filter by: Publication Year
(Descending) Articles
Language Related Research (23223081) 16(2)pp. 253-277
An alternation is a pair of sentences with identical structures and meaning. Transitivity alternation, on the other hand, is a type of grammatical alternations in which the verb is used with a different number of arguments without a significant change in meaning. Participating in specific alternations is considered as a criterion for categorizing verbs in semantic classes. For investigating this hypothesis, and in order to obtain more accurate information about the syntactic behavior and semantic properties of the verbs which can omit their objects, 435 cases of context independent object omission extracted from different sources such as books, magazines, movies, series, and everyday conversations were studied. The findings show that the verbs which participate in specific alternations, have identical semantic properties and can be categorized in one semantic class. Accordingly, the semantic behavior of the verb can be predictable based on its syntactic behavior. An interesting fact about the verbs which participate in same alternations and belong to same semantic class is that, the kind of objects these verbs take, have common features as well. The syntactic behavior and semantic characteristics of the investigated verbs and their objects reveal that, a verb can omit its object, when the object is general, indefinite, unspecific, and its meaning is predictable for the hearer. © 2025, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.
Language Related Research (23223081) 15(2)pp. 33-68
The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of prototypical transitivity components presented by Hopper and Thompson (1980) on object omission construction in Persian. Object omission is a valency-reduction process in which a verb which is transitive in nature, appears without its object but the construction makes sense for the hearer.As this construction reduces the valency of the verb, it can be considered as a transitivity reduction phenomenon as well. Accordingly, the existence of more transitivity components with low degree in the aforementioned construction is expected. To examine this hypothesis, a data set including 435 cases of object omission was discovered and examined. The analysis revealed that unexpectedly, there are some transitivity increasing components such as kinesis (action) and mode (irrealis) in this construction. On the other hand, although some of the components have no impact on object omission, some of them including participants, aspect, punctuality and affectedness of the object, seem to be the most important factors which facilitates object omission. The impact of ten prototypical transitivity components on object omission and the reasons behind that, is what has been investigated and justified in this research. © 2024, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.
Voprosy Jazykoznanija (0373658X) 2020(2)pp. 104-123
This study seeks to examine the lexical category of adjective in Persian using the Typological Prototype Theory (TPT) as its theoretical framework. This study aims to (a) evaluate TPT in determin-ing the prototypical features of Persian adjectives, (b) account for the morphological and syntactic differences between prototypical and non-prototypical adjectives in Persian, and (c) determine the association between frequency of occurrence and prototypicality of Persian adjectives. Having collected the data from Persian Language Database as well as Bijankhan Corpus and analyzed them based on the criteria and sub-criteria of TPT, we concluded that TPT can distinguish between Persian adjectives de-noting property, action and object, but is actually incapable of accounting for the behavioral differences among the sub-categories of these adjectives due to the insufficient set of criteria and sub-criteria pro-posed for this purpose. Actually, this theory could prove more helpful in distinguishing between prototypical and non-prototypical parts of speech if it had considered the monosemy and polysemy phe-nomena, more various syntactic functions of POS, different morphological features like derivation, and class range. It was also shown in this research that there exists a relationship between the traditional-ly-categorized adjective types in Persian and their degree of prototypicality, in such a way that property adjectives and object adjectives are the most and the least prototypical respectively, while the action adjectives are in between them in terms of prototypicality. © 2020, Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Voprosy Jazykoznanija (0373658X) 2019(3)pp. 101-124
This paper is an attempt to evaluate "manner of motion salience" in Ilami, a southern dialect of Kurdish. Manner components can cross-linguistically be encoded by main verbs, manner verbs, manner preverbs, and ideophones, among other linguistic devices. First, we will discuss the ways this semantic component is expressed in Ilami Kurdish. Then, in order to assess the salience of the manner component, a dictionary-based lexical survey and several experimental trials will be carried out. Following a study by F. E. Cardini ("Manner of motion saliency: An inquiry into Italian", 2008), we will conduct a vocabulary investigation to calculate the number of manner verbs in Ilami Kurdish, and then compare the statistics with Italian (a verb-framed language) and English (a satellite-framed language) to measure manner salience in Ilami Kurdish in comparison with other languages. We will also perform several experimental trials, aimed at evaluating manner salience in the actual use of this dialect. Accordingly, the experiments will be carried out to assess "ease of lexical access", which helps us to understand how readily participants (children and adults) can retrieve manner verbs from memory. Cross-linguistic analysis of Ilami Kurdish shows that this dialect is a relatively highly manner salient language, in which the elaboration of the manner component is rich and pervasive. This finding is supported by the dictionary-based lexical survey as well as ease of lexical access trials. Use of various strategies by Ilami Kurdish speakers to express manner sheds some light on the fact that manner salience is not solely affected by the lexicalization patterns of languages, as this component can also be encoded regardless of the path coding position. © 2019 Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Language Related Research (23223081) 8(7)pp. 365-390
