Language Research

Abstract Whether or not there is a verbal passive construction in Persian has been ‎highly controversial. Traditional grammarians and most linguists have ‎argued that there is a structural passive construction in Persian, similar to ‎that observed in English. Within the framework of the Minimalist ‎Program, but more in the spirit of Emonds’s (2006) division of analytic ‎passives into verbal and adjectival, it will be argued that the Persian ‎so-called verbal passive construction is just an instance of adjectival ‎passive, or indeed, unaccusative CPr with a past participle serving as ‎its NV element. In line with what holds for verb movement in simplex ‎and complex predicates, it will be discussed in detail that Modern ‎Persian lacks verbal passive constructions and hence passive ‎projections, and in contrast to the grammatical verb budan ‘to be’ ‎which can be used either as a light verb in complex predicates or as a ‎perfect auxiliary in present/past perfect tenses, the grammatical verb ‎šodan ‘to become’, which is traditionally considered as a passive ‎auxiliary, is indeed a light verb hosted by an NV element. According ‎to this line of analysis, in Persian adjectival passives, the head [A-en] is ‎present in both LF and PF and the past participle is obligatorily ‎interpreted as an adjective.

Abstract The third person singular enclitic verb /-ast/ which is equivalent to English verb “is” undergoes the highest number of  phonological processes among Persian enclitic forms of the verb “boudan” (to be); It changes to [as] in one environment, to [s] in another, and to [e] in four environments. Deletion of /t/ is common in all six contexts. These different pronunciations are determined by various phonological processes including resyllabification, deletion of a vowel or insertion of an intervocalic consonant in order to resolve hiatus, vowel- consonant harmony, apocope, epenthesis, and raising. The primary cause of most of these phonological processes is the fact that this enclitic starts with a vowel. Consonant deletion is another cause. The ultimate goal of this research is to come up with a single inclusive ranking of constraints which explains all the three pronunciations of enclitic verb “-ast” in different contexts within Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004). The results section of this research includes six facts about the phonology of this enclitic verb.

Abstract Auxiliation is a subfield of the more familiar field of grammaticalization in world languages and deals with the way in which complex lexical verb structures develop over time into auxiliary grammatical structures in some of their usages. Most auxiliaries in New Persian were used just as lexical verbs in Old or Middle Persian and converted into auxiliaries through grammaticalization. The present study deals with the process of auxiliation of "shodan" in passive structure in Persian. This paper by providing instances of the passive structures in Old and Middle Persian provides an answer to the question of whether the usage of "shodan" as an auxiliary in passive structure goes back to the Old Persian or has been the outcome of grammaticalization. According to the existing evidences, the grammatical function of "shodan" in New Persian has been acquired through auxiliation during Dari (early New Persian) in the process of the evolution of passive structure from stative passive in Old and Middle Persian to dynamic passive in Dari. From typological view point, comparing the evolution of passive structure in Persian with similar processes in some other languages makes it clear that such an evolution has been due to a common tendency in languages towards dynamic passive in order to disambiguate passive structures.

Abstract Stress refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable. All of the words in lexicon regardless of the apparent structure and the number of their syllables have their own stress. Given that the regularities governing stress assignment in Persian depend on the type of lexical category and that Persian speakers have a tendency to assign stress at the end of words, the goal of the present paper was to explore the patterns of stress assignment in Persian bound morphemes under the optimality theory. Data analysis was done by OT soft software (version 2.3.2). With regard to the data, it was concluded that the apparent difference between bound morphemes stress was due to the prosodic level at which they appear. The set of constraints involved in the analysis of Persian stress included: ALIGN R/L, WRAP & CLASH.

Abstract In this research, we investigated the glottal wave of Persian vowels, using electroglottography. In the first level, the properties of vowels glottal wave were analyzed. In the second level, the glottal wave between male and female speakers were  compared. Contact quotient is the glottal wave parameter which was analyzed. Data included six Persian vowels and the glottal wave recorded using electroglottography. Speakers included four men and four women. The results showed that the average ratio of the Persian vowels contact quotient was significantly different. This result is based on the interactive approach of the linear source-filter model of speech production regarding effect of different areas of speech production. The comparison of male and female speaker glottal waves showed that Contact quotient parameter was different between men and women. In other words, men and women, in addition to the difference in fundamental frequency, showed different voice quality in speech production.
 

Abstract The purpose of the present research was the study of metaphorical conceptualization of the "anger" target domain in Persian, based on conceptual theory of metaphor. For the first time in Persian, the corpus-based method of Metaphorical Pattern Analysis (MPA) was applied on Hamshahri 2 corpus to collect and analyze the research data and finally for the "anger" target domain, 42 source domains were obtained. Also, the productivity of all the source domains was determined based on their frequency of occurrences in the corpus. After comparing the results of the present research with the ones done with traditional methods to collect the data of fear domain, the superiority of the corpus-based method of the present research was approved. Besides, after doing a comparative analysis of metaphorical conceptualization of fear between Persian and English, it was revealed that most frequent source domains are common in both languages and some of the sources only appear in Persian. The reason for some of these differences is cultural characteristics of the languages.

Abstract The role of orthography in difficult speech perception tasks has already been proved (Dehaene & Cohen, 2011). Since the processing of heterographic homophones is believed to be more difficult than other words (Hino & colleagues, 2013), the present study aimed at identifying the role of orthography and word forms in perception of such words during top-down processes, such as speech perception. A kind of priming experiment was programmed on the basis of a mixed word processing and retrieval model. This model was the result of combining the models proposed by Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer (1999) and Dell (1990). 41 participants took part in the experiment and the data analysis confirmed the research hypothesis by 95 percent of certainty.