Scientific disciplines divide the particulars they study into kinds and theorize about them, but it is difficult to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for a particular to be classified under a certain kind. What is a natural kind? Scientists normally assume that in the process of studding the nature they discover some real independent kinds, not that they invent them subjectively. Are they true? If natural kinds really exist and they are distinguishable from non-natural kinds, then what is the standard of this distinction? In this paper we first go through natural kinds and their related issues. Then, while explaining the difference between naturalism and Conventionalism, we offer a description of the causal theory of reference and its suggested solutions for distinguishing natural from non-natural. Finally we show that the difference between naturalism and conventionalism can be more accurately explained through the rule of the "explanatory value".

The aim of the present study was to examine the degree of NATURALNESS and accuracy in English translations of Hāfiz by native speakers of English and Persian. The researchers attempted to find answers to the following two research questions: 1) Is there any difference between an English translation of Hāfiz by a native speaker of Persian and a native speaker of English in terms of NATURALNESS and accuracy? 2) Is it possible to achieve both NATURALNESS and accuracy in poetry translation? To find answers to these two questions, some samples of Hāfiz ghazals were selected and contrasted with two different translations. The first translation was done by Pazargadi, a Persian translator, and the second one by Clarke, an English translator. The approach of the study was a comparative one and therefore a descriptive methodology was applied in the research. After surveying the two translations, the researchers came to the conclusion that in the samples studied the translation of Hāfiz ghazals by the Iranian translator was more accurate, whereas the translation of the English translator was more natural. The final suggestion was that if a native translator and a non-native one cooperate with each other in the act of translating a piece of literary work, especially poetry, it might lead to a better translation which is both natural in its form and accurate in its meaning.

Intelligibility of the meaning, normality of the style, and NATURALNESS of the language all are of prime importance in translated texts, but they are not the only factors to be taken into account in evaluating a translation. The original text is considered as the keystone in assessing the accuracy and adequacy of a translated text. It may happen that a translation is clear and intelligible in its meaning, normal in its style, and natural in its language, but does not correspond to the original in the content of the message. That is, neither the intelligibility nor the NATURALNESS of a translation is a sign of its faithfulness to the original. This study is an attempt to discuss the significance of accuracy, clarity and NATURALNESS in religious translations in order to find out how much these criteria are important and influential in evaluating such translations.

The importance of the economic aspect of tourism usually overshadow many natural tourism destinations. Fereydounshahr county in Isfahan province, with pristine mountainous landscapes and diverse natural features, has high potential to attract many tourists. However, pristineness over much of its area suggests limiting the public access based on the degree of NATURALNESS. Hence, the aim of this research was to classify Fereydounshahr county based on NATURALNESS. Accordingly, nine effective indicators were weighted, using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Idrisi software was then employed to overlay the digital layers of criteria and produce a NATURALNESS map, that consisted of five classes (from very natural to developed), based on Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) approach under six different scenarios. Results showed that developed areas under the AND scenario and the natural areas under the OR scenario have the largest range. The extent of desirable areas, including natural and relatively natural, increased when moving from risk aversion to risk taking scenarios. Based on the results, most of the natural areas were concentrated in western parts of the region, due to the long distances from the main roads, high presence of wildlife, and the presence of steep slopes.

Despite the extensive research on translation and challenges on translation of figurative language, in particular idioms and proverbs, little is achieved to solve the challenges. The corpus of the study was an English translation of the novel Pinocchio and its Persian translation. The name of the novel is ' The Adventures of Pinocchio'. The aim of this case study was to explore the strategies which were applied for translating idioms and proverbs in the corpus of the study from English to Persian and identify the most frequently used strategies. Therefore, the corpora were examined and a total of 200 idioms and nine proverbs were explored. The data were analyzed to find the most frequent strategies and to see whether the translation of idioms and proverbs was idiomatic and natural. The findings reveals that translation by paraphrasing at 86% and replacing proverb with an equivalent local proverb at 66.66% were applied in translation of idioms and proverbs respectively. It also shows that the translator translated the idioms and proverbs in an idiomatic and natural way.

