فردوس آقاگل زاده

Objective: This study aims to find the most suitable type of oral narrative for assessing the transitivity system used by hearing-impaired students studying in ordinary schools with their hearing counterparts. Methods: Three types of oral narratives, including personal narration, storytelling, and story improvisation were collected. The participants were eighteen hearing-impaired students (selected as an available sample) along with eighteen hearing students. Oral narratives were transcribed and analyzed using Halliday's transitivity system framework. And data analysis was carried out using SPSS 26 and based on the normality of the data in each of the transitivity indicators, two-independent samples t-tests and U Mann-Whitney tests were conducted. Results: Findings revealed that all three types of oral narratives of hearing-impaired students contained transitivity indicators lower than average, this difference was significant for processes (p=0.047) and participants (p=0.029) in improvisation, and for circumstances only in Personal narrative (p=041). However, in the total three types of narratives, the median difference between the two groups is significant in all transitivity indices (p= 0.24, p=0.022, and p=0.001 for processes, participants, and circumstances respectively). Conclusion: In light of the results of this research, the storytelling task, which is the most widely used form of assessment in communication disorders, cannot capture the narrative weaknesses of hearing-impaired students enrolled in regular schools, and it is necessary to use more spontaneous narrative tasks such as personal narration and improvisation of narrative in evaluating and rehabilitating these children.

The main objective of this study is to examine different layers of power relations between characters of Persian novels as represented by Afsoone Sabz utilizing Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis framework (1996) which paves the way for decoding social structures that cause verbal abuse in Iran. To this end, Afsoone Sabz novel, written by Takin Hamzeloo, is chosen as the case study. It can be maintained that social structures like gender inequality, socioeconomic status differences, and class struggle determine verbal abuses in Persian. It is reasonable to argue that Hamzeloo uses her text to influence the audience (Iranians in general and Iranian women in particular) to be aware of social practices (gender inequality, socioeconomic status differences, class struggle and power relations) in an attempt to change, if not subvert, power relations (obtain gender equality and remove socio-economic inequality in Iran). The paper suggests that Hamzeloo uses othering strategy, as a powerful rhetorical tool, to portray the pessimistic outlook