Language Research

Abstract The impact of power in the criminal court discourse and the interrogation process is manifested in many factors such as context-specific conditions and differences in social position between a police investigator and the accused. This study intends to use politeness strategies by Brown and Levinson (1987) to explore and describe the role of politeness in the interrogation process. The aim of this study is to describe the relationship between power and politeness in promoting the interrogation process because politeness is embedded in power relations. Corpus consisted of eleven transcripts of the hearing randomly selected from criminal cases in public justice administration in Bushehr. The results showed that with the observance of politeness (Brown and Levinson's strategies), the interrogation route could not be well advanced, because the defendants refrain from answering questions due to lack of pressure and threat. But with pressure and harshness of the signs of power, the interrogation route can be well advanced.

Abstract A growing number of recent studies on verbal meaning have demonstrated that positing a direct mapping between (lexical/logical) semantics and syntax with respect to event structure can account for numerous linguistic phenomena. In this article, we demonstrate that certain facts in Persian can only be explained by decomposing verbs into smaller syntactic pieces that reflect subparts of a complex event structure. Contrary to the previous claims, taking the theoretical position that there is only one generative component, we argue that morphological causative predicates are constructed in syntax. By replicating the dobare ‘again’ test, we shall further claim that morphological causatives are not syntactically atomic units, but are decomposable into separate morphemes in the syntactic structure. We show the different pattern in morphological causatives with respect to the modification of manner adverbials in terms of the size of the complement of the v_CAUSE.