Maryam Daneshgar
Abstract
Ethnic diversity in Iran results in language variety and it affects education from the first year of school; therefore it is necessary to take heed of this matter and to prevent disturbing bilingual children’s education progress for lack of deficiency in the Persian language. This study has been ...
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Ethnic diversity in Iran results in language variety and it affects education from the first year of school; therefore it is necessary to take heed of this matter and to prevent disturbing bilingual children’s education progress for lack of deficiency in the Persian language. This study has been done to analyze the language skills of bilingual and graduated Persian speakers. Statistical society was the students of twelfth grade and the sample has been chosen with the cluster sample and random multistage method among these cities: Arak, Tabriz, Sari, Sanandaj, Shiraz, Yasouj, and Yazd. The research methodology was based on a survey. Besides descriptive statistics, in the inferential statistics part, the non-parametric tests of Mann-Whitney U and KruskalWallis and the parametric test of t-test and ANOVA were employed. Examining the quantitative and qualitative data proved that the results of evaluating Persian and bilingual graduates were meaningful in reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills and the Persian students functioned in all of the skills better than the bilingual students. These outcomes were exact even with adding gender, major, and comparison between the best score of bilinguals and the weakest score of Persian students. The meaningful differences between all of the skills demonstrated that the efforts made in the formal education years were not efficient enough. Based on language variety in Iran, the recommendation of this paper is a reconsideration of current educational programs, especially with paying attention to preschool and the first-third grades of elementary school.Introduction Persian is the national and official language of Iran and all of the official education at schools are done in Persian language. On the other hand, Iran has ethnic diversity with various dialects in a large population. Therefore, Iranian children don’t have the same language situation by entering school at the age of six and their proficiency in Persian is different. According to the studies, if proper education regarding the dialects and languages of each region does not occur, there will be a learning disability and it will spread to other grades. This topic must be taken seriously to prevent the lack of Persian, which disturbs bilingual children’s educational progress. This research is done to analyze bilingualism's impact on enhancing the reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills of graduated students of the educational system by paying attention to the sort of language (being bilingual or Persian speaker), gender, and major.Literature ReviewNumerous studies in Iran and other countries revealed the better performance of bilinguals and a positive influence of bilingualism on the social and cognitive abilities of children and teenagers (including cf. Povarch and Kurt, 2019; Jumabava, 2021; Asadibalin, 1394; Abtahi and Khodadadian, 1395; Yousefi et al. 1396), in contrast, other studies displayed that being bilingual for Iranian children is usually a disturbing point rather than an advantage. The first exposure to school for students with different mother tongues will usually cause language confusion that will affect their educational process. The discontinuity between the language of school and the mother tongues of students will hinder communication based on personal motivation so it will harm the educational process (Parsaie et al, 1392) also the rate of dropping out of school in the cities with the majority of bilinguals is considerably more than other cities (Daneshgar, 1396).MethodologyThe research methodology was based on a survey. Statistical society was all of the students of twelfth grade and the sample was 595 graduated students of the twelfth grade of high school that was chosen among these cities: Arak, Tabriz, Sari, Sanandaj, Shiraz, Yasouj, and Yazd with the cluster sample and random multistage method (for more information, see Daneshgar, 1398, pp. 56-53). Selecting the sample (shown in Table No. 1) was purposeful and attempted to cover the linguistic variousness of different regions of Iran. Table 1Statistical data of participants Language situationGenderEducational majortotalbilingualPersian speakerboygirlLiberal artsScienceMathematicsnumber232363277318142326127595percent39614753245521100Research tools were: A. web-based, online, and researcher test for reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills (for more information about the construction of the test and evaluation tables, see Daneshgar, 1398, 57-61), B. background questionnaire of students including background information which will lead to giving information about the mother tongue of participants and the usage of their mother tongue among their families