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The present study aimed to investigate the effect of gender on the L1-L2 syntactic processing in balanced bilinguals who learned their L2 at the age of seven. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI), Turkish-Persian balanced bilinguals (15 women and 15 men) performed an auditory grammaticality judgment task with an alternating language switching paradigm. Based on the Bilingual Dominance Scale, no significant difference was observed between the participants' proficiency in their L1 (Turkish) and L2 (Persian). Imaging results demonstrated strong neural similarity between men and women in two left-lateralized syntax-specific ROIs (Pars opercularis and posterior superior temporal gyrus), supporting the indistinguishable gender performance during L1-L2 syntactic processing. In addition, in EF-specific areas in right-hemisphere (planum temporale, supplementary motor area, superior parietal lobule and superior frontal gyrus), we did not observe differences in hemispheric recruitment by men and women, evidencing empirically for gender sameness in lateralization. Therefore, the present task and sample are not consistent with the previous claims that women show (a) superior language performance and (b) less lateralization. In general, our findings suggest that L1 and L2 syntactic processing in balanced bilinguals is not affected by the gender parameter.
 

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In the Persian language, which follows the SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) word order, the interrogative complement or prepositional object usually appears after the object in the focal position. However, it is possible to move this phrase to other positions within the sentence. The aim of this study is to investigate the processing of interrogative complement displacement in Persian using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) based on Friederici's syntactic processing model. This study focuses on the central-parietal region of the brain, specifically the N400 and P600 components, which, according to Friederici's language processing model (1995), examine the filler-gap dependency structure and the mental representation of these phrases. Four different positions of the interrogative complement in Persian were examined, and 50 sentences were constructed for each condition.. The results indicate that the displacement of the interrogative complement leads to different brain responses, with an increase in N400 amplitude in the central-parietal region when the interrogative complement follows the subject, and an increase in P600 amplitude in the initial or focal position of the interrogative complement. These findings suggest that the displacement of the wh-complement in Persian, according to Friederici's model, has a neurophysiological basis and may represent a filler-gap dependency structure in mental representation.

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The present paper is an attempt to investigate the methods of passivisation of Persian compound verbs on the one hand and, to introduce Jackendoff’s semantic theory; which is called Theory of Conceptual Semantics on the other. The purpose of introducing this theory is to check Persian data within the framework of this theory to see if the its foundations, as its founder claims, are universal and can justify Persian data or not. To do this, the semantic behaviors of 22 Persian compound verbs were examined when making them passive. There are two methods for the passivization of Persian compound verbs, namely syntactic and semantic. Since the Jackendoff’s semantic theory is unable to explain the unacceptability of grammatical sentences, because the approach it takes for semantic analysis is making semantic components salient, thus we will reason that if sentence is not considered as the unit of semantic analysis, the outputs of such analysis will not be correct.

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Semantic Space of šod-{n ‘to become’ in Persian: A Cognitive Account This paper attempts to explore the semantic space of šod-{n ‘to become’ in Persian in order to address some basic features of linguistic cognition (e.g. analyzability and compositionality). One of the highly-frequent verbs in Persian is šod-{n, which with regard to its different functions at the level of sentence, can be considered as the most active verb in this language. According to a diachronic viewpoint, the same verbal form, šod{n, with four distinctive functions (as a main verb, as a copula, as a modal verb, and as the verbal constituent of complex predicates) plays an important role in Persian verbal system. The passive construction in Persian is considered as a Complex Predicate in which šod-{n combines with different linguistic categories such as noun, adjective, prepositional phrase and past participle (X in general). Its semantic space indicates that various types of constructions including šod-{n form a network of meanings, in which the verbal element šod-{n is meaningful, in contrast to the previous studies it's passive construction which considered it as a purely syntactic element carrying no meaning. Therefore, the passive construction in Persian is viewed as analyzable in which šod-{n is not a random occurrence but rather an extension of its other uses. The relatedness of the uses of šod-{n provides further evidence for the claim in Cognitive Grammar that the passive construction is part of a larger network of related syntactic constructions and not derives from the active construction.

