Language Research

Abstract One of the consequences of the progress of science and technology in recent decades is the immediate recording and dissemination of film and sound from various social events. A clear example of this claim is the observation of various videos and sounds from crime scenes in the media. Sometimes sound is the only clue left by criminals at crime scenes. This has prompted forensic experts to seek precise and scientific analysis of sound in order to determine the identity of the speaker and confirm or refute their hypotheses. In forensic phonetics, paying attention to the phonetic characteristics of vowels in different manifestations of spoken language such as dialects, styles, etc. is of great importance. In this study, the vowel space of two speech styles, readable and clear, in Persian has been investigated and compared within the framework of phonetic phonetics. The main objective is to analyze the phonological differences between these two styles for use in forensic applications such as speaker identification, speech reconstruction, or criminal analysis. The research is descriptive-analytical, and the data were obtained by analyzing the first and second structural frequencies of vowels extracted from audio samples. The audio samples included the speech of 25 Persian speakers (male and female) in two speech styles: readable and clear, which were recorded and collected using a microphone. Python and R software were used to extract and analyze the data. The results showed that clear speech has a wider vowel space than readable speech and provides greater accuracy for forensic purposes. It was also found that in both readable and clear styles, women have a larger vowel space than men, and the ability to identify women's voices is greater than that of men. In the study of inter-speaker variation, it was also found that there is greater coherence in women's vowel production and greater dispersion in men's vowel production, and that clear style enhances this dispersion in men and weakens it in women. Therefore, gender and speech style interactively affect the amount of inter-speaker variation, and round vowels, especially /u/, show the greatest sensitivity to these factors.

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Lexical frequency is considered an important factor in usage-based phonology, yet its influence on the distribution of word-initial phonemes in Persian has received limited empirical attention. This study investigates the distributional pattern of word-initial phonological classes in Persian and evaluates the extent to which lexical frequency affects this pattern. The dataset consisted of the first 1,000 entries in *Routledge* *Frequency Dictionary of Persian*, divided into two frequency groups comprising the 500 most frequent words and the following 500 words. The initial segment of each word was classified into seven phonological categories: stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, liquids, glides, and vowels. The distributions of these categories were compared using the Chi-square test of independence, and effect size was assessed with Cramer's V. The findings reveal a remarkably stable phonological organization across both frequency groups. Stops constitute the dominant word-initial class, followed by fricatives, while the overall proportion of obstruents and sonorants remains highly consistent. The distribution of individual phonemes is also strongly skewed, with only a small number of phonemes—particularly /m/, /e/, /s/, /t/, /d/, /b/, and /h/—accounting for a substantial proportion of all word onsets, whereas many others occur only rarely in initial position. These results highlight the central role of Persian phonotactic constraints and syllable structure in shaping the organization of word-initial phonemes. Although minor differences in the frequencies of some phonological classes were observed between the two lexical-frequency groups, these differences were not statistically significant, and the associated effect size was negligible. The findings therefore suggest that lexical frequency plays only a limited role in determining the distribution of word-initial phonological classes within the high-frequency Persian lexicon. In contrast, structural phonological constraints provide a more robust explanation. The study contributes empirical evidence to Persian phonology and offers implications for corpus linguistics, computational language processing, speech technology, and Persian language education.

Abstract Final examinations have become one of the most important and controversial issues in Iranian education in recent years. Their direct impact on students’ academic futures, especially through the decisive role of grade averages and the repeated changes in university entrance policies, has turned them into a sensitive and widely debated issue among students, families, and the education system.The present study investigates the the language of educational policymaking in texts related to the Ministry of Education’s final examinations and analyzes the linguistic features that reproduce power relations and ideology in the institution’s official texts. The study is conducted within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and draws on Machin and Mayr’s model. The data comprise 300 texts purposively collected from the Ministry’s information portals during the Iranian calendar years 1403–1405. Methodologically, the study adopts a descriptive-analytical, mixed qualitative-quantitative approach. The findings show that, in lexical analysis, lexical selection has the highest frequency and that the texts legitimize institutional authority through word choice. Lexical deletion and overlexicalization also contribute to meaning construction by disregarding students’ stress and psychological pressure while repeatedly emphasizing the definitive or positive effect of grade averages. Furthermore, instability in decision-making and repeated changes in announced programmes may be associated with students’ experiences of confusion and psychological pressure. Reporting verbs naturalize the official narrative, while nominalization and presuppositions remove responsibility from Ministry decision-makers and portray events as natural and rational. Among rhetorical features, hyperbole and metaphor occur most frequently. Modality analysis also reveals the predominance of deontic and epistemic modalities over hedging devices. Overall, the findings indicate that the language of these texts, beyond serving as a means of information dissemination, plays an active role in reproducing competitiveness and educational inequality; by legitimizing the institution’s authority, it restricts opportunities for criticism and questioning regarding the consequences of these policies.

