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Concentrations of lead (Pb) were found in the shells of the oyster Saccostrea cucullata and sediments in May 2010. Samples were obtained at four sites on Qeshm Island, at three sites on Hormoz Island, and at three sites in Lengeh Port along the intertidal coast of the Persian Gulf of Iran. The levels of Pb in sediments and shells were analyzed by graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrophotometer.Mean Pb concentrations in the different sampling stations varied between 613.94 and 0.06 µg g^-1 in the shells of S. cucullata and 180.78 and 0.86µg g^-1 in sediments. Biological effects criteria suggest that Pb concentrations in sediments in three sites from Lengeh Port were higher than ERL (effects range low), but at the all sites were lower than ERM (effects range medium). The present results support the significant differences in shell and sediments’ accumulated concentrations of Pb among sites attributed to input sources of human activities including urban, domestic, industrial, agricultural, shipping and transport, mining activities, and ports and harbors

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Derivation is a process in which adding a derivational affix leads to formation of a new word. This process has been studied by linguists for many years and mainly seen as a morphologic or morphosyntactic process. Productivity of a derivational affix (the number of new words formed by a derivational affix) is a prominent factor while considering the derivation process. Phonological and morphophonemic factors may also play role in the ratio of the productivity of an affix. This paper studies the impact of syllable structure on the productivity of verbal derivational suffixes in Persian language. The results showed that there is a close relation between the syllable structure and the productivity of the verbal suffix derivational suffixes in Persian, all of them have a vowel in their initial syllable position. As a result, we can conclude that initiation with a vowel can be considered as a productivity factor of a derivational suffix in Persian. The study of the nucleus of the syllables also showed that the two front vowels of [a, e] are the most frequent vowels of these suffixes as nucleus. Consequently, it is concluded that phonological factors, especially syllable structure of a derivational suffix, play an indispensable role in its productivity      

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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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The Erysiphaceae are obligatory parasitic fungi that cause powdery mildew disease of green space plants. During this study, powdery mildew fungi were collected and identified from different localities of Ardabil landscape, Iran. Erysiphe rayssiae (on Spartium junceum), Erysiphe robiniae var. robiniae (on Robinia pseudoacacia) and Euoidium cf. agerati (on Ageratum houstonianum)are new records for mycobiota of Iran. Jasminum sp. is reported as Matrix nova for Erysiphe syringae-japonicae. Also this is the first record of Golovinomyces montagnei on Cirsium arvense and Golovinomyces orontii on Antirrhinum majus in Iran. The taxa including Erysiphe astragali on Astragalus sp., Erysiphe crucifearum on Brassica elongata, Erysiphe polygoni on Rumex sp., Golovinomyces cichoracearum on Cichorium intybus and Golovinomyces sordidus on Plantago sp. are newly found in Ardabil province. Furthermore, some specimens belonging to Podosphaera fusca s.l. were assessed. According to the new species concept, concerning these taxa, Podosphaera fusca s.s. was redescribed, and Podosphaera erigerontis-canadensis on Taraxacum sp. is reported for the first time, although previously reported from Iran under the Podosphaera fusca.  

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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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The linguistic study of “Humor” has a rich and long history, and the systematic research on linguistic mechanisms of humor goes back to Raskin’s semantic theory of humor (1985). Besides the elements such as incongruity, ambiguity and exaggeration, flouting of Grice maxims (1975) of Cooperative Principle (CP) is one of the most reviewed techniques of producing humor, which has been the subject of various linguistics studies. In this research, we study the role of maxim flouting in producing so-called “pa-na-pa” (“so what” conversational style) jokes, which have been recently spread initially on the Internet and then in the society. We also depict the process in a three-part algorithm. This new generation of Iranian jokes is considerable not  only because of their linguistic but also because of its sociolinguistics characteristics in which there is no trace of insulting language toward social and ethnic minorities that itself shows a paradigm shift in Iranian jokes.  

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While writing a literal or educational text, especially for children, it is very important to know the characteristics of the readers. Children’s literature and educational professionals believe that using difficult vocabulary or structures in a text will eliminate the reader’s motivation, so using simple structures and core vocabulary is very important. Core vocabulary means a list of words that have high frequency in use, and everyone (in an age level) can understand their meaning. In this research, we study the usage of core vocabulary in 20 texts from “Roshde Noamuz” magazine according to Nematzade et al (2011). The results of this research can be fruitful in writing and translating childrenʼs texts. We further aim to find vocabulary that all Iranian children can understand its meaning to use in literal and educational texts.

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The “Persian Gulf”, as a very important geopolitical region known as global heartland, is the third great gulf of the world. There have been some controversies over the name of this region in recent few decades, and recently some Persian Gulf Arab states or sometimes American and European institutes have tried to coin the fake name of “Arab Gulf” instead. In this paper, after reviewing the literature and historical and international documents, we study the naming strategy of international media toward the name of this important geographical entity. We compare the frequency, genre and content of the articles and news in which four referring expressions of “Arabic/Arab/Arabian/Persian Gulf” have been used within the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. The data are gathered from Time magazine archive (1923-2008) and Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) (1990-2012). The findings of this article show that, comparing with other terms, the usage of the term “Persian Gulf” is considerably and undeniably more than the other three terms in a way that in Time magazine archive, there are 969 and in COCA corpus, 5003 cases of “Persian Gulf” usages while this number is around a hundred for all of the three coined words. The results further shows that while Persian Gulf is widely used context freely as default name, “Arab Gulf” term is mostly used in economic context, especially in those news and articles, which are about the “oil”.

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Linguistic mechanisms of representation (Personalization/ Impersonalization ) of social actors in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), especially van Leeuwen’s approach to CDA has been longly in the center of attention. This prominence will be much higher when the subject of the study is naming strategy and representation of “Iran” as one of the most important actors of the Middle East and the socio-political and ideological rival of the United States of America. In this article, we studied the naming and representation (exclusion/inclusion) strategy of Time magazine toward Iran/the Islamic Republic of Iran within van Leeuwen socio-semantic framework. The data has been gathered from the archive of time magazine from 1920s to 2010 . The findings showed that both the frequency and the addressing method of Iran in Time magazine has been considerably divergent within decades and through the time. While the name of “Iran” has been mentioned for more than 5600 times in this corpus, the official title of “the Islamic Republic of Iran” has gone under an extremely exclusion process  and repeated for only 8 times, all of these cases are oriented with clearly biased adjectives and modifiers. The findings of this research may be interesting for both scholars and public audience of the mass media.

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How does a journalist or an editor decide which news is worthy and which is not? According to some media researchers, they refer to a set of news values. One of the best known lists of such news values have been supplied by Johan Galtung and Marie H. Ruge. An analytical discussion on news values always refers to this list, which initially intended to cover international events. These factors include: 1- Frequency 2- Threshold 3- Unambiguity 4- Meaningfulness 5- Consonance 6- Unexpectedness 7- Continuity 8- Composition 9- Reference to elite nations 10- Reference to elite people 11-Reference to persons 12- Negativity. The current research collected 303 headlines from the front pages of four widely circulated Iranian newspapers: Hamshahri, Keyhan, Shargh and Iran. Out of these headlines, 426 news were distinguished and considered. As such, results show that the factors like reference to elite people (F10) and consonance (F5) play main role in Iranian press. Further Iranian press do not focus on Galtung and Ruge’s news values although, in general, headlines possess one or more of above factors. However, two factors (F10 and F5) show that Iranian press follow traditional process in news selection.