Linguistics
Masoud Dehghan; Nima Moshtaghi; Shahla Raghibdoust; Kourosh Saberi
Abstract
Coherence is one of the discourse–building features whose absence in the discourse of senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s type causes their discourse becomes misunderstanding. So, the present study aims to investigate coherence in the discourse of Kurdish senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s ...
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Coherence is one of the discourse–building features whose absence in the discourse of senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s type causes their discourse becomes misunderstanding. So, the present study aims to investigate coherence in the discourse of Kurdish senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s type. The methodological nature of this quantitative study is ex post facto type and the statistic population of this study included 20 subjects (10 senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s type subjects and 10 normal elderly subjects) who were matched based on age (63-75), gender (male and female), illiteracy, and Kurdish language (Kalhori dialect) speaker. To determine the severity of dementia, the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale was administered and subjects with a score (0.5 ≤ score< 2) were selected. Then subjects answered the questions about their daily routines, families, and celebrating Eid Nowrouz. The data were analyzed based on Laine et al view and SPSS 16.0, independent T-test was used to obtain the statistic results. The findings indicate that there is a significant difference between the discourse of SDAT and NE subjects in the use of global coherence with (P=0/004) and local coherence with (P=0/003). The results showed that the use of global and local coherence has less frequency in the discourse of SDAT subjects; however, the absence of global coherence is more obvious. In the other word, local coherence has more frequency than global coherence.
Masoumeh Zarei; Shahla Raghib Dust
Abstract
Color terms are radiation of the human conceptual system that represents a reflection of his cognitive and linguistic features. The human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Metaphor is a cognitive mechanism and one of the linguistic strategies that can play a part in color term ...
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Color terms are radiation of the human conceptual system that represents a reflection of his cognitive and linguistic features. The human conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Metaphor is a cognitive mechanism and one of the linguistic strategies that can play a part in color term formation and categorical extension of colors. This study has taken metaphor in Persian color terms and the metaphorical structure of color categories in the Persian language into consideration. In this study, based on cognitive lexical semantics, 910 color terms in Persian have been analyzed. After describing semantic domains in the metaphorical formation of Persian color terms and analyzing the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms, the frequency of semantic domains’ application in Persian color terms and color categories’ tendency for participation in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms have been investigated. Metaphor is one of the cognitive mechanisms that have a significant role in forming color categories and their conceptual extension in Persian. The domains whose phenomena have been observed in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms are plant domain, animal domain, food domain, body domain, mineral domain, natural phenomenon domain, and object domain. The frequency of application and distribution of these semantic domains in Persian color categories is not equal. Besides, the rate of color categories’ participation in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms and their tendency to the source semantic domains vary in metaphorical mapping.
Introduction
Color terms are radiation of the human conceptual system that represents a reflection of his cognitive and linguistic features. Metaphor is a cognitive mechanism and one of the linguistic strategies that can play a part in color term formation and categorical extension of colors. This study has considered metaphor in Persian color terms and the metaphorical structure of color categories in the Persian language. In this research, we attempted to provide answers to the following questions:
How is the metaphorical structure of color categories in the Persian language?
What are the source domains in the metaphorical mapping of concepts in Persian color terms?
What is the contribution of color categories to the metaphorical structure and the extent of their tendency to the semantic domains in Persian color terms?
Literature Review
Conklin (1955) studied color categories in the Hanunóo language. Berlin and Kay (1969) argued that all languages share a universal system of basic color categorization that has evolved in 7 stages. Rosch (1973) studied the color terms of the Dani language. Levinson (2000) categorizes color propositions in the Yélî language. Everett (2005) believes that there are considerable differences in the way colors are named among the speakers of the Pirahã language. Xing (2009) investigated color terms in Chinese. Gol-Mohammadzadeh (2009) studied the symbolic meaning of color terms among Persian speakers. Estaji (2007) investigated Persian color terms structurally. Afrashi and Samet (2012) studied the conceptual metaphors of color in the Persian language. Alizadeh Sahrai and Raskhmahand (2016) investigated the hierarchy of basic color words in Persian.
Methodology
This research was based on a fieldwork study and the data was collected from different social-cultural contexts in the Persian-speaking society. In this study, we examined 910 color terms descriptively and statistically, within the scope of cognitive lexical semantics and the theoretical beliefs of Lakoff and Johnson (1980). In this research, we investigated the metaphorical structure of color categories and the formation of Persian color terms through the cognitive mechanism of metaphorical mapping.
Results
The analysis of the research data shows that in the metaphorical structure of color categories, due to the similarity of an area of the color spectrum to a phenomenon in the surrounding world, the name of that phenomenon is used for the lexical encoding of that area in the color spectrum. There is a general metaphor in the formation of Persian color terms and their categorization: the radiating color phenomenon is color (see the figure below).