The aim of this paper is to investigate adverbs within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar. Testing the hypothesis of layered structure suggested for the adverbs in this theory, presenting ternary classification of nuclear, core and the clausal for them and explaining the reasons behind their order are the main goals of this study. What diversifies different approaches is the extent to which they allow meaning to determine the order for adverbs. The extent is the most in functionalism and the least in formalism in their extreme terms. Role and Reference Grammar which bridges these two extremes is considered the most qualified approach for the study of adverbs since it considers all the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects together for the analysis of different phenomena including adverbs and thus its viewpoint toward adverbs has been a model for us in this study. In order to investigate this claim regarding Persian adverbs, attested data have been gathered from written and spoken sources and the order principle was checked against the sentences containing adverbs; so that the well-formedness level of sentences containing different adverbs was evaluated and the decrease in the well-formedness of sentences having the reordered version was judged to indicate the deviation from the seemingly basic order. Supporting the admission of the layered structure hypothesis for the adverbs, some complementary tests such as the sensitivity of nuclear adverbs to aspect, the ambiguity in interpretation for some core adverbs, different positions for various adverbs and their interpretation and finally the questionnaire and frequency test were used. Results from all of the tests have shown that Persian to a great extent follows the ordered principle suggested for adverbs in Role and Reference Grammar and the flexibility for the position of temporal adverbs and also of the adverbs within each layer do not question this as this theory itself has predicted them beforehand. Worth mentioning that order principle was observe red to hold for some of the adverbs in each layer such as between evidential and epistemic modal adverbs belonging to clause layer. This supports more the ordering hypothesis. Besides, in this study different types of adverbs were recognized based on their interaction with operators. For nuclear adverbs, several number of aspectual adverbs were identified In Persian. What seem to be directional adverbs corresponding directional operators both in nucleus and core layer are either directional prefixes or argument adjuncts which the main predicate license them in the logical structure. And also the elements which seem to be negative adverbs which correspond with the negative operators in all of the three layers are actually negative polarity items in Persian since they always co-occur with negative operator. The event quantificational adverbs denote the times an event is happened which are considered as core adverbs. Also the adverbs which show deontic modality observed in Persian belong to core layer. Besides the adverbs which correspond to specific operators in the layers so far, there are adverbs belong to the layers without having a corresponding operator such as degree adverbs modifying the nucleus and manner and temporal-locative and also subject-oriented adverbs which modify the core layer. Finally we can point to epistemic modal and evidential adverbs as the main representatives for the clausal layer adverbs. The number for clausal adverbs, of course, will exceed if we add evaluative adverbs to them. Generally these were the main three classes of adverbs in Persian based on Role and Reference view on the adverb types. There are for sure some alternation between adverbs of different types and that’s why we can’t consider an absolute border between adverbs of different layers. In conclusion, Persian adverbs, as predicted by Role and Reference Grammar, reveal layered structure and obey the ordering principle and therefore we can present a ternary classification of nuclear, core and clausal adverbs for them which supplements the traditional binary classification for them; which means that they modify predicate, predicate and its arguments and the whole proposition in respective. © 2018, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.
Dialectologia (20132247) (19)pp. 109-130
As far as obfuscation of the truth is taken into account, passivization seems to be one of the most prominent processes by which the agent of an action may become evasive (by being omitted or demoted to non-obligatory prepositional constituent) in certain contexts. Cross-linguistically, these constructions may not necessarily be formed in an identical fashion, as in some languages such items may be constructed syntactically, morphologically and/ or lexically. In this paper, through employing Role and Reference Grammar framework, we attempt to represent the nature of passive constructions in Ilami, a southern variety of Kurdish language. In pursuit of this goal, we enjoy Ilami data to represent how passivization could be explained in the RRG [Role and Reference Grammar] framework. Analyzing our Kurdish data, we concluded that Ilami gains advantage of the main types of passivization strategies. The use of strict morphological, periphrastic and impersonal passives was well-attested, and additionally, it can be said that the two stages of passivization suggested in RRG are done in Ilami passives.
