Raziyeh Gholipour Hafshejani; Mohammad Dabir moghaddam
Abstract
Abstract Theoretical foundation of systemic functional grammar as a general and corpus-based theory concentrates on function and meaning and also focuses on text and the use of language in context. This theory should be applicable to all languages and linguistic works. In this grammar all our inner and ...
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Abstract Theoretical foundation of systemic functional grammar as a general and corpus-based theory concentrates on function and meaning and also focuses on text and the use of language in context. This theory should be applicable to all languages and linguistic works. In this grammar all our inner and outer experiences could be represented by experiential meta-function and its process through transitivity system. This article is a stylistic investigation of the verbs, the process types, and relative frequency of them in dramatic texts. The present study indicates how this theory is capable of analyzing and interpreting dramatic texts stylistically and examining the role of language in dramatic structure. In this study, the authors analyze five famous contemporary Persian plays by transitivity system within the framework of SFG. We consider the frequency and percentage of process types in each play as a stylistic parameter which shows unique structural features of dramatic texts and stylistic features of each play and playwright.
Mohammad Dabir-Moghaddam; Hossein Raeesi
Abstract
Stylistic devices are highly used to write interesting news headlines. However, a review of literature shows that very few studies have been conducted on their usage in a sport context. Therefore, this study has sought to investigate the stylistic devices used in the Iranian sport newspaper headlines. ...
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Stylistic devices are highly used to write interesting news headlines. However, a review of literature shows that very few studies have been conducted on their usage in a sport context. Therefore, this study has sought to investigate the stylistic devices used in the Iranian sport newspaper headlines. To do so, a total of 185 headlines containing stylistic devices from eight sport newspapers collected during a three-month period were classified according to Leigh’s (1994) Model. According to the findings of the study, the two stylistic devices allusion and pun together accounted for over half of the total number. Also, personification, paradox, repetition, and quotation were found to be the least used devices. The findings also indicated that though stylistic devices have served aesthetic functions and have caused the written language to become much closer to colloquial speech, they are sometimes found to be difficult to understand, requiring background knowledge on the readers’ part.
Saeed Labbafan; Mohammad Dabirmoghaddam
Abstract
The main purpose of this study is providing a grammatical description of the agreement system in Khaniki language, based on empirical data. This variant belongs to South-Western Iranian languages. This language, as well as many other Iranian languages, is an endangered language. This language is spoken ...
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The main purpose of this study is providing a grammatical description of the agreement system in Khaniki language, based on empirical data. This variant belongs to South-Western Iranian languages. This language, as well as many other Iranian languages, is an endangered language. This language is spoken in the village [xɑnik], locally called [xunek]. In this paper, the description of the agreement types has been done based on Comrie (1978). In the descriptions, it will eventually turn out that Khaniki has grammaticalized a split alignment system sensitive to grammatical features of 'tense', 'aspect', 'person' in verbs and also the 'semantic feature of the subject'. In clauses containing «+present» verbs, whether transitive or intransitive, the agreement system will be 'Nominative-Accusative' and in clauses containing «+past», «+perfect», «+third person», and «+psyche» verbs, whether transitive or intransitive, the agreement system will be Non-'Nominative-Accusative'. In the 'Nominative-Accusative' system, subjects are always marked by inflectional agreement suffixes appended to verbs and in the Non-'Nominative-Accusative' system, which can be sub-divided to a neutral or tri-oblique type in this language, oblique agreement clitics will mark A, S, and O.
Mojdeh Parsa kia; Mohammad Dabirmoghaddam
Abstract
Conditional constructions are linguistic expressions in which the occurrence of a phenomenon or situation is subject to the occurrence of another phenomenon or situation. This type of construction has different tense patterns regarding its semantic features. This study was conducted to explain the representation ...
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Conditional constructions are linguistic expressions in which the occurrence of a phenomenon or situation is subject to the occurrence of another phenomenon or situation. This type of construction has different tense patterns regarding its semantic features. This study was conducted to explain the representation of Aspect and Mood and the relationship between them in Persian conditionals. In the present study, the approaches of Comrie (1976) and Palmer (2001) were applied to establish mood and aspect, and Possible World Typology of Conditionals, as put forward by Declerck and Reed (2001), to investigate the semantic classification of conditions. The corpus included 540 conditional constructions extracted from a total of 5 works of contemporary novelists. Analysis of Persian conditional constructions showed that grammatical aspect often appears in the secondary role and function as a mood in such constructions. Further, expression of the unreality of the conditional clause in most conditionals is established through subjunctive mood.