compared to Persian.ResultsBased on the sort of language (being bilingual or Persian speaker): among bilingual and monolingual Persian speakers in all reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills is a notable difference and in all of these skills, Persian speakers have more capacities.Based on gender: in all of the skills, girls had more abilities and this difference was meaningful. Moreover, the impact of gender was analyzed between the Persian speakers and the bilinguals. The results demonstrated that the function of Persian speakers (both boys and girls groups) were better in all reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills and they gained better results.Based on educational major: the result of liberal arts, Science, and mathematics in reading and writing skills indicated a significant difference but in listening and speaking skills this difference was not meaningful. The influence of educational majors on Persian speakers and bilinguals was studied. The outcomes proved that the function of Persian speakers in all majors (liberal arts, Science, and mathematics) was better in all reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills and they earned better results.Analyzing the results based on descriptive statistics was notable. The comparison between the best score of bilinguals and the weakest score of Persian students by adding elements of gender and major verified the better function of Persian speakers and the average weakest score of Persian speakers was better than the average of best scores of bilinguals. ConclusionThe results of evaluating the four skills of graduated Persian speakers and bilinguals confirmed better results for Persian speakers with considerable differences and more capabilities. Since these results are for the students of the last grade of schools, the outcomes with significant differences in all the skills proved that the efforts made in formal education were not efficient enough to make children and teenagers skillful in the Persian language. This circumstance will also spread into university and, predictably, the language skills of students at university are the same as their school time situation. The result of education in each country is the consequence of the evaluation of all of the users of that pedagogical system, therefore the cause for this problem is that all of the children don’t have the same language situation but the educational system assumes all of them in the same level and present same educational program for all. This negligence will disturb the educational function of language, proper and deep perceiving and finally, it will result in language lacking in graduation time. Regarding the language diversity of Iran, it is essential to verify this problem in the educational system. Also, it is vital to take heed of the features of the students, especially in the first years of school. In the bargain, it is important to provide educational programs for the teachers of bilingual regions and empower their professional skills, mainly from the first to the third grade of elementary school. It is also crucial to assess sporadic evaluations based on national standards.
Fahimeh Khodaverdi; Golnaz Modarresi Ghavami; Mojtaba Monshizadeh
Abstract
This article accounts for the acoustic grounds of the diachronic lenition of Old Persian /k/ to [ʧ] and [z] in certain verbal (present tense) and nonverbal forms and to [x] in the past tense of the same verbs, in /V__ [a, e]/ and /V__[t]/ contexts respectively. In order to replicate the phonetic ...
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This article accounts for the acoustic grounds of the diachronic lenition of Old Persian /k/ to [ʧ] and [z] in certain verbal (present tense) and nonverbal forms and to [x] in the past tense of the same verbs, in /V__ [a, e]/ and /V__[t]/ contexts respectively. In order to replicate the phonetic context of these diachronic changes within the framework of laboratory phonology, present day Persian forms containing the same phonetic contexts were uttered twice by two male speakers of Persian and recorded and analyzed using the Praat software (version 5363). The results of the acoustic analysis of the recorded samples and Independent-Samples t-test indicated that [k] shows a high degree of fronting within the context of the stressed vowels [á, é]. At the same time, aspiration in intervocalic position motivates the spirantization/affrication of this consonant. Intervocalic fronted [c] and [ʧ] are acoustically similar to each other as well as to [ʃ] and [s]. The consonants [c] and [x] have certain common acoustic characteristics when they appear before [t]. Therefore, [c] is prone to be weakened and interpreted as a fricative/affricate in such contexts.
mahnush eskandari; Ali Saeidi
Abstract
In Persian, the complement subordinate clause is known as one of the direct dependents of the verb, but in Russian, it can also be dependent on the verb, noun, short adjective, or predicative adverbs. In this study, we have examined the types of complement clauses in Russian and Persian, and since the ...