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In this research, the semantic properties of Persian reduplicative constructions were studied in the framworks of “Iconicity Theory”, in general, and the quantity principle in particular. Researches on reduplicative constructions in most languages have reveraled the connection of these constructions to such meanings as augmentation, increased quantity, internsification, continuation, repetition, completion, and distribution. The aim of this research was to show the connection of Persian reduplicative constructions to the aforementioned meanings within the framworks of “Iconicity Theory”, the principle of quantity, and the revised version of Regier's model (1998). The extensive research on form-meaning correlation in Persian causative constructions seminated in the development of a semantic classification of Persian reduplicative constructions (The attached semantic types lists 1-5).

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This paper, using Government and Binding Theory, deals with resumptive pronouns in Persian. It is concluded that the resumptive pronouns in genetive structures are obligatory. Such pronouns can be absent in genetive position of topicalized structures in the old and literary Persian. They are obligatory in prepositional structures too. The presence of prepositon before the head of relative clauses is possible, if in the of both relative and matrix clause verbs there exist -roles needing a joint preposition by which they are represented. Otherwise, the preposition must be stranded in the relative clause with a resumptive pronoun in the complement position. Resumptive pronouns are optional in the object position of relative clauses but banned in topicalized structures. A trace is prefered in the unmarked subject position of relative clauses but resumptive pronoun occurs when this position is focused and shows a sort of uniqueness. Relative element in Persian relative clauses is a non-overt operator coindexed with resumptive pronouns or traces. Persian language is sensitive to complex noun phrase consraint, and accordingly, in cases where a resumptive pronoun inside a complex noun phrase is coindexed with a non-overt operator out of that complex noun phrase and yet the structure is grammatical, it is concluded that no movement happens. So Persian resumptive pronouns are base-generated. Non-clitic pronouns can not be resumptive in topicalized structures.  

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Although linguists have been studying the “News” as a type of text for a long period of time, the researches have been mainly of the product-oriented types, which purely analyze the news texts and their linguistic characteristics. Linguists and media researchers have been mainly keen to determine sets of criteria known as “News Values” so far, and the result is various lists of media and linguistic news selection norms. The goal of this article is finding answer for the following questions: How news production process can be orchestrated in a linguistic model? What are the linguistic news values? and How these linguistic values correlate with other selection criteria? In addition to revisiting the theoretical notion of “News Values” and introducing the “Grice Maxims” as the linguistic criteria of news composition, this paper, as a descriptive analytical study based on field work, also represents the multi-level model of news composition and selection based on linguistically oriented findings. The mentioned model not only determines and explains different levels of news composition and selection process from the event to the news, but also puts the role of macro-structural elements of news discourse production such as ideology, relations of power and composition in the center of attention.

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Revealing the unequal relations of power, which lead to hegemony in media and make audiences aware of it, has been in the center of attention for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) for a long period of time. Van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic network of social actors is considered as a competent framework for linguists and discourse analysts to do so. In this article, we study 50 hard news and articles published in leading international news agencies and newspapers about Iran’s nuclear program during November and December 2010 to analyze the way the social actors of both sides of the quarrel have been represented in the media. The results showed that although the international news agencies and newspapers claim to stay neutral in representing the events, some linguistic mechanisms to represent Iranian social actors differently from the western ones are obvious and Iranian social actors playing role in this case are shown as irrational hardliners while western counterparts are introduced as logical peace seeker ones.

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One of the important issues in the study of grammar is the study of the structure and the functions of different sentences of a language, as well as describing the similarities and differences between them. This article aims to study the exclamative sentences of Persian according to a corpus and within a typological framework based on the study done by Zanuttini and Portner (2003). The article seeks answers to these questions: “What is the structure of exclamative sentences in Persian”?, “What are the semantic and pragmatic functions of such sentences”? “How these sentences can be differentiated from declarative and interrogative sentences”? and “What is the position of the negative markers in such sentences”? The results of this descriptive-analytic study showed that Persian Language has two types of exclamative sentences; declarative exclamatives and wh-exclamatives, which are different in terms of their semantic, pragmatic, syntactic and acoustic features.  