Language Related Research (23223081) 6(7)pp. 219-236
This paper set up to investigate the word “didan” (see) based on frame semantics to explore how the sense of words can be traced back through human’s experiences and background knowledge. In other words, the purpose of this paper is to clarify such delicate meaning distinctions, which are mainly overlooked in dictionaries. To solve this problem, we started this study by searching different texts and corpus so that we could find semantic frames for “didan” from one hand, and extract differences between the verb “didan” and other partially synonymous verbs such as “moshahede kardan” (observe), “tamasha kardan” (watch), etc, on the other hand. Then, we try to determine how polysemous verb of “didan” is analyzed in terms of semantic frames. By analyzing data, we have found out that the relationship between different frames with that of “base sensory-eye” frame is the cause of polysemy. Furthermore, the partially synonymous verbs are differentiated from the verb “didan” based on ‘aim, target, etc. variables’; last but not least we have put forward a model that shows how “didan” and its different frames are related and how partially synonymous words are differentiated from it. © 2016, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.
STUF - Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (09422919) 69(3)pp. 411-435
This paper attempts to assess motion events in Ilami Kurdish through Talmy's binary typology (1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and lexical descriptions: Vol. 3. Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 36-149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000a. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 1: Concept structuring system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2000b. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 2: Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) according to which, languages could be classified as "Satelliteframed" or "Verb-framed". Following Berman and Slobin's approach (1994. Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) in using "The Frog Story", which paved the way for evaluating numerous languages in terms of their motion verbs, we used this elicitation tool for gathering Kurdish data. Results reveal that Ilami tends towards Satellite-framed languages as the concept of Path is often expressed by the use of satellites. As far as analysis of Path in Kurdish is taken into account, this concept has been analyzed with the help of different criteria proposed by Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2008. Path salience in motion events. In Jiansheng Gu, Elena Lieven, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin Tripp, Keiko Nakamura & -eyda Özçalý\+kan (eds.), Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin, 403-414. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and typologically compared with other languages too. It seems that in addition to the oral nature of Ilami and its contact with Persian language, "the syntactic sensitivity of satellites" as a new motivation, also affects the amount of details accompanying the Path concept in this dialect.
Language Related Research (23223081) 6(3)pp. 293-313
Noun incorporation is considered as a word formation process which is not treated similarly in different languages and has various representations. The incorporated noun is unmarked for features of definiteness and specificity; it does not take definite article, demonstratives or case marking. This study aims at finding an explanatory account for this phenomenon in Persian in order to decide whether a particular structure involves incorporation or not. To do this, incorporation is examined with respect to its relation to transitivity as a prototypical phenomenon. In this regard, it may be analyzed according to the notion of the degree of transitivity and the presence or absence of different transitivity parameters. The results show that the two parameters of individuation of object as well as affectedness of object specifically have role in the occurrence of incorporation. Aspect, also, has some effect through its relation to affectedness. Therefore, incorporation is better to be considered as an instance of transitivity decrease which occurs due to the lack of object individuation and object affectedness in a transitive clause. The deviation from the prototypical transitive clause due to the absence of these features is responsible for the structural differences of the incorporated clauses with that prototype. © 2015, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.
Language Related Research (23223081) 6(5)pp. 191-213
The present study investigates the auxiliary selection in the languages which use this way to encode perfect and progressive aspect, future tense and passive. In other words, it investigates how Persian makes use of the universal auxiliary categories, be and have, and then it attempts to find out the similarities and differences between this language and others with regard to the selection of these verbs. In the next step the gathered data is analyzed within the framework of croft (2003). The study of various languages showed that the selection of each of auxiliary verbs is not an accidental matter but represents different grammatical and historical development. It is concluded that Persian tends to select the verb be for the perfective aspect and in this way it is more similar to Germanic languages rather than Romance ones. With regard to progressive aspect this language uses the verb have and used to select the verb be before with respect to passive voice although it now uses another auxiliary verb as the production of language invention. For future tense the concept of volition remains in its auxiliary verb. Thus some Persain language usages of the auxiliary verbs follow the universal markedness hierarchy while others are restricted to a few number of world’s languages. © 2015, Tarbiat Modares University. Created by sinaweb.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies (20530692) 4(3)pp. 551-561
Object indexation is a grammatical phenomenon in which a clitic pronoun, co-referential with the free nominal object, appends to the verb. Optionality of indexation in Persian leads us to consider the role of pragmatic factors in its occurring. The present study aims at investigating the influence of information structure on direct object indexation in Persian. To do this, the data of standard spoken Persian including 540 cases were extracted from various resources and then analyzed within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar. The high frequency of topical direct object indexation confirms the role of information structure in direct object indexation. Analyzing the few cases of focal direct object indexation indicated that all cases of both topical and focal object indexation necessarily involve identifiable referents. Hence, the basic requirement in direct object indexation in Persian is identifiability of its referent. Considering the syntactic position of direct object in Persian clauses shows strong overlap of topical and focal objects. The post-core slot only belongs to the topical direct object and focal object cannot be placed there. Therefore, in order to identify the pragmatic relations of direct object in a clause, considering the context of the discourse is highly important. © 2014 Academy Publisher Manufactured In Finland.
