Language Research

Abstract Having not acquired or retrieved any words for the intended concept, in the process of mother tongue acquisition, children sometimes try to innovate new words in dealing with the problem. This study empirically investigates these innovations in preschool years. The data include 60 words innovated by a female native speaker of Persian (2.6 trough 5.0). The result shows that she made use of 7 morphological processes to coin the words and regarding these innovations, adjective and compounding are the most frequent grammatical categories and morphological processes respectively. But the first morphological process used by the child is derivation through suffix "-i", the most productive Persian suffix. This result does not support Clark's findings since she says that the most productive process is the first one which children use to make their own new words. Keywords: lexical innovation, acquisition of morphological processes, first language acquisition, compounding and derivation, psycholinguistics

Abstract The present paper studies hedges in Persian academic papers. Hedging has an important role in academic discourse; in fact it is a device expressing a writer's degree of certainty or doubt about a proposition. In this study, a collection of 114 academic papers (57 papers in the field of chemistry and 57 papers in the field of Persian literature) have been analyzed. The results show that the distribution of hedges in chemistry and Persian literature papers are different. Hedging is more frequent in literature papers; this is due to the different nature of reasoning in the two fields. As for the different kinds of hedges, in both fields adverbs are the most frequent and adjectives are the least frequent hedges.

Abstract This paper aims to investigate the presence of quantifier phrase and classifier phrase in the DP of Sarhadi dialect of the Baluchi language. To reach this goal, pseudo partitive constructions and their characteristics in different languages are introduced and then it is shown that determiner phrases containing a classifier in Baluchi are examples of juxtaposed pseudo partitive constructions in which the classifier is the head of a classifier phrase carrying an uninterpretable feature [uQ] which necessitates the presence of a quantifier / number phrase right above it in the modifier domain of Baluchi determiner phrases.

Abstract H?r?m? is a g?r?n? dialect and subset of G?r?n?-Z?z? linguistic branch and is considered as one of northwest Iranian dialects. H?r?m? is a preserved dialect and have preserved the archaic phonetic and inflective characteristics, so etymological study of this dialect leads to considerable points in more accurate identification of Iranian languages. In this article, etymological study of some verbs of H?r?m? have been investigated and assumptive form of the dialect’s middle age and also proto-Iranian of past and present stem of these verbs has been reconstructed. There is also effort to be specified position of this dialect in scope of Iranian languages, by studying phonetic transformations of these verbs and mention of cognate words. Dialectic materials of this study have been collected from native speakers of H?r?m?n ? Luh?n.

Abstract This article addresses the perceptual correlates of compensatory lengthening in Persian. In a perception experiment, duration, spectral tilt measurements H1-H2 and H1-F1 and F0 were varied in several steps based on the results from a production experiment (Sadeghi, 2007). Subjects were asked to identify the tokens involving vowel length. Results revealed that duration is the most reliable perceptual correlate of vowel length, and that intensity level manipulations provide stronger vowel length cues than F0 differences.

Abstract This paper investigates the nature of Absolutive case and the syntactic mechanisms underlying its licensing. To this end, two recent minimalist approaches to the syntactic derivation of ergative structure will be introduced. Drawing on evidence from the syntactic derivation of clauses with intransitive complex predicates in Kurdish, it will be established that the Absolutive case is checked by the head of the Tense Phrase (T°). Thus construed, the chain of argumentation in this paper favors an approach to ergative structure where Absolutive case is treated on a par with Nominative case.

Abstract Cognitive semantic approach, which deals with the "cognition" of human being, tries to explain the way of human understanding by means of different tools, such as image schema. In this way, there is an explanation for synonymy. The purpose of writing this paper is to show the reasonability of semantic substitution of Persian verbs in context.

Abstract In the theory of phrasal phonology and on the basis of the leveling rule, Kahnemuyipour (2003) claims that in the stress representation, the words with? symbols in the intonational phrase level, receive secondary stress. The objective of this article is scrutinizing the intonational evidence for secondary stress in Persian. Analyzing the data which had secondary stress and were produced by the authors with Pratt software, revealed that the phonological phrases that take secondary stress are marked by a high boundary tone; except in the cases where the phonological phrase taking secondary stress is the last phonological phrase of an intonational phrase. In this situation, the boundary tone of the last phonological phrase will be subordinate to the boundary tone of the intonational phrase. In other words, if an intonational phrase is marked by a high boundary tone or by a low boundary tone the last phonological phrase taking secondary stress in the intonational phrase, will be marked respectively by a high and a low boundary tone.