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We examined two assumptions of the "Conceptual Metaphor Theory" (CMT) using corpus-based method. According to the first assumption, linguistic metaphors are merely reflections of conceptual metaphors; so linguistic metaphors have a marginal and secondary role. According to the second assumption, conventional linguistic metaphors are systematic. A 50-milion token sample of Hamshahri collection of Persian texts was selected as the corpus of the study. All of the corpus analyses of calculating the collocations and extracting the concordances were carried out using Ant Conc corpus software. Data analysis failed to find evidence in support of the first assumption provided by CMT, but the second assumption was partially confirmed. The findings suggest that the semantic patterns of linguistic metaphors are more complex than those predicted by CMT, and language use factors play an undeniable role in shaping the semantics of metaphoric expressions.  

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Cognitive poetics answers to the fundamental questions on the cognitive tools of art, language and literature. This is the strong point of this approach over the other approaches, especially literary theory, which has limitations such as inability to understand how different meanings are created and various interpretations of literary texts are possible. This paper explores how to connect the text world to the reader’s world to interpret the text and extend the reader's mental spaces in the understanding of literary texts as the research field. The main aim is the application of a model for the free reading of such interpretation, which is left to the person who relies on the opinion of cognitive poetics. Analysis of the story of Shazde Ehtejab (Golshiri, 1384/2005) is to check the elements in building the story. The questions are: 1) Which of the building elements of the story of Shazde Ehtejab can be identified by the Text World Theory? and 2) How does the identification of these elements help to interpret different text worlds? The answers to these questions (three layers of the text -“text world”, “discourse world” and “sub world”) are identified based on the Text World Theory, which is involved in building of the story. Then the link between the micro-text worlds in the form of included text world that has emerged in the mind of the Shazde and formed the original text world of the story, would be shown. The contrast between the characters and the mental spaces that are occurred through their thoughts, and form the smaller text worlds within the Shazde’s original text world, would be effective in systematic interpretation of the text.

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The present paper studies the method referential categories and their distribution and their types in two translated texts from Dubliners written by Jamez Joyce within the framework of Holliday’s coherence theory and also analyses the book itself and compares the source text and the target texts. The method for analyzing this data is statistical analysis method. The sample of this study is five stories from the Dubliners series which were selected randomly and 135 sentences were selected from the main text. As these sentences were analyzed in their two translations the total number of analyzed sentences is 405 in three books. Reference in Holliday’s theory is a subcategory of grammatical cohesion. This study tries to explain differences in translation methods of two Persian translations by analyzing reference. Results show that method of using reference in these three texts is different and depending on the author and story different types of reference were used. At the end different methods of reference in translation of two translators were considered reflecting their different point of view about story.

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In the present research the authors attempt to study the complex predicates derived from the Arabic infinitives and their derivatives by taking into consideration: the closeness of Persian to Arabic, their joint cultural and historical backgrounds in different eras and the borrowing of many words from Arabic in modern Persian to such an extent that today an outstanding part of many Persian words specially        non-verbal particles in complex predicates are dedicated to the Arabic loanwords. Regarding  the development and productivity of compounding as an active word formation process in Persian, which is considered as a salient typological property, this process has constantly been regarded from different approaches by Iranian and foreign linguists. Therefore, the purpose of this research is initially to investigate and delineate the formation process of the complex predicates which are derived from the Arabic infinitives and their derivatives, using the achievements of cognitive linguistics. Moreover, it examines the dominant constraints on such compounds. It's worth mentioning here that the analysis of chosen investigated verbs is based on the three theories of categorization, configuration and conceptualization which are theoretical fundamentals of cognitive morphology proffered by Hamawand (2011).  