Sadegh Hemmati; Mohammad Dabir-Moghaddam
Abstract
Qashqai Turkic is one of the southwestern (Oghuz) Turkic languages in Iran, which has undergone profound changes at all language levels as a result of intense and long-term contact with Persian. This study investigates the changes that have occurred as a result of this contact in the strategies ...
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Qashqai Turkic is one of the southwestern (Oghuz) Turkic languages in Iran, which has undergone profound changes at all language levels as a result of intense and long-term contact with Persian. This study investigates the changes that have occurred as a result of this contact in the strategies of combining clauses in the structure of complex sentences. These changes include changes in the strategies of coordination, as well as subordination strategies in relative, complement and adverbial clauses. In this study, by investigating and analyzing a written corpus consisting of seven story books, in addition to determining the change cases, an attempt has been made to quantify their extent and progress by quantitatively examining them, and the results of previous research in this field are re-evaluated. The theoretical framework used in this research is the code-copying model introduced by Lars Johanson and used in many researches related to contact linguistics in Turkic languages.
Noorahman Naseh; Mohammad Dabirmoghaddam
Abstract
AbstractAll languages of the world have passive construction that behaves differently in the process of passive formation. One kind of passive construction observed in the world's languages is analytical that Iranian languages usually utilize it to construct passive construction. Pashai language, which ...
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AbstractAll languages of the world have passive construction that behaves differently in the process of passive formation. One kind of passive construction observed in the world's languages is analytical that Iranian languages usually utilize it to construct passive construction. Pashai language, which is one of the Eastern Iranian languages, has an analytical passive construction. Keenan and Dreyer (2007) divided the auxiliary verbs of passive construction into four types. This article investigates the passive construction in Pashai language in terms of structure and lexicon. In Pashai language, the typical pattern for passive construction is similar to the pattern for the auxiliary verbs /biʈʃæ/ and bitek; the former is used for the feminine grammatical subject and the latter for the masculine grammatical subject and the direct object. It becomes a grammatical subject, the subject is lost or deleted, and the verb turns to past participle form. There is another pattern of passivization in Pashai language, which is examined in the second part of this article under the title of lexical and semantic passive; that is, the kind of passive construction in which the passivization process does not work regularly. The method used in this article is obvious and explicit; the text of Pashai language is not only written in their phonological forms but, to avoid problems analyzing the data, the examples are also translated into Persian.
Enayat Rahman Mayar; Mohammad Dabirmoghaddam
Abstract
This article investigates the passive structure of Pashto language, Pashto language has passive structure which has various structural similarities with the passive structure of Persian language. This article initially discusses the recognition and explanations of passive structure provided from the ...
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This article investigates the passive structure of Pashto language, Pashto language has passive structure which has various structural similarities with the passive structure of Persian language. This article initially discusses the recognition and explanations of passive structure provided from the grammarian and linguists of Pashto language. Whereas the languages of the world make passive structures in different ways which we can divide them into “analytical passive” and “morphological passive”. In Pashto language the passive structures are made with helping verbs, therefore, it is a kind of analytical passive. The common pattern for passive structure in Pashto language are the helping verbs (بودن, شدن). In addition, the main verb in the process of changing active structure into passive structure appear in the forms of adjective and past participle. The subject of the sentence usually eliminates while changing from active into passive structure, but we can mention that as a “combination tool” which may have the function of the “lost role”. The object of the sentence in passive structure moves into a syntactic subject, and the verb appears in the superstructure as an essence; which has past participle form in the “unambiguous passive structure” and it is eliminated for the purpose of contraction.
Ismatullah Miakhil; Mohammad Dabirmoghaddam
Abstract
The paṢto/ Pashto language is classified as a (subject-object-verb) or (SOV) language, and it is one of the post-position languages. This language is lexical-based in independent, coordinating, and dependent clauses (subject-object-verb). Pashto is spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan and even in India. ...
