JOURNAL OF HUMAN SCIENCES
Year:2008 | Volume:- | Issue:56 (SPECIAL ISSUE ON LINGUISTICS)|Papers Count:20

Social, cultural, economic and political developments in recent years have put many local and minority languages in danger of extinction and Iranian vernaculars are not an exception to this general rule. Nowadays, in Mazandaran, we witness the increase of acquisition and usage of Persian in various domains and the persistence of current state can threaten the survival of Mazandarani. This research, using questionair and interview, is investigating the acquisition and usage of Mazandarani among three age groups in Amol. The findings of the research show that in some informal domains like family domain, Mazandarani is the dominant language but in formal domains such as school and office domains Persian is more common. In all domains, Persian is used by young people is more than by older age groups. Meanwhile, the usage of Mazandarani by women, urban and educated people more than that by men, rural and illiterate inhabitants. Attitudes towards Mazandarani are not so positive, especially among younger generations. Considering the above mentioned cases periencing a process of gradual erosion in the region.

This research has studied the effect of some factors like frequency, semantic priming, repetition priming in lexical access, using the semantic association experiment and lexical decision task. These tests are applied to help understand the competence through some evidences from the individual's performance. Scientists use this method in modeling mental processes of natural language, and try to explain the problematic cognitive mechanisms with which we are faced in order to understand and interpret these processes. Results show remarkable details illustrating the relations between words in our mental lexicon; also the findings give us some interesting points related to the mechanism and necessary information concerning lexical access.

This paper is devoted to study the semantic views of Muslim grammarians up to the mid 16th century A.D. (mid 10th century A.H.). After reviewing the literature concerning this field in Chapter 2, we refer to the primary sources written by those grammarians living in the aforesaid period (from Sibawayhi [778 - 796 A.D] to Al-Suyuti [1505 A.D.]), differentiating inflection [sarf] from syntax [nahw] so as to place emphasis on semantic points. We base our analysis on Ibn Usfur [1271 A.H.]’s division of inflectional problems. In chapter 5, we concluded that “meaning” had a central function both in inflectional argumentation and in inflectional description.

Words, as transference of meaning elements, are the factors of communication and mutual understanding in teaching language. Dictionaries are instruments for comprehension of word denotations. But sometimes in intermediate and advance levels of learning language, students have difficulty in finding the exact synonym of a word or idiom. The reason is that some words and expressions have root in beliefs of language community, are only given with their denotations, without mentioning their connotations. This essay studies the role of words in culture transmission, and it's main. Question is how to teach meaning and cultural dimensions of words. In this essay, we study the cultural problems in teaching French and its words and idioms to native Persian students in Iran, in special sense. And finally some instructions for teaching concepts and cultural dimension of words are discussed.

A text relation with other texts has been an important subject, which attracted the attention of researchers such as Kristeva, Barthes, Riffattere, Jeant, ete. within Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. In the 1960s, it was Julia Kristeva who used "Intertextualite" for the first time, indicating any relation between different texts. Thereafter, Gerard Jeant expanded the study domain of Kristeva, and called relation between a text with other texts or different from its own as "transtextualite" and subdivided this type into five categories where intertextualite was only one type. Other categories were called "arcitextualite", "paratextualite", "metatextualite" and "hypertextualite", each with their own subcategories. Of all these categories, Intertextualite and Hypertextualite study the relationship between two artistic texts, whereas Transtextualites is the study of the relation of a text to the related hypertext. On the other hand, Paratextualite probes into the relation of a text to other connected or separated texts. Metatextualite investigates the analytical elation of a text in respect to another one. And Arcitextualite deals with the relation between a text and a text of its kind. Here, we will elaborate on the Intertextualite from Jeant's point of view.

The present article intends to discuss the repercussions of a recent trend introduced by Chomsky within the generative enterprise known as the Minimalist Program. It has opened a new front which makes possible an attempt to eliminate redundant elements and concepts, either formal-i.e., methodological-or substantive, from the theory of language required to be succinctly, or elegantly, formalized. It will be demonstrated that a minimalist version of Universal Grammar is possible to be posited which dispenses with “principles” as linguistic invariants altogether. Within such a framework, a final theory of language constitutes parameters only. However, contrary to the standard assumptions, such parameters allow no/bi-valuation when being set besides the general possibilities of fixing one or the other valuation options postulated for a parameter; such a minimalist version is suggested to be called the Unified Theory of Parameters (UTP) or Un-Principled UG (UPUG).

In this paper, we propose a flat analysis of English clause structure in which there is no syntactic VP constituent. Wherever in the derivation of any individual sentence, a unit appears, which looks superficially like a VP, we argue that it is either syntactically a subject less clause, as in “VP-preposing” and “VP-coordination”, or a unit which is constructed solely at the level of logical form, as in “VP-ellipsis” and “VP-anaphora”. The construction of logical forms is carried out in two stages. Firstly, each syntactic rule is accompanied by a translation rule which compositionally gives a corresponding logical form. This aspect of the proposal has affinities with ideas from Lexical Functional Grammar, in particular GLUE semantics (Dalrymple 2001), and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (Steedman 1996), although neither of these frameworks assumes a flat clause structure. The logical forms which are so constructed may then themselves be the input to a further stage of higher-order unification. This procedure manipulates them in a variety of ways. For example creating the partitions required by information structure (Pulman 1997). This aspect of the proposal has affinities with proposals for a flat structure for English clauses in Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin 2005).

This paper aims to address a number of issues with respect to bilingualism and second language education. It starts with an emphasis on the fact that bilingualism is a common phenomenon in the world and that it can be studied both as an individual and a societal phenomenon. Next, it deals with reasons why some societies become bilingual. Afterwards, it introduces various bilingual education programs in North America followed by a number of guidelines for more effective teaching in these classes. Finally, it calls for incorporation of a course in sociolinguistics into the curriculum of teacher training programs.

The present study aimed at investigating the role of input modification in text comprehension. Traditionally, modification of written input has been limited to linguistic modification or text simplification. The use of the idea of interactionally-modified input, originally studied in the area of oral interaction in text comprehension, is a new development which can potentially be useful in organizing reading instruction. A comparison was made in this study between linguistically-modified (LM) texts and interactionally-modified (IM) texts through repeated measure design. The result of using texts under the two afore-mentioned conditions and the control condition of using unmodified (U) texts showed that the learners’ comprehension was highest under the interactionally-modified text condition and lowest under the unmodified text condition with the linguistically-modified text condition in between. The results are discussed and suggestions are made for the improvement of reading pedagogy.

This study was a program evaluation of ESP courses offered at MS/A and Ph.D. levels at 10 faculties of Science and Research Campus, Islamic Azad University. A total of 309 respondents comprising 275 students, 18 instructors and 16 heads of departments participated in this study, which incorporated four data gathering techniques, i.e. questionnaires, interviews, observations, and tests. A questionnaire was administered to 275 students to analyze their English language needs. Another questionnaire was administered among the instructors and heads of departments, and interviews were conducted with instructors, to seek their evaluations of the ESP courses and what they felt the students' English language needs were. In addition, the researcher observed different ESP classes to see closely the actual classroom practices, and a general English proficiency test, constructed and validated by the researcher, was also administered among the students to determine their approximate level of general English language knowledge. The results of the study demonstrated that there are mismatches between the students' perceived English language needs and the ESP courses they attend. Furthermore, both MS/A and Ph.D. students generally scored low on the English proficiency test, which requires the implementation of certain measures to address this deficiency.