Golnaz Modarresi Ghavami
Abstract
In western linguistics, ‘juncture’ is a technical term in phonetics which has its roots in American structuralism. Besides phonetics, the term is especially important in the areas of speech perception in psycholinguistics, text to speech conversion, and speech recognition in computational ...
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In western linguistics, ‘juncture’ is a technical term in phonetics which has its roots in American structuralism. Besides phonetics, the term is especially important in the areas of speech perception in psycholinguistics, text to speech conversion, and speech recognition in computational linguistics. In Persian phonetics and phonology, the equivalent chosen for the term ‘juncture’ has led to the misconception that it is equal to ‘pause’. This article is a review of some influential works in western linguistics, with the purpose of determining the exact meaning of the term ‘juncture’ and the phonetic features that are discussed under the title of juncture. It is argued that the chosen equivalent in Persian is not appropriate, as it implies the meaning of ‘pause’ and this is not the intended meaning of juncture in western linguistics. Showing a number of phonetic features that mark the boundaries of grammatical units in Persian, the equivalent of ‘boundary’ is suggested as a replacement.
Azade Mirzaei; Amir Saeid Moloodi
Abstract
The first semantic roles corpus in Persian language, containing about 30,000 sentences from contemporary Persian language, is manually annotated. This corpus, based on the concept of thematic roles of Fillmore, adds a layer of predicate-argument information to the syntactic structures of Persian Dependency ...
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The first semantic roles corpus in Persian language, containing about 30,000 sentences from contemporary Persian language, is manually annotated. This corpus, based on the concept of thematic roles of Fillmore, adds a layer of predicate-argument information to the syntactic structures of Persian Dependency Treebank. In this corpus, the verbs, propositional nouns and adjectives are regarded as the predicates of the sentences and are annotated according to their argument structure. The data was prepared based on Conference on Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) dependency format. Semantic tags used as the semantic annotations include thematic roles and functional tags. Thematic roles labels present the argument structure of the predicates of the sentences, and functional tags modify the verb or the whole sentence. The number of thematic roles tags and functional tags are 27 and 15, respectively. The two tags of NEGATION and MODALS are used as the functional tags.
Adel Rafiei; Sara Torabi
Abstract
Default inheritance is one of the critical notions in network approaches to language which considers linguistic knowledge to be comprised of constructional nodes at different levels of abstraction and hierarchical relations among them. Based on this mechanism, properties are inherited from higher to ...
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Default inheritance is one of the critical notions in network approaches to language which considers linguistic knowledge to be comprised of constructional nodes at different levels of abstraction and hierarchical relations among them. Based on this mechanism, properties are inherited from higher to lower nodes unless the lower node already has other specifications for the property. The importance of this mechanism becomes evident when describing a set of linguistic constructions which show some differences despite having common features. The use of default inheritance enables us not only to maintain the generalizations governing similar constructions, but also to justify the differences among them. It also makes it possible to show the connectedness of such constructions in the language network without the need for labeling the slightly deviated instances as exceptional. Through applying a construction-based morphology and focusing on the interpretation of default inheritance as motivation, the present paper tries to explain the role of word formation patterns in the production and understanding of complex words which do not necessarily correspond to their governing patterns regarding all their form-meaning specifications. To this end, instantiations of three Persian word formation patterns, «-zɑr», «-eʃ» and «ɑmiz», are investigated and the existence of apparently exceptional instances associated with these patterns is justified through three concepts of constructional schemas, default inheritance and gradient motivation.
Mehdi Sabzevari; Fateme Mohammadi
Abstract
Farsi course book, included in the curriculum for the high school students with the aim of acquiring language skills, consists of various educational materials on writing and structure. The researchers in the present study are of the belief that the Farsi course book is fraught with major pitfalls which ...
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Farsi course book, included in the curriculum for the high school students with the aim of acquiring language skills, consists of various educational materials on writing and structure. The researchers in the present study are of the belief that the Farsi course book is fraught with major pitfalls which must be dealt with. In addition to the pitfalls, many Farsi teachers are not equipped with the sufficient knowledge and education to teach linguistic skills. Furthermore, most of the points raised in the book are not put into practice, which is in direct contradictions to objectives of Ministry of Education. Contrary to the strongly-held belief that since Farsi is the formal language of the country and the media, students should not have any serious trouble in understanding and learning it, Farsi is one of the few courses which have experienced great educational failure. The present paper seeks to uncover the possible reasons behind students’ failure resulting from the contents of Farsi course book and its teaching methodology in an attempt to improve them.
Naser Rashidi; Mohsen Raghnezhad
Abstract
Textbooks are the most important and common teaching resources in the educational system of Iran. The policy making and administration are centralized in this system. In such systems, the formal schooling depends largely on teaching and learning on the basis of textbooks. Therefore, it is important that ...
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Textbooks are the most important and common teaching resources in the educational system of Iran. The policy making and administration are centralized in this system. In such systems, the formal schooling depends largely on teaching and learning on the basis of textbooks. Therefore, it is important that different parts of textbooks including the content and the exercises be compatible with the real needs of students. This study sought to analyze the Persian language textbooks written for the speakers of other languages (‘basic courses’ and ‘capital of Iran’) based on the Bloom’s revised taxonomy. The results showed that in both of these textbooks the lower-level cognitive skills were considered more than the higher level ones. Further, the textbooks included more composition and creativity exercises (higher-level cognitive skills) than the application ones (lower-level cognitive skills). Moreover, the comprehension exercises, which are lower-level cognitive skills in the taxonomy, were employed much more than the other higher-level skills in the taxonomy. The results of this research can be useful in planning the curriculum and designing new textbooks for the Persian language students.
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.
Ehsan Changizi
Abstract
Aban Yasht is the research on the 5th Yasht of Avesta which is carried out by Dr. Changiz Mowla’i and is published in 1392 (Persian calendar). The 5th Yasht pays tribute to Anahita, the Zoroastrian deity of the waters. In this article, the various parts of the book are introduced, and a short description ...
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Aban Yasht is the research on the 5th Yasht of Avesta which is carried out by Dr. Changiz Mowla’i and is published in 1392 (Persian calendar). The 5th Yasht pays tribute to Anahita, the Zoroastrian deity of the waters. In this article, the various parts of the book are introduced, and a short description of the author’s line of action is presented. Afterwards, ten major topics discussed in the book are scrutinized. To compile such a book, the author of Aban Yasht has referred to and quoted from many books and articles written in English, French and German. The points raised in this article are as follows: phoneme, grapheme, the concept of root, statement of the problem, the copula “is”, the pronoun “ya-”, translations, syntactic issues, compounding or compound, and the tone of writing. Some of the points raised in this article are of considerable importance not only in this book but also in most of the research studies on the Iranian ancient languages.