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The paṢto/ Pashto language is classified as a (subject-object-verb) or (SOV) language, and it is one of the post-position languages. This language is lexical-based in independent, coordinating, and dependent clauses (subject-object-verb). Pashto is spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan and even in India. It is the official and national language of Afghanistan. Most people of Afghanistan (63%) speaks Pashto.Pashto is one of the Eastern Iranian languages in which, like other languages of the world, the conditional clause appears before the main clause in conditional sentences. Sometimes in special and emphatic cases, the conditional clause can come after the main clause. In Pashto language, conditional device (kӘ) can appear in the beginning of the first clause and in the second place of the first clause or in the beginning of the second clause.Conditional sentence structure, which are compound sentences in Pashto, include a subordinate clause (conditional clause) that usually comes before the main clause.As its name implies, the two clauses are joined by a conditional device (kӘ). This (kӘ) comes at the beginning of the subordinate clause. Sometimes (kӘ) in the conditional clause is accompanied with (no) or (xo) devices, but more often they appear in the beginning of conditional sentences. In conditional sentences, (Če) device can also mean (kӘ).
Reza Sahraee; Hossein Bazoubandi; Hamed Mowlaei Kuhbanani
Abstract
In order to strengthen the scientific register of Persian language, word selection for the scientific terms of foreign languages and accurate knowledge of word-formation mechanisms in this register and its capacities are of considerable importance. Few statistical and corpus-based researches have been ...
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In order to strengthen the scientific register of Persian language, word selection for the scientific terms of foreign languages and accurate knowledge of word-formation mechanisms in this register and its capacities are of considerable importance. Few statistical and corpus-based researches have been conducted on the word formation processes of the approved terms of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. One of the fields not comprehensively addressed so far is the field of transportation within its four main fields. Therefore, the present research, using a descriptive-analytic method, is a comparative study of the word-formation processes of the approved terms of the Academy and their English equivalents in the four fields of transportation (intra-city road, marine, rail and air transport) in the first eight books, including 2929 Persian terms and 2929 English terms (5858 words in total). The results show the dominant word-formation processes in the Academy's words in the field of transportation are respectively compounding (11.77%), compound-derivative (6.69%) and derivation (4.06%). Also, less than one percent of the corpus is formed using other word-formation processes. Moreover, 73.36% of words are the result of syntactic structure and 3.14% are used as simple words. By contrast, the dominant word-formation processes of the English equivalents are respectively compound-derivative (39.56%), compounding (32.57%) and derivation (5.87%); Less than 5% of all English words are made by using the processes of abbreviation, clipping and blending. In addition, in English language, 10.03% of the data are syntactic structures and 2.7% of the words are simple words.
Mohammad Dabirmoghaddam; Vida Shaghaghi; Mojtaba Monshizadeh; Hussein Piri
Abstract
Persian is a verb-final language; that is, its basic unmarked word order is SOV. Clauses in Persian, like other languages, have both the core- elements and non-core elements. The lack of the non-core elements or adjuncts in a clause does not make it ungrammatical but a speaker or writer use these elements ...
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Persian is a verb-final language; that is, its basic unmarked word order is SOV. Clauses in Persian, like other languages, have both the core- elements and non-core elements. The lack of the non-core elements or adjuncts in a clause does not make it ungrammatical but a speaker or writer use these elements to express his/her intentions. This study aims to investigate the post-verbal position of the non-core elements in colloquial Persian and the contributing factors in taking pre- and post-verbal positions of these elements. To this end, 893 leftward scrambled clauses were studied. The results show that only the non-core elements of location and destination take the post-verbal position, which is mainly the position of given information and non-focused part of a clause. Also, there are some contributing factors, so that non-core elements do not take the pre- and post-verbal positions accidentally. In addition, the core elements of a clause do not take the post verbal position.
somayeh aghababaei; mohammad mahdi zamani; Nematollah Iranzadeh
Abstract
Considering the importance of Persian literary works in linguistic studies and teaching Persian speakers of other languages, it is very important to study the scientific works that have been written to introduce or critique prominent Persian literary works. However, in many cases, these scientific works ...