Figure 1
The general conceptual metaphor of color in the Persian language
source domain target domain
radiating color phenomenon
color
mapping
This general metaphor is made of a set of radiating color phenomena that create a cluster of “convergent cognitive models” together. This cluster radially causes the formation of a set of convergent subcategories in the color categories, which are: color is plant, color is animal, color is body, color is food, color is mineral, color is natural phenomenon, and color is object. The models of this cluster are shown in the figure below:
Figure 2
The cluster of metaphorical cognitive models
source domains target domains
color
color
color
color
color
color
color
plant
animal
body
comestible
mineral
natural phenomenon
object
mappings
These cognitive models are semantic source domains in the metaphorical mapping of 910 Persian color terms. Figure (3) illustrates the distribution of these domains in the metaphorical mapping of Persian color terms:
Figure 3
the distribution of semantic domains in the metaphorical mapping
Generally, the distribution of these semantic domains in Persian color categories is not the same as the following table shows:
Table 1
The distribution of the semantic domain in color categories
color categories
plant
animal
mineral
natural phenomenon
food
body
object
blue
2%
6%
6%
18%
3%
5%
0%
purple
8%
2%
1%
0%
0%
0%
0%
gray
0%
12%
15%
9%
1%
3%
12%
yellow
17%
10%
18%
8%
10%
23%
14%
green
21%
13%
10%
5%
1%
5%
5%
red
19%
12%
15%
15%
25%
28%
7%
white
3%
9%
10%
14%
17%
8%
26%
black
2%
8%
4%
12%
0%
5%
9%
pink
9%
1%
3%
3%
9%
10%
5%
brown
12%
15%
10%
6%
33%
15%
9%
orange
6%
2%
7%
5%
0%
0%
0%
polycolor
1%
9%
2%
5%
0%
0%
14%
In addition to the non-uniformity of the frequency of the use of semantic domains in color categories, the participation rate of each of these color categories in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms:
Figure 5
The participation rate of color categories
The tendency of each of these color categories to the source semantic domains in the metaphorical mapping is also different. The following table shows the contribution of color categories in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms and the tendency of each of them to the source semantic domains in the metaphorical mapping:
Table 2
The contribution and tendency of color categories
color categories
plant
animal
mineral
natural phenomenon
food
body
object
blue
10%
21%
16%
45%
4%
4%
0%
purple
85%
9%
6%
0%
0%
0%
0%
gray
1%
34%
34%
20%
1%
1%
9%
yellow
43%
14%
19%
8%
5%
7%
4%
green
58%
20%
11%
6%
1%
2%
2%
red
41%
14%
13%
12%
%11
7%
2%
white
12%
19%
16%
22%
14%
4%
13%
black
17%
28%
11%
32%
0%
4%
8%
pink
57%
4%
8%
8%
11%
8%
4%
brown
33%
21%
11%
7%
20%
5%
3%
orange
49%
10%
23%
18%
0%
0%
0%
polycolor
14%
55%
10%
21%
0%
0%
0%
Conclusion
Metaphor is one of the cognitive mechanisms that play a great role in the formation of color categories and their conceptual extension in the Persian language. In the metaphorical structure of color categories in Persian, the concept of the surrounding phenomena domain is exactly mapped to the domain of color. The similarity between phenomenon and color is lexically encoded by color-term-forming affixes and morphemes of the Persian language. In Persian color terms, metaphor functions paradigmatically and there is a one-to-one correspondence between the concept of phenomenon and the concept of color. The domains that have been observed in the metaphorical structure of Persian are, in order of maximum, as follows: plant domain, animal domain, food domain, body domain, mineral domain, natural phenomenon domain, and object domain.
There is a non-uniformity in the degree of distribution of these semantic domains in different categories; the presence of some of them is more prominent in some color categories and insignificant in others. Furthermore, the percentage of color categories’ participation in the metaphorical structure of Persian color terms and their tendency to the source domains in the metaphorical mapping are also different. Plant is the most prototypical semantic domain in the metaphorical structure of Persian color categories and green, red, and yellow categories are the prototypical categories in the semantic domain of plant.
Shohre Sadeghi; Shahla Raghibdoust
Abstract
Relative construction is one of the complex syntactic constructions involving various structures depending on the different language typologies. Studies in several languages have shown that subject relative clauses (SRCs) are easier and faster to process than object relative clauses (ORCs). Some studies ...
