Publication Date: 2006
Studia Linguistica (14679582)60(1)pp. 97-120
The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the Persian past tense form is projected into the future to designate events, states, and processes. While it must be admitted that the phenomenon under consideration is by no means confined to Persian, its examination in this language will reveal certain characteristics which are likely to contribute to a better understanding of how temporal deixis, together with aspectual and modal meanings, interact with contextual factors to yield socio-culturally relevant utterances. Of special theoretical interest in this respect are the semantic-pragmatic constraints levied, in varying degrees, on the projected tense in terms of negation, pronominal choice, speech act assignment, aspectual character, modal status, and pitch contour. Fundamental to the present study are three assumptions. First, the deictic projection at issue has pragmatic motivations, and, in addition, stems largely from the ontological asymmetry between pastness and futurity. Second, it has an indisputable edge over the other future-indicating devices available to Persian speakers in that it denotes factivity with respect to the occurrence of a situation. And third, it is stylistically marked as it digresses from the normal function of the past tense. © The Editorial Board of Studia Linguistica 2006.
Publication Date: 2008
Journal of Language and Politics (15692159)7(1)pp. 53-70
This paper aims to investigate the language used by newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran. More precisely, the paper sets out to analyze how such a language is deployed to represent relevant hegemonic ideologies. The approach adopted for this purpose draws inspiration mainly from critical linguistics, where it is hypothesized that, as far as the pertinent metadiscourse goes, media genres serve to activate and perpetuate social power relations. In keeping with this theoretical stance, the paper argues that socially constructed texts can be said to perform two complementary functions; on the one hand, they shed light on the realities experienced in social life; on the other, they reveal such aspects of those realities as are constructed through the use of language. It is thus in this context that the media language used in the post-revolutionary Iran lends itself to analytical investigation, where the available data reveal the co-existence of three competing discourse processes of 'Islamization', 'Iranian Nationalism' and 'Western liberalism', relating to the third stage development of post-revolutionary Iran. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Publication Date: 2009
Language Sciences (03880001)31(6)pp. 853-873
The present paper sets out to focus on an aspect of the modal system of Persian which, despite its crucial role in interactive discourse, has not received the treatment it deserves. More precisely, the paper seeks to investigate how the simple past is deployed to express subjective epistemic and deontic modality within a future-oriented framework. This apparent clash between tense and time can be explained in terms of a set of recognition criteria: tense-distinction, interrogation, conditionality and modal harmony. The clash is also explicable pragmatically in that it is heavily context-dependent. In both cases, the underlying assumption is that the modality under consideration is invariably construed as indicating certainty, disbelief, challenge, nonchalance or obligation with respect to a particular state of affairs. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Publication Date: 2010
Language Sciences (03880001)32(4)pp. 488-504
The goal of this paper is to investigate the syntax and semantics of obligatory control predicates in Persian. After reviewing present syntactic approaches to control, the facts of Persian are shown to lead to the conclusion that it is not possible to identify the controller in Persian on purely syntactic grounds. Rather, the properties of obligatory control constructions in this language provide evidence for the necessity of considering semantic factors in the proper analysis of this construction. These properties are shown to follow a semantic treatment along the lines of Jackendoff and Culicover (2003) and Culicover and Jackendoff (2005). We propose that in Persian obligatory control constructions, the control predicate licenses an event complement with the controller being the argument to which the control predicate assigns the role of actor for the action stated in the complement clause. Classes of exceptions, not to be discussed in this paper, may be treated as coercion in the sense of Sag and Pollard (1991), Pollard and Sag (1994); followed by Jackendoff and Culicover (2003) and Culicover and Jackendoff (2005), in which internal conventionalized semantic materials, not present in syntax, are added. © 2009.
Publication Date: 2010
Languages in Contrast (15699897)10(1)pp. 54-75
This paper investigates how English influences the Persian scientific language. By analyzing parallel corpora of English and Persian texts from the areas of education and psychology, the paper seeks to reveal that translation as a language contact phenomenon influences not only the grammatical and semantic categories of the target language, it also leaves some traces of the impact of the source language on the discourse-pragmatics of the target language. This in turn leads to a kind of stylistic variation triggered by the source language. One of the main arguments adduced is that such a replication is based on the cultural filters operating in the replica language. In other words, the borrowed elements show a kind of innovative adaptation to the new environment to resolve their clashes with the target language. Thus the paper primarily focuses on the influence on Persian, through translation, of the English passive construction, as well as its deictic terms of first personal pronouns. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Publication Date: 2011
Asian EFL Journal (17381460)13(3)pp. 153-183
The current study sets out 1) to investigate the strategic needs of participants in reading literary and non-literary texts; and 2) to shed light on the differences of reading literary and non-literary texts. To achieve this aim, thirty participants read three literary and two non-literary texts and wrote down the questions for which they could not find any answer.Next, these questions were categorized in five groups: Scripturally implicit, textually implicit, textually explicit, linguistic and miscomprehension. The findings suggest that the dominant problem of participants lies in textually implicit aspects of the text. Finally, a Kruskal-Wallis test was applied in order to compare the frequency of question types across literary and non-literary texts. The difference of all question types proved to be statistically significant across both literary and non-literary texts.