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In our Iranian- Islamic heritage there are lots of luminous and valuable linguistic theories. Abdolghaher Jorjani`s theory of construction is an example of these endeavors in the Islamic linguistics area which has many close relations with western linguistic and critical theories such as Halliday functional theory. There are many common points between these two theoreticians` principles and concepts. This study tries to analyze some of this common points with a descriptive-analytical method in three basic sections: The first one deals with construction theory &systemic grammar.The second deals with construction theory &context.and the third deals with construction theory & textual structure. some of the conclusions of this research are: the convergence between the concept of construction and the concept of systemic grammar, the attention of two theoreticians with the context(linguistic and extralingustic) and its special function in the explanation of meaning of text , the convergence between two theoreticians in special function of speaker and listener in the word order. the present research is going to recognize functional features of Jorjani`s theory by filling the gaps between both theories which belong to old time and contemporary time.

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The purpose of the present research is to investigate the formation of locative nouns in Persian which are not semantically similar in spite of their resemblance in functions. The suffix "-zâr" in Persian, for instance, indicates both the concept of location and multiplicity of something: "golzâr and lâlehzâr". The other suffixes of location, however, do not bear this semantic property. It's worth mentioning that along with the above mentioned process, two other processes of "compounding" and "derivation-compounding" are also investigated here. Thus, the authors in the present research have attempted to investigate these semantic constraints which are dominant on such suffixes, using the achievements of cognitive morphology such as categorization theory, conceptualization and configuration. Eventually, the authors attempt to introduce the cognitive potentials contributing to the formation and usage of these locative forms

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speaker`s attitude toward her/his statement. Aikhenvald (2004) presented a model for evidential in about 500 languages around the world. She introduce 2 types of evidentiality.  Grammatical evidentiality including obligatory affixes and clitics and ungrammatical evidentiality including optional syntactic and lexical strategies. Aikhenvald refers to direct and indirect evidentials from a semantic view point. This study show that there aren`t any grammatical evidentials in Persian and like the other Indo- European languages , Persian has linguistic items which fulfill evidential function in addition to their first roles in language. Some of evidential structures  in Persian include impersonal passive forms, modal expressions , tense- aspect features, reports and quotations and sensory and perception verbs.

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It seems that speech technology is a multidimensional skill which is related to some semiotic verbal and non-verbal issues and is more complicated than the usual and everyday language that native speakers use to communicate. Studies have shown that the power of speech is not any less than magic indeed in many fields. 
In this paper, it has been tried to investigate the quality of both speech and speech techniques of 10 Farsi speakers in the viewpoint of 100 Farsi native speakers including 21 verbal, Para-linguistic, non-linguistic, and pro-enunciation factors applying a listener-based method which  was done for the first time in Farsi. The Participants have been chosen through stratified sampling to obtain data. The opinion poll has been about the speech quality of the ten Farsi speakers who were speaking spontaneously on TV live programs of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasts (IRIB). Hence, 20000 data were gathered from the statistical population. Then, descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated to reveal the most effective factors on speech quality.  
Selecting the factors were inspired by principles and theories of Grice (1975), Yule and Brown (1989), Edlund and Gustafson (2010) in the framework of Eco Semiotics (1979). Hence, 21000 data were gathered from the statistical population. Then, descriptive and inferential statistics were calculated. At first, in order to find out the questionnaire reliability, some of the respondents (40 people) were asked to complete the questionnaires again after ten days by watching all the ten one-minute recorded films of speeches through the same process. Consequently, after calculating the data and comparing with the previous questionnaires’ results, the reliability of the questionnaire was determined based on intra class coefficient (ICC) procedure. According to the definition of reliability coefficient (Mooner, 2000), the ICC degree for the overall questionnaires was 0.88 that indicates high correlation between both tests with a ten-day time interval. The internal validity of 0.872 was estimated as well.
Subsequently, among all the observed factors, relatively, para-linguistic and non-linguistic factors have been identified as more effective than linguistic and pro-enunciation factors on speech quality of Farsi speaking skills. As a result, by presenting and identifying the degree and the percentage of the related factors, effective improvement and reinforcement strategies on speech techniques quality for Farsi speakers can be specified and clarified.