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Relative construction is one of the complex syntactic constructions involving various structures depending on the different language typologies. Studies in several languages have shown that subject relative clauses (SRCs) are easier and faster to process than object relative clauses (ORCs). Some studies have proposed the topichood hypothsis to account for the ease and faster processing of the subject relative clause. However, based on this hypothesis, when the embedded noun phrase in a relative clause is a pronoun, the difficulty in the processing of object relative clauses is reduced. In the present study, the speed of the processing Persian subject and object relative clauses with full NP and pronoun were investigated on fourtu 20–30-year-old monolingual normal subjects using self-paced reading (SPR) experiment, one of the online experiments in psycholinguistic studies. The experiment was presented in a linear, noncumulative (i.e., moving window) SPR procedure with region-by-region segmentation. Each of the 16 sentential stimuli had 4 syntactic forms and collectively, 640 reading time data from the subjects were recorded. The findings indicated that the processing speed of the regions within relative clauses, i.e., the regions containing relative clause noun phrase and relative clause verb, were faster in pronominal ORCs, pronominal SRCs, full NP SRCs and full NP ORCs, respectively. However, the processing speed of the main clause verb region was a bit different in the various sentences containing relative clauses. The conclusions, in line with the results of a number of research in other languages, confirmed the topichood hypothesis with respect to the processing of Persian relative clauses.
Nima Noori; Shahla Raghibdoost
Abstract
Since, based on previous findings, orthographic depth affects the nature of cognitive mechanisms, different patterns can be expected depending on the degrees of transparency or opacity of the orthographic systems of languages. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between ...
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Since, based on previous findings, orthographic depth affects the nature of cognitive mechanisms, different patterns can be expected depending on the degrees of transparency or opacity of the orthographic systems of languages. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, and phonological working memory with reading speed and reading accuracy in Persian. The participants included 75 healthy and normal monolingual Persian-speaking children (mean age 121.6 months) studying in Grades 3-5 in Zahedan elementary schools. From each grade, 25 children were selected by purposive sampling. All children belonged to the middle and upper social classes. 9 subtests were administered to the children to measure the variables of IQ, reading speed, reading accuracy, phonological working memory, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming. The results indicated that there is a strong and significant relationship between rapid automatized naming and reading speed. The relationship between this variable and reading accuracy was moderate and significant. Phonological awareness had a relatively strong and significant relationship with reading speed and reading accuracy. Phonological working memory had a significant and moderate relationship with reading speed. It did not have a significant relationship with the reading accuracy. Regarding the relationship between these cognitive predictors and reading in Persian, it can be inferred that it is very similar to the relationship between these variables and reading, which has been reported in inconsistent orthographies like English and Hebrew. The results indicate that the cognitive predictors are significantly affected by the orthographic transparency.
Simin Sedehi; Shahla Raghibdoust
Abstract
Velati (Velayati) is a dialect used to be spoken all over Varnosfaderan, a region located in Khomeini Shahr, Isfahan Province in Iran. Unfortunately, like many other dialects, affected by miscellaneous factors, this dialect has been considerably wiped out and its usage is currently restricted to Bavalgan, ...
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Velati (Velayati) is a dialect used to be spoken all over Varnosfaderan, a region located in Khomeini Shahr, Isfahan Province in Iran. Unfortunately, like many other dialects, affected by miscellaneous factors, this dialect has been considerably wiped out and its usage is currently restricted to Bavalgan, one of the five regions of Varnosfaderan. In a research by Esmaeili (1379), the internal classification of the central Iranian dialects and common grouping of Velati and Isfahan Jewish dialects were mentioned. As no documented evidence regarding the linguistic comparison of the two dialects was available, the present study aimed at examining the structure of the past tense verbs in the two dialects in order to shed light on their similarities and differences. The results of the study indicated striking resemblances between Velati and Isfahan Jewish dialects at the phonetic, phonologic and morphologic levels. Moreover, it was found that transitive and intransitive past tense verbs involve distinct structures in both dialects which may point to the existence of the ergative structure. In sum, the similarities of the past-tense verb structures in the two dialects were so remarkable that they confirmed the hypothesis that they are of a common historical origin.
Shahla Raghibdoust; Elahe Kamari
Abstract
Previous research showed that deaf individuals in compare to hearing ones perform weaker in syntactic processing. Therefore, they are expected to compensate for this defect through using their background knowledge. The aims of this study were to investigate the effect of deafness on the participants’ ...
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Previous research showed that deaf individuals in compare to hearing ones perform weaker in syntactic processing. Therefore, they are expected to compensate for this defect through using their background knowledge. The aims of this study were to investigate the effect of deafness on the participants’ ability to comprehend subject relative clauses, and to determine their strategies in comprehending the semantically plausible subject relative clauses and semantically implausible ones within the theoretical framework of Interactive-Compensatory Model (Stanovich, 1980). The performance of 4 profound deaf students in fifth grades as the experimental group and 4 healthy hearing students as the control group was studied in a cross-sectional research to evaluate their comprehension of semantically plausible subject relative clauses and semantically implausible ones. The findings of this research showed that there was no significant difference between the performance of the deaf and hearing participants in comprehending semantically plausible sentences (p>0/05). However, a significant difference between the performance of the two groups was observed with respect to their comprehension of semantically implausible sentences (p<0/05). Based on the analysis of the data, it was concluded that the difficulty that the deaf experimental group experienced in processing semantically implausible subject relative sentences can be attributed to their use of a top-down strategy in comprehending these syntactic structures.