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In Persian, the complement subordinate clause is known as one of the direct dependents of the verb, but in Russian, it can also be dependent on the verb, noun, short adjective, or predicative adverbs. In this study, we have examined the types of complement clauses in Russian and Persian, and since the main difference between these clauses in these two languages is in the words that need an obligatory dependent or complement, we will examine these words in Russian and also how to express these clauses in Persian. The purpose of this study is to find similarities and fundamental differences between the complement subordinate clause and the words that need a complement in both Russian and Persian by carefully examining the complement subordinate clause and the words that need a complement and obligatory dependent in both languages. Therefore, take a step to facilitate the teaching of Russian compound sentences to Persian-speaking students. Most Complement clauses in Persian are obligatory and dependent on verbs. Also, in the studies conducted, it was found that the complement clauses related to predicative adverbs in Russian are expressed in Persian with the complement clause related to evaluative, positive, and aspect verbs, and the clauses related to short adjectives in the Persian language come with the adverbial cause clause.Also, in the studies conducted, it was found that the complement clauses related to predicative adverbs in Russian are expressed in Persian with the complement clause related to evaluative, positive, and aspect verbs, and the clauses related to short adjectives in Persian language come with the adverbial cause clause.
Masume Zarei
Abstract
Color terms and color naming is a matter that has frequently drawn the attention of the linguists. Human eyes can identify more than seven million colors. Languages in different cultures have tried to represent lexically a range of them. Color terms and their typology is considered as one of the pivotal ...
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Color terms and color naming is a matter that has frequently drawn the attention of the linguists. Human eyes can identify more than seven million colors. Languages in different cultures have tried to represent lexically a range of them. Color terms and their typology is considered as one of the pivotal studies in recent decades. While there are Persian words for the colors, each year, due to inaccessibility, several non-Persian color terms enter this language. This article is aimed at representing a list of Persian color terms, studying their morphological structure, their localization and enrichment of Persian language and culture. More than sixteen hundred color terms have been collected by the writer. These terms can be divided into simple and complex words. Only 2.74% of Persian color terms are simple and 97.26% of them have complex structure. Persian speakers create color terms through suffixation and syntactic processes. 50.50% of complex color terms have derivational structure and the remaining 46.76% are compound. Derivation and compounding are the most productive and frequent processes in the formation of Persian color terms.
Reza Morad Sahraee; Shohrehalsadat Sajjadi; Shiva Majidi; Amirhossein Mojiri
Abstract
Corona is a phenomenon that the living human being has not experienced before, and it happens so suddenly that it causes the closure of Persian language classes in the world. There are 14 Lebanese students studying at the Center of Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages at Allameh Tabataba'i ...
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Corona is a phenomenon that the living human being has not experienced before, and it happens so suddenly that it causes the closure of Persian language classes in the world. There are 14 Lebanese students studying at the Center of Teaching Persian to Speakers of Other Languages at Allameh Tabataba'i University, who were getting ready to attend academic study in Iranian universities for the year 1399. They have spent half of their Persian-learning course in face-to-face classes where they have encountered Coronavirus problems. In order to solve their problem, Azfa center has shifted their class to virtual online classes. This article reports the result of the virtual Persian classes that took place in this center. The question of this research is: Whether virtual online classes can be replaced with face-to-face education in emergency conditions? The results showed that the rate of language learners' progress in Coronavirus epidemic conditions (virtual education) was not significantly different from face-to-face teaching. Lebanese learners were also largely satisfied with learning Persian virtually. It can be concluded that in emergency situations, the web platform can be used for language teaching. In order to answer the question of the research, we have used students' progress tests and compared the grades of face-to-face classes with virtual online classes and also used a researcher-made questionnaire to measure students' satisfaction.
Hassan Bashirnezhad; Somayeh Mohammadi
Abstract
The present study examines the lexical and syntactic development of dissimilar Persian-speaking twins named Behzad and Behnam over a period of ten months (from the beginning of 21 months to the beginning of 31 months). This study seeks to find out what differences and similarities there are in the syntactic ...
