Language Research

Abstract There is a generative constructional process in both Persian and Kurdish languages, through which some syntactic constructions can be transformed from a simple expression to an emphatic expression without changing the original meaning. This process, which is the proof of a subject through the negation of other states, can be called “affirmative negation". “Sentence to express the concept of obligation", "sentence to express inclusion" and "positive news sentence in the present tense" are among the cases that are transformed from their fundamental and unmarked structure into a marked structure with specific verbal motivations. In this research, within the framework of the markedness approach, the marked form of the mentioned sentences in Persian and Kurdish languages is described and analyzed from the structural and functional aspects in order to determine their difference from the basic and unmarked form in terms of semantic function. The aim is to explain and prove the nature of the construction process of affirmative negation in Persian and Kurdish languages as a structural pattern and to show the performance of this process in construction from unmarked to markedness. The result of the research shows that marking in syntactic constructions does not occur only with the movement of sentence elements, but sometimes it is done through this process, which is one of the processes of emphasis.

Abstract Antonymy is a kind of lexical-semantic relationship between two words that are similar in many aspects out imply opposite meanings. The few previous studies as well as the authors’ initial study on the oral and written corpus reveal that antonyms’ sequence is subject to a hidden regularity. In the study of antonyms’ distribution, their sequence, i.e. A-B or B-A  is considered.  Earlier studies and observations of writers regarding oral and written corpus indicates a hidden order in the sequence of antonymous pairs. Jones (2002) attempts to reveal this order in light of seven rules, i.e., morphological derivation, positivity, magnitude, chronology, gender, phonology and idiomaticity. In this study, we investigated the sequence of antonymous pairs in a researcher made Persian corpus. The detected and extracted samples include 4000 sentences taken from written and oral genres produced since 1970s to 2010s in Iranian mass media. The texts include journalistic, narrative and scientific texts as well as oral files extracted from movies, TV, and radio programs. To consider radical changes in Persian language, texts exchanged in virtual space such as facebook messages are also taken into account.  The diversity of subject and historical order of the texts would help up to work on a natural, well-balanced corpus, and would provide us a platform for a diachronic approach. The samples are collected randomly. As far as the part of speech is concerned, in forming antonymous pairs, the category of nouns tops followed respectively by verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns. The findings indicate that the framework introduced in Jones (2002) could explain almost half of the sequences attested in the corpus. Rules of idiomaticity, phonology, positivity, morphological derivation are more effective and in some cases the cultural and contextual differences may explain the sequence. It was also revealed that the unmarked member mostly precedes the marked one. This finding is consistent with previous studies conducted on markedness.