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Considering the importance of Persian literary works in linguistic studies and teaching Persian speakers of other languages, it is very important to study the scientific works that have been written to introduce or critique prominent Persian literary works. However, in many cases, these scientific works deviate from their purpose, which is to identify important literary works, due to the some problems in using the scientific variety of Persian language. This study considers using of the scientific variety in these works by Moayed Shirazi (1983), Pournamdarian (1989), Zarrinkoob (1999) and Khorramshahi (2001), which were selected as the book of the year of the Islamic Republic in the 1980s and shows how in many cases these scientific works cannot achieve their goal in the appropriate way. This study intends to answer this question: what are the problems in the use of the language of science in Persian literary research. For this purpose, researchers combine aspects of qualitative and quantitative research methods to extract various problems in using the scientific variety of Persian language in these works and show spread of these problems. Study of these authoritative scientific works shows that problems such as semantic deviation, historical deviation, stylistic deviation, extra regularity, quoting literary texts to strengthen the poetic function of language, simile, irony, ambiguous words, verbiage, and value judgment are observed in these works
Abstract
Textbooks and teaching materials have high-priority in foreign language teaching and they provide a curriculum-based framework for teachers.Since language teachers are faced with a myriad of resources when choosing, they must systematically evaluate them so that they can decide on the most appropriate ...
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Textbooks and teaching materials have high-priority in foreign language teaching and they provide a curriculum-based framework for teachers.Since language teachers are faced with a myriad of resources when choosing, they must systematically evaluate them so that they can decide on the most appropriate textbook to suit the needs of their language learners. What is remarkable in this regard is that today with the expansion of Persian language teaching to non-Persian speakers, the number of audiences and those interested in learning the Persian language is increasing, several books and educational resources have been provided to achieve this goal; accordingly, the evaluation of Persian language teaching resources also helps Persian language teachers in choosing the correct and appropriate educational materials. In this regard, the present study tried to learn to evaluate the Persian educational collection (Zolfaghari et al., 2002) using the evaluation checklist of the book Mokandan and Nimehchi Salem (2015) from the point of view of Persian language teachers. Based on this checklist, 19 teachers evaluated the "Farsi Biyamuzim" educational series and a semi-structured interview was conducted with 5 teachers. The results of this study showed that this educational complex, although it is currently being taught in many Persian language teaching centers and is evaluated at a relatively good level in terms of educational content from the perspective of teachers, also faces shortcomings and limitations that the author of this research offers suggestions for improving the visual and content quality of this collection.
Mahsa Sadeghi
Abstract
Metaphors have a very essential role and importance in the system of the human mind and cognition. From the very beginning of the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) to the present day, metaphors have played a significant role in the conceptualization of this illness and related issues. The ...
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Metaphors have a very essential role and importance in the system of the human mind and cognition. From the very beginning of the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) to the present day, metaphors have played a significant role in the conceptualization of this illness and related issues. The aim of the present research is to investigate the metaphorical conceptualizations of Corona in the news headlines of domestic Persian-language media. The research data include 220 metaphorical expressions in the headlines extracted from the websites of four news agencies including Fars, ISNA, Tasnim, and Mehr. The Data were analyzed within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff, 1987, 1993; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999) and the theory of image schemas (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987). The results show that the metaphors used to conceptualize the Corona can be divided into two main categories: Metaphors based on image schemas and metaphors separate from image schemas. In the formation of first metaphors, force schema plays a major role and can manifest as the schemas of war, natural forces, and football. In the formation of the second category of metaphors, the source domains of humans and animals as well as domains such as fire, shadow, and vehicle play a major role.
fatameh nosrati mumvandi; Reza Morad Sahraei; Hayat Ameri; Abbas Ashrafi
Abstract
The present study aims at studying radial network of the five words "Lesan, Qara, Khataba, Samea, and Kataba" based on cognitive semantics. Likewise, determining frequency of usage of radial meanings and prototypical meaning of the given word in two translations of Quran by Foladvand and Qomshei and ...
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The present study aims at studying radial network of the five words "Lesan, Qara, Khataba, Samea, and Kataba" based on cognitive semantics. Likewise, determining frequency of usage of radial meanings and prototypical meaning of the given word in two translations of Quran by Foladvand and Qomshei and two interpretations of Al-Mizan and Nemoneh is another purpose of the article. To determine the radial meanings and prototypical meaning of the given word, Tyler and Evans (2001)’s criteria were used. The analysis showed that the tools such as metonymy, metaphorical expansion and image schema play the main role in expanding the prototypical meaning of the given word; and meanwhile metaphorical expansion plays the main role in expanding the prototypical meaning. Additionally, it was found that in the translations and interpretations, there is a relative balance between usage of prototypical meaning and radial meanings of the words; although in some words this balance does not fit.