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The present study examines the lexical and syntactic development of dissimilar Persian-speaking twins named Behzad and Behnam over a period of ten months (from the beginning of 21 months to the beginning of 31 months). This study seeks to find out what differences and similarities there are in the syntactic and lexical development of these twins, despite the fact that the two children grow up in the same language environment. The data of this study were collected through rapid observation and recording of data in a notebook, audio and video recording using a video camera and audio recorder, as well as the diary of the mother of the twins in which children's language products were recorded. The investigation of the collected data and their comparative analysis each month shows a significant difference between the lexical and syntactic development of the twins. Although in the early months of the study, Behzad had a much higher language ability compared to his twin brother, Behnam, from the fourth month of the study, a significant increase in Behnam's lexical and syntactic growth rate was observed. Considering that the language development environment of these two children, both in the family and in the kindergarten, has often been the same, the existence of differences in the lexical and syntactic developmental stages of these two children can be attributed to the difference in innate and inherited linguistic talent of these two children. Dizygotic twins do not have exactly the same chromosomal structure. The results of this study show creative mental activities in two children, which is evidenced by the existence of numerous cases of over-extension and overgeneralization.
Morteza Dastlan
Abstract
Polygrammaticalization is a type of multiple development where a single form develops distinct grammatical functions in different constructions. The verb ‘xāstan’ is an instance of this phenomenon which conceptualizes specific notions of tense, aspect and modality in modern Persian. Xāstan, ...
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Polygrammaticalization is a type of multiple development where a single form develops distinct grammatical functions in different constructions. The verb ‘xāstan’ is an instance of this phenomenon which conceptualizes specific notions of tense, aspect and modality in modern Persian. Xāstan, as a lexical verb and with the meaning “to want something”, falls in “Volition” basic event schema. Since different parameters of grammaticalization are applied on the verb in the grammaticalization process, the verb xāstan transforms to a complex schema. As an auxiliary verb and in serial complex schema, xāstan conceptualizes the future tense. In the same complex schema but in different contexts, the verb expresses proximative and avertive aspects. When the verb xāstan falls in evaluative complex schema, it conceptualizes a new notion of modality in which the speaker requests addressee the permission of actualizing the verb by proposing a suggestion; as a result, it is called proposal modality. The main explanation of polygrammaticalization of the verb xāstan in Persian seems to be filling the functional gaps and satisfying the need of conceptualizing the grammatical functions not met by other grammatical forms.
Mahmood Jafari Dehaghi; Mojtaba Monshizadeh; Fahimeh Tasalibakhsh Kaseb
Abstract
Modal functions of the verb “residan” (to arrive) and the emergence of such modal characteristics are discussed from the perspective of grammaticalization in the present study. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to make a review on former studies on the subject of modality – more ...
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Modal functions of the verb “residan” (to arrive) and the emergence of such modal characteristics are discussed from the perspective of grammaticalization in the present study. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to make a review on former studies on the subject of modality – more specifically, grammaticalization of modality – in Persian, followed by a description of theoretical approaches toward the concepts of modality and grammaticalization. The authors gathered data from different periods of Persian language to study the diachronic changes the verb “rasidan” has faced since the early stages of Old Persian to Middle Persian, New Persian and recent usages in Modern Persian. Analysis of data showed that in some specific contexts in New Persian, the verb “residan” was grammaticalized to represent dynamic, deserving, and permissive modality after undergoing changes such as metaphorical extension. On the other hand, in recent usages in Modern Persian, “residan” has survived, through a different path, as a means to represent dynamic modality.
Azadeh Mirzaei
Abstract
Conditional constructions consist of two clauses. The existence or non-existence of a causal relationship between these two clauses causes the conditional construction to be divided into two groups: consequential and non- consequential conditionals. The literature review of conditional concept shows ...
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Conditional constructions consist of two clauses. The existence or non-existence of a causal relationship between these two clauses causes the conditional construction to be divided into two groups: consequential and non- consequential conditionals. The literature review of conditional concept shows that it can be introduced a variety of conditional constructions according to various criteria though sometimes the same phenomena differ in how they are named. In the present study, by reviewing the literature and based on the corpus-based approach in the Persian language, it was attempted to provide a model that covers various types of conditional construction according to similarities and differences in their properties. The findings showed that in addition to open, hypothetical, real, rhetorical, relevant and implicit assertion conditional construction, the four different types of conditionals including contrastive, implicational contrastive, converse and reverse conditionals can be also introduced. In the contrastive conditional, both clauses describe some related property but differ in some values assigned to the shared property. In implicational contrastive conditional, there is a contrast relationship between one clauses and the inference of the other one. In the converse conditional, contrary to the basic conditional, the "if clause” is the result of the second clause and in the reverse conditionals both clauses simultaneously are conditioned by the other one.