Abstract Attention to linguistic differences between men and women, formed in Western countries since the late 1960s, has been informed by the findings of sociolinguistic researchers and the activities of feminist figures. Many experts and researchers believe that there are differences in the temperament, mentality, and views of women towards the world, which have led to certain differences in their language usage and writing methods. This issue is also visible in the field of translation in such a way that the translation styles of male and female translators can have certain differences. In this study, using the descriptive-analytical method and based on Sarah Mills's views in her book "Feminist Stylistics", the Arabic-to-Persian translation of the book "The Ash of Civilizations" (translated by Zahra Yazdinejad) was examined. Also, this translation was compared with the Persian to English translation of the same book (translated by Mehdi Afshar) to reveal the effect of Yazdinejad’s translation on that of Afshar. The results of the study showed that Yazdinejad, by using the established equivalence method, was able to recreate most of the nuances of feminine language in the poems of the aforementioned work in Persian. On the other hand, Afshar’s adherence to Yazdinejad’s mediated translation style, due to the limitatations of mediated translation, has led to transfer of feminine language from Persian into English.

Attention to linguistic differences between men and women, formed in Western countries since the late 1960s, has been informed by the findings of sociolinguistic researchers and the activities of feminist figures. Many experts and researchers believe that there are differences in the temperament, mentality, and views of women towards the world, which have led to certain differences in their language usage and writing methods. This issue is also visible in the field of translation in such a way that the translation styles of male and female translators can have certain differences. In this study, using the descriptive-analytical method and based on Sarah Mills's views in her book "Feminist Stylistics", the Arabic-to-Persian translation of the book "The Ash of Civilizations" (translated by Zahra Yazdinejad) was examined.

Abstract Cultural conceptualization, as a core domain within Cultural Linguistics, is premised on the assumption that many features of human languages are rooted in the beliefs, traditions, and worldviews of their speakers, and are encoded through cultural schemas, categorization, and conceptual metaphors. This study aims to investigate the cultural conceptualization of "resistance" in Amal Dunqul's socio-political ode Serhan La Yatasallam Mafatih al-Quds (1987). The central research question is how Dunqul, through linguistic mechanisms, represents and re-conceptualizes the notion of resistance in conjunction with the cultural components of Arab society. Employing a descriptive-analytical approach and drawing upon Sharifian's (2017) framework of Cultural Linguistics, this study examines the poem's seven sections (Is'hah). The findings reveal that resistance in this poem is not an abstract concept, but rather a set of established pragmatic cultural schemas embedded in the distributed cognition of Arab society. Across the seven sections, eight such pragmatic cultural schemas are identified: "resistance," "political betrayal," "steadfastness and hope-laden patience," "humiliation and subjugation resulting from compromise," "readiness for combat," "sanctification of struggle," "oppression and lack of free expression," and "resistance-oriented nationalism." These schemas acquire meaning through a binary oppositional relationship, whereby every representation of resistance is conceptualized against betrayal or abasement. Furthermore, the poet invokes the religious schema of Prophet Joseph to re-conceptualize the contemporary Palestinian tragedy as a sacred archetype, thereby establishing a common ground between his own mind and the historical memory of his audience. The re-categorization of "homeland" from a geographical territory to a "divine inheritance," and the "bullet" from an instrument of death to a "tool of atonement and forgiveness," further shifts conventional conceptual boundaries. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that Dunqul, by leveraging his transcultural competence, transforms resistance from a mere political act into a profound cultural identity anchored in the history, religious traditions, and embodied human experience of the Arab individual. The paper thus confirms the efficacy of Cultural Linguistics analytical tools in uncovering the latent layers of meaning in contemporary Arabic poetry.

Abstract This study examines the agreement of verbs with subjects in terms of person and number in the writing sheets of Azerbaijani-Persian bilingual students. The data were collected from compositions of students in 4th and 5th grades of primary school. Errors related to verb usage in the writing of both groups of students were extracted, and after determining the frequency and percentage of these errors, they were analyzed based on various factors involved in L2. The findings of this research showed that students in both the 4th and 5th grades made various linguistic errors in using the person and number inflectional morphemes of verbs, while they did not face issues in using other inflectional morphemes of verbs such as negation, tense, voice, and aspect. The disparity in the occurrence of errors related to inflectional morphemes of verbs led data analysis towards examining the differences in verb inflectional morphemes and classifying them. The person and number morphemes of verbs function at the sentence level to ensure agreement between verb and subject, whereas other inflectional morphemes of verbs are considered inherent morphemes that perform a morphological function. The purpose of attaching inherent morphemes to verb is to convey meaning related to time, negation, and aspect to the audience. Therefore, learning inherent inflectional morphemes, which carry more semantic weight, occurs much faster and more easily than learning those morphemes that have a syntactic function, such as ensuring subject-verb agreement. Additionally, the higher frequency of errors in use of person and number morphemes in 4th-grade students compared to 5th-grade students indicates that advancing to the next grade significantly impacts second language learning. Thus, the results of this study highlight the role of both linguistic and non-linguistic factors in L2, which can be applied in various fields of language education (such as curriculum development and teaching).