Fatemeh Bahrami
Abstract
Despite being transitive, possessive verbs are characterized by a lower level of transitivity due to their non-action nature. As a result, the semantic roles of the arguments of such verbs, which pertain to the possessor and the possessed rather than the agent and patient, significantly impact their ...
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Despite being transitive, possessive verbs are characterized by a lower level of transitivity due to their non-action nature. As a result, the semantic roles of the arguments of such verbs, which pertain to the possessor and the possessed rather than the agent and patient, significantly impact their transitivity. This reduced transitivity is evident in the encoding of grammatical relations. Specifically, the present research demonstrates that in Persian, the possessive verbs “to have” and “to be” treat their subject and object as non-prototypical arguments, employing different strategies in the agreement and case-marking systems. Consequently, the syntactic structure mirrors the semantic markedness of these arguments. Notably, despite their synonymous meanings and equivalent argument structures, “to have” and “to be” exhibit divergent behaviors in terms of grammatical relations. The explanation lies in the non-prototypical semantic roles of syntactic arguments, allowing either argument the potentiality to occupy the syntactic subject position. Additionally, the two hierarchies of the agreement and case-marking systems, which operate in opposing directions, influence each verb’s preferred strategy for marked encoding. Partial agreement of the verb with the subject (i.e., according to person, but not to number) also serves as a complementary tool for reflecting the marked structure.
Masood Ghayoomi; Shayan Mohseni Khorrami; Atena BakhshiZadeh Gashti
Abstract
Dialectology is a major research topic for a long time to find the dialects’ geographical distribution and to classify dialects to develope the atlas of dialects. In this field, one can use computer’s capabilities to store and to organize information, to find similarities between dialects, ...
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Dialectology is a major research topic for a long time to find the dialects’ geographical distribution and to classify dialects to develope the atlas of dialects. In this field, one can use computer’s capabilities to store and to organize information, to find similarities between dialects, to visualize the isoglosses on a geographic map, and the like. The common property of these studies is that a full text is not used and the studies are mostly limited to questionnaires containing a few key words or phrases.Another useful aspect of using computers in dialectology is processing the dialectic data and automatically annotating this data. In the current research, in addition to preparing a dialectic corpus containing full texts for the Gilaki dialect, we put an effort to prepare a language model to annotate the data at two levels, namely part-of-speech and lemmatization. Since there is no annotated training data for making the Gilaki language model, we manually annotate the developed corpus and then create a statitical language model. To show the quality of the developed language model, the available data is divided into two sets, namely as training and test data, and we will evaluate the model using the 5-point cross-evaluation method. According to the experimental results, the performances of the models for lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging of the Gilaki dialect are 91.20% and 90.79%, respectively.
zohreh daneshmand; Mohammad Amin Nasseh
Abstract
In this study, the words order of the Arabic dialect of Arabkhaneh in South Khorasan has been investigated from typological point of view. Arabkhaneh is a region consisting of several villages, 90 kilometers south of the center of South Khorasan, which in its mixed Arabic-Persian dialect has been greatly ...
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In this study, the words order of the Arabic dialect of Arabkhaneh in South Khorasan has been investigated from typological point of view. Arabkhaneh is a region consisting of several villages, 90 kilometers south of the center of South Khorasan, which in its mixed Arabic-Persian dialect has been greatly influenced by the surrounding Persian language at all levels (morphological, syntactic, phonological features). In this research modeled on “The Word Order Correlations” (Dryer, 1992) and Typology of Iranian Language (Dabir Moghadam, 1402) were chosen as the frameworks to investigate word order of Arabkhaneh's dialect. In the present study, the question that occupied the minds of researchers was: In which linguistic components has the Arabkhaneh dialect deviated from standard Arabic typological patterns, and in which components has it converged with Persian linguistic typological patterns? In this research, in addition to using the questionnaire, interviews were conducted with 10 native speakers of Arabkhaneh who were illiterate (5 men and 5 women) and over 60 years old. After gathering the data, plenty of time was spent on IPA transcription and analysis of data. Upon examining the data, typological behavior of the Arabkhaneh dialect demonstrated that it has diverged from standard Arabic patterns in certain components while in other components, the criterion has been aligned with Persian. Furthermore, in components where standard Arabic accommodates two types of linguistic behavior, the Arabkhaneh dialect has accepted a common form with Persian standards and has shown no inclination toward the use of the second type.