Landscape ecology as a modern interdisciplinary science offers new concepts, theories, and methods for land evaluation and management. A main part of landscape ecology is describing patterns in the landscape and interpreting the ecological effects of these patterns on flora, fauna, flow of energy and materials. Remote sensing and GIS techniques have a high ability for landscape researchers to specify maps and analyze landscape patterns. We can use the trends in indices to our management decisions. In this study, landscape patterns were quantified by the number and size of land cover patches, the degree of NATURALNESS, and the diversity indices were calculated by GIS approaches and compared for 35 years, in order to reinforce the management efforts of Mouteh wildlife refuge in Iran. The results showed increasing destructions with regards to unplanned human activities, while some natural landscape improvements occurred in the core protected area.

Introduction The present paper is a corpus-based study of NATURALNESS and markedness of some Persian subject suffixes: '-ǎ, -ǎr, -ǎn, -bǎn, -gar, -kǎr, -mand, and -ande', extracted from Tǎrix-ol-vozarǎ, within the Natural Morphology framework. To date, no studies have focused on presenting a continuum of Persian subject suffixes according to their markedness and NATURALNESS. This paper aims to rank the NATURALNESS of some subject suffixes in Persian. Natural morphology is a cognitive-functional approach introduced in the 1970s. In this approach, NATURALNESS and markedness are key terms that differ from frequency and simplicity. NATURALNESS is not a fixed concept; it can be represented on a continuum. There are four semiotic criteria for assessing the NATURALNESS of any word formation process: 1. morphotactic transparency, 2. indexicality, 3. transparency bi-uniqueness, and 4. shape of signan. According to morphotactic transparency, there is a relation between form and meaning: each form has a corresponding meaning and concept. In forms with the highest transparency, stem and affix can be separated; However, in some cases, affixation causes some phonological changes in the stem, resulting in reduced transparency. Indexicality means that a signan should have only one signatum. Bi-uniqueness means that a signan should have just one signatum and vice versa. This criterion doesn’t allow for synonymy, homonymy, and polysemy. For example, whenever two words are synonyms, they violate bi-uniqueness. Additionally, productivity is important for this criterion. There are two sub-criteria for this parameter: Qualitative criterion and quantitative criterion. According to the qualitative criterion, the closeness of the meaning of a derived word to its stem, without any semantic change, is the focus. According to the quantitative criterion, new tokens of a process should be focused. The fourth criterion of NATURALNESS concerns the number of syllables of each word or affix. One-syllable words and affixes are more natural than two-syllable ones. The data in this paper are analyzed according to these four criteria. Since Persian subject suffixes form a fairly large category, a corpus-based study of them is necessary. The present paper compares and contrasts a selection of such suffixes to discover which one is the most natural and the least marked within the Natural Morphology framework. A suggestion for future studies is to conduct a corpus-based analysis of subject suffixes in Persian language teaching coursebooks to determine whether these books teach subject suffixes, considering their ranking of NATURALNESS and unmarkedness.   Materials and methods As this paper is corpus-based, the data were made machine-readable. The book Tǎrix-ol-vozarǎ was digitized, and AntConc software was used to extract subject suffixes. After extraction, the data were copied into Excel, where unnecessary parts were filtered out. After filtering the data, all sentences containing the target derived words were examined. The following results were observed: the suffix –bǎn appeared in 352 instances, making it the most frequent, while the suffix –kǎr appeared the least. Results and discussion Based on the findings, -gar is the most natural suffix, while -ǎn is the least natural suffix in the corpus. In other words, the suffix –gar violated the fewest criteria, while -ǎn violates most of the four criteria mentioned above. It was also found that -ǎr is not used as a subject suffix in the corpus but functions as a gerund or object suffix.   Table 1. The amount of NATURALNESS of each suffix. rank Suffixes Violation of morphotactic transparency Violation of indexicality Violation of bi-uniqueness Violation of shape of signan Average violation of 4 criteria Average of suffixes' NATURALNESS 1 -ǎ %0 %33.33 %29.69 %0 %15.75 %84.24 2 -ǎn %0 %81.35 %37.33 %0 %29.67 %70.33 3 bǎn' %0 %11.11 %51.11 %0 %15.55 %84.44 5 -kǎr %0 %0 %19.99 %0 %4.99 %95.002 6 -gar %0 %0 %12.94 %0 %3.23 %96.76 7 -mand %0 %33.33 %19.99 %0 %13.30 %86.69 8 -ande %0 %0 %9.092 %50 %14.77 %85.22   Conclusion The study concludes that -gar is the most natural suffix, while -ǎn is the least natural in the corpus. It also proves that -ǎr is not a subject suffix but rather serves as a gerund or object suffix.