Sepideh Navabzadeh Shafi’i
Abstract
In Persian language, like any other language, there are some words derived from other languages. These words are usually called borrowed, imported or loan-words. Following various historical events, many words from Greek, Arabic, Turkish, French, English, Russian and other languages have found their ...
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In Persian language, like any other language, there are some words derived from other languages. These words are usually called borrowed, imported or loan-words. Following various historical events, many words from Greek, Arabic, Turkish, French, English, Russian and other languages have found their ways into Persian over time. The French language has been the first scientific and educational European language in Iran. As a result, the words of this language hold a special place in Persian in terms of quantity and application. Some very common Persian words have been borrowed from French, and they have been so widespread that all Persian speakers from various social classes are daily and continuously using French words unaware of their origin. French language students, in the course their language learning, notice that some Persian words are in fact borrowed from French roots. Obviously, the loan-words are phonetically changed and coordinated with Persian phonetic system. There have been changes in semantics as well; for example, among many meanings in the language of the origin, only one has entered into Persian or the word meaning and application has changed. In the present study, we aim at investigating the changes in semantic and application of some French loan-words in Persian language.
Amir Ghorbanpour
Abstract
The present study aims at exploring head position in Persian syntactic phrases within the Optimality Theory framework. Making use of syntactic alignment constraints proposed by Grimshaw (2002), which is alternatively notated in this paper as Align-Left/Right(X, XP) (McCarthy, 2008), the study seeks to ...
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The present study aims at exploring head position in Persian syntactic phrases within the Optimality Theory framework. Making use of syntactic alignment constraints proposed by Grimshaw (2002), which is alternatively notated in this paper as Align-Left/Right(X, XP) (McCarthy, 2008), the study seeks to arrive at a consistent ranking of the relevant constraints being active in Persian with respect to the relative position of heads and complements within phrases. Bearing in mind the non-uniformity of head position across Persian syntactic phrases, it is concluded that the general constraint Align-Left (X, XP) is highly active and determinant in most of the syntactic structures in the language; also, the exceptions of head-finality, i.e. verb phrases and the direct object case marker ‘rā’, are accounted for by more specific, higher-ranked constraints of opposite value. These higher-ranked constraints are Align-Right(V, VP) and Align-Right(K, KP) respectively.
Abstract
This article studies the spatial interpretation of the left-right and front-back axes in Persian in the theoretical framework of Levinson (2003) and Danziger (2010). On the horizontal plane, there are three main Frames of Reference. Of these three, the Absolute FoR is not used routinely in Persian. The ...
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This article studies the spatial interpretation of the left-right and front-back axes in Persian in the theoretical framework of Levinson (2003) and Danziger (2010). On the horizontal plane, there are three main Frames of Reference. Of these three, the Absolute FoR is not used routinely in Persian. The other two, the Relative and Intrinsic FoRs, can potentially be the interpretation of the two main axes of the horizontal plane. In order to obtain real data from the native speakers, the “Ball & Chair” game (Bohnemeyer, 2008) was used. Data analysis shows that in all the cases where the speaker’s description caused misunderstanding for the listener, the speaker’s intended interpretation has been relative, while the listener has understood them intrinsically. For the left-right axis, whenever the speaker has considered “[az negah-e] ma” redundant and has had it decreased from the sentence and used phrases such as “chap/rast-e sandali”, there has been a possibility of misunderstanding for the listener. However, when they have used it even in its decreased form of “chap/rast-e ma” the listener has well understood the intended relative meaning. According to the data, in Persian the absolute dominant usage of left and right is relative and only in special cases are they used intrinsically. The front-back axis is also used in the relative sense but with small dominance over intrinsic.