Zahra Hajiali; foroogh kazemi; Maryam Iraji
Abstract
The concept of isomorphism in Persian, from the perspective of linguistic typology, holds significant importance. This study investigates the paradigmatic isomorphism of syntactic polysemy in the preposition "az" within Persian proverbs. It seeks to answer the following questions: How can syntactic ...
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The concept of isomorphism in Persian, from the perspective of linguistic typology, holds significant importance. This study investigates the paradigmatic isomorphism of syntactic polysemy in the preposition "az" within Persian proverbs. It seeks to answer the following questions: How can syntactic polysemy in paradigmatic isomorphism within Persian proverbs be explained based on linguistic typology? How do the principles of iconicity and economy interrelate with the preposition "az" from this perspective? Initially, the preposition is analyzed concerning form-meaning correspondence through the lens of isomorphism, followed by an evaluation of its connection to the principle of economy. The data comprises Persian proverbs containing this preposition, selected from the book Famous Iranian Proverbs (containing 1,700 proverbs), and analyzed through a library-based approach. The results reveal that "az" encompasses a continuum of meanings, including: cause and reason, spatial source, temporal source, starting point and trajectory, origin and foundation, agent (instrumental) and agent (actor), Given the main keywords in polysemy (related meanings), the evidence from the analyzed proverbs confirms an iconic relationship between form and meaning. The preposition "az" elucidates the form-meaning connection in a manner that is both iconic and economical. Thus, the interplay of the principles of economy and iconicity manifests in paradigmatic isomorphism, reflecting the polysemous nature of the preposition "az" in Persian proverbs. This finding provides a foundation for future similar research. The outcomes of this research are particularly valuable for typologists, linguists, researchers of Persian language and literature, and language educators.
Naser Hafezi Motlagh; Mohammadreza Pahlavannezhad
Abstract
According to the embodied mathematics hypothesis, based on the cognitive linguistics’ concepts, the origin of mathematics is human embodiment, and therefore mathematical Platonism and similar descriptions, which assume the existence of mathematics independent of humans, can only have a religious ...
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According to the embodied mathematics hypothesis, based on the cognitive linguistics’ concepts, the origin of mathematics is human embodiment, and therefore mathematical Platonism and similar descriptions, which assume the existence of mathematics independent of humans, can only have a religious position and not a scientific one. In this research, due to the embodied mathematics, the role and effects of the vertical dimension in the formation of space image schema and its influences on language and also the geometric concept of vertical dimension have been discussed. Considering the influence of the gravity on the space image schema and therefore the asymmetry in human physical perception of the height, not only the image schemas of space, force and container are influenced by the vertical dimension, but also the role of this dimension in the formation of metaphors and conceptual blending is prominent too, and it is considered a significant element in the formation of geometrical-mathematical concepts that arise from embodiment. Considering that the perceptual world has a three-dimensional structure consisting of the vertical dimension, in this research, reducing or increasing of this geometric dimension and its effect on space image schema and language expressions have been analyzed. The role of the vertical dimension in mathematical concepts can be described based on linguistic intuition, and examples of this effect have been discussed. Based on this analysis, reducing or increasing the spatial dimension is not only effective on the conceptual system, but also on the linguistic structure and related mathematical concepts.
سید مهدی ساداتی نوش آبادی; hengameh vaezi
Abstract
This research examines the passivization of sentences with ditransitive verbs in Persian, based on Citko's (2011a) notion of symmetric move. The two objects of these sentences can move to the specifier of the tense head in the passive sentence. However, according to the Economic Principle and the ...
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This research examines the passivization of sentences with ditransitive verbs in Persian, based on Citko's (2011a) notion of symmetric move. The two objects of these sentences can move to the specifier of the tense head in the passive sentence. However, according to the Economic Principle and the Shortest Move in the Minimalism Programme, only the nearest constituent to the probe head should be allowed to move. The study results, based on Persian language samples, indicate that the direct and indirect object can move to the specifier of the tense head in passive sentences with ditransitive verbs but moving of the indirect object to this position produces semantically marked sentence. Furthermore, making the passive voice of these sentences is free from the specificity and definiteness feature of the direct object, which is determined by the presence or absence of the accusative case form ‘ra’. This study also found that the linear order of objects and the semantic roles of the indirect object in the active sentence do not affect the feasibility of transforming sentences with ditransitive verbs into the passive form in Persian language.
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