Language Related Research (23223081) 5(1)pp. 63-88
Generally speaking, cleft constructions are marked syntactic structures, which represent a simple logical proposition by two clauses. The relation of these constructions to more basic structures is determined in regard with the theoretical framework chosen for the analysis. In the one hand, transformational studies try to determine the underlying structure through using cleft construction features. If copular sentences were considered as the basic structure for cleft constructions, the chosen analysis would be an extrapositioal one, and in the case of relating these structures to non-cleft structures, expletive analysis would be given. Recent efforts on studying cleft constructions will not be accommodated in none of the approaches above, on the other hand. Eventually, this paper indicates that transformational approaches can not well afford explaining these sentences, and thus a non-transformational approach must be chosen. © 2014, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.
Language Related Research (23223081) 5(3)pp. 55-80
The present research deals with the investigation of subject-intransitive verb agreement in the Persian language. The corpus of this research has been extracted from articles as well as spoken and written utterances. The data are analyzed based on Minimality and Optimality approaches each of which has been explained under generative framework. The research intends to show the exception cases of agreement in the traditional Persian grammar based on Chomsky's recent Minimalist approach which is syntactic-based and the optimal theory which is constraint-based. The reason behind selecting these two approaches is to determine as which one of them explains the exceptional agreements better. In the minimality, subject-verb agreement involves a relationship between probe and goal in order to determine the unvalued features. But in the optimality, the interaction of constraints influences the choice of optimal agreements. The findings demonstrate that all the exception cases of agreements are explained based on the minimal approach; in honorific or polite application, the presence of the feature [+HON] causes plural agreement on verb. In the subject-less verbs, the probe agrees with null PRO. Moreover, in optimality, the optimal choice is determined following the Extended Animacy Hierarchy. The results show that the minimal approach is much more efficient than the optimality theory in explaining the subject-verb agreements. © 2014, Tarbiat Modares University. All rights reserved.
English Language Teaching (discontinued) (19164742) 5(8)pp. 130-145
The studies regarding information structure and its distribution in sentences are traced back to works of Prague School linguists such as Mathesius in 1920s. Recently, the issue of information structure has been dealt with by functionalists. In Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), information structure constitutes one of the main components of syntax. In this theory, information structure is mainly based on the Lambrechtiyan information structure which regards the formal structure of sentences as highly related to the discourse-pragmatic functions. Information structure investigates the way information is structured in clauses and sentences. This paper aims at dealing with information structure in interrogative sentences according to RRG. At first a brief introduction to works on information structure and RRG is presented. Then the theory is applied briefly to Persian language declaratives and dominantly to interrogatives.
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences (discontinued) (20392117) 3(2)pp. 479-486
This article provides a syntactic analysis of Topicalization and Focalization processes in Persian within the framework of minimalist syntax. According to Haegeman and Gueron's Split CP Hypothesis (1999), Topicalization is a recursive process and can apply to more than one constituent in a sentence, while Focalization is unique and therefore appears in a single projection. In this paper we argue that in Persian more than one constituent might undergo focalization. This implies that Focalization cannot be unique. Thus, we first propose two Focal Phrases in the periphery position of a clause. The specifier positions of the two Focal phrases are the landing sites of the focused constituents. Then we suggest the relative position of focal phrases with topic phrases in Persian. It will be concluded that the first focus phrase appears immediately after the complementizer phrase before the first recursive topic phrase followed by the second focus phrase and recursive topic phrase respectively.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies (20530692) 2(9)pp. 1828-1834
Some syntacticians claim that a non-referential second argument of an activity predicate expresses an intrinsic aspect of the meaning of the verb and does not refer specifically to any participants in the event denoted by the verb. The aim of this paper is to examine activity predicates in Persian to see whether they follow this proposal or not. Presenting the properties of two-place activity predicates in Persian, and their accomplishment counterparts, I argue that the second argument in activity verbs of consumption, creation, performance, etc. is an inherent argument of the predicate. Indeed, they are part of the predicate, rather than the participants in the event. Moreover, it is shown that if the second argument takes a referentiality marker, the verb class is changed to accomplishment. Finally, it is concluded that Persian supports the RRG treatment for two-place activity predicates. © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.
