Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Year:2020 | Volume:8 | Issue:2|Papers Count:7

The present research is an attempt to study the borrowing hierarchy of Azerbaijani from Persian. The data collection was carried out using both library sources and field work. The majority of the data is from the speech interaction of Azerbaijani speakers living in the central part of Ardabil. The analysis of the data indicates that Azerbaijani speakers, in addition to using their native compound sentence patterns use Persian compound sentence patterns in their speech by borrowing Persian grammatical morphemes. Although a lot of Persian genitive and possessive phrases are used as borrowed phrases in Azerbaijani, these structures have not entered Azerbaijani as borrowed patterns. Persian prepositional phrases and Persian comparative adjective marker also appear as code-switched elements in bilinguals’ speech but they cannot be assumed as borrowed elements considering the borrowing code-switching distinguishing criterion. Evaluating research findings according to Stolz and Stolz (1996) suggested hierarchy of contact-induced changes and convergence progression shows that Persian subordinate compound sentence patterns have become more established in Azerbaijani system but the pattern borrowing has not occurred in phrase and word levels of Azerbaijani system yet.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the naming trends during recent three decades in Kalatarzan of Sanandaj, Iran. Name is a cultural and social phenomenon rooted in the beliefs of the individuals within the community. Thus, the process of children's naming can represent the process of social and cultural changes in the social system. Due to multidimensional aspect of naming, the present research was carried out adopting a cognitive-sociolinguistic approach because neither social nor cognitive linguistics can tackle exploring various aspects of naming. The research method is descriptive-analytical. In order to complete the task, 8325 boys and girls names were collected. The names were analyzed in terms of gender, differences in Sorani and Hewrami varieties of Kurdish, as well as the extent to which nature-inspired names have been used. The result demonstrated that national identity group had the highest frequency (2628 names), followed by ethnic names (2440 names) and religious ones (2353 names) as second and third names with highest frequency. The result of the study indicated that names with national and religious identity had a decreasing trend and names with ethnic and international identity had increased.

Language form is affected by many factors. This study is intended to investigate the information distribution in the simple Persian marked and unmarked structures. Information structure deals with how old (evoked) and new information are distributed in the sentences of a text. The present study is aimed at investigating the information structure of Pre-posed constituents of Persian simple sentences. Grammatical role and syntactic category of the pre-posed constituents were, also, investigated. To achieve the goals, a corpus including 226 simple sentences from a football match between Real Madrid and Juventus was investigated to analyze the information status of pre-posed constituents. The collected sentences were all simple (marked and unmarked) sentences. Prince (1992), Ward and Birner (2004) and Birner (2013) were referred to frequently as theoretical model of this study. After collecting the data, they were codified and analyzed employing SPSS software version 23. Findings revealed that most of the pre-posed constituents were old (evoked or inferential) in terms of discourse, while new in listeners' view. As far as grammatical role is concerned, indirect objects were found to be pre-posed more than other grammatical roles. Finally, in terms of syntactic categories, the pre-posed constituents were found to be mainly noun phrases and prepositional phrases.

The present study has investigated the ideological structure of the Iranian newspapers in terms of the words used in representing the offenders, the victims, and the crimes in the framework of critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010). To this end, based on a systematic random sampling, the crime-related texts were collected from six most widely published newspapers as Keyhan, Ettelaat, Resalat, Javan, Aftab, and Shargh from May 2016 to June 2017. Then, 50 issues of each newspaper were randomly selected and a one million-word corpus was developed and analyzed by AntConc software. The findings indicated that among 81 words used in crime representation, the crimes against individuals had the highest frequency with 33% and moral crimes with 1. 5% were the least frequent. Also, the analyses of 108 extracted target words representing the offender and 76 extracted target words representing the victims showed that representing offenders and victims were based on age, gender, family relationships, occupation and social role, role in crime, as well as depersonalized representation. The representation of the offenders has been carried out most frequently in terms of the role in committing the crime with 62% and least frequently based on age with 4%. The representation of the victims has been done most frequently based on gender with 31. 5% and least frequently in terms of occupation with 4%.

Proverbs represent the beliefs and values of human cultures, the study of which can provide profound insights into concepts and daily experiences of language users. In this regard, cognitive semantics constitutes an effective framework to study linguistic meaning and uncover speakers' conceptualization of the world. In this study, we analyzed Azeri Turkish proverbs based on conceptual metaphor and image schemas theories. First, 470 Azeri proverbs were collected from the Turkish Azeri Proverbs book, and then they were checked by interviewing senior Azeri speakers. The proverbs were initially analyzed by looking for conceptual metaphors and source domain concepts and then the second time they were searched for image schemas. The findings showed that the source domain ANIMAL is the most frequent conceptual domain and the least frequent domain is related to the PATH and HEAT-COLD source domains. Also, the most frequent domain in image schemas was CONTAINMENT image schema and the least frequent one was the BALANCE image schema. In conclusion, findings suggest that the ANIMAL source domain as well as the CONTAINMENT image schema are the most prominent conceptual domains that have been frequently used in Azeri proverbs and have shaped the daily experience of Azeri speakers.

The term predicate refers to two concepts in the literature; in the traditional grammar (in dividing the sentence into two parts: the subject and the predicate) and the other in the discussion of predicate-argument relations. Recent linguists have used two terms, predicate and predicator, to avoid confusing these two terms, respectively, for the first and second definition. In Persian, the two terms “ Gozɑ ɹ e” and “ mahmul” have made a clear distinction between the two concepts. The present study investigates the different types of predicators in Persian based on the role and reference grammar to consider the differences and similarities between the predicators in Persian. The consideration of the layered structure of clauses and phrases showed that the nominal predicator has the most similarity and the prepositional predicator has the least to the verbal predicator. Furthermore, the findings showed that we have to accept the adjective phrase contrary to the role and reference grammar because there are different types of adjectival modifiers which are necessary to consider according to the layered structure.