, the hierarchical position of the negation marker as well as the interaction of the modality and mood to argue against the hypothesis that assigns ‘ aya’ to the Mood Phrase (MoodP) (Raghibdoust, 1993). Following that, it is proposed that ‘ aya’ is placed, by external merge, in the head of the Interrogative Phrase (IntP), aiming to check and value the unvalued [Q] feature on this head, satisfy the requirements of the linear order of Persian, and derive the interrogative interpretation of the clause.

Persuasion is one of the salient issues in the field of critical-forensic discourse analysis. The present study aims to investigate the biases of lawyers in applying persuasive approaches of judges based on Laclau and Mouffe's theory (1985, 2001, 2002). The methodology of this mixed research (qualitative & quantitative) is descriptive-analytic in which the data were collected via referring to courts and lawyers' offices, as well as studying hundreds of cases, and also observing dozens of interrogations during 1397 and 1398. Then, the authors analyzed 20 utterances of conversations of participants in discourse based on Laclau and Mouffe's theory. Moreover, it was found that the most persuasive approach of lawyers includes positive and negative biases comprising foregrounding and backgrounding respectively. These two notions appear in the field of discourse disputes in different ways. The results showed that backgrounding and foregrounding have their own strengths and weaknesses. Also, the findings indicated that the notions of foregrounding and backgrounding are ways of maintaining and sustaining the power and hegemony of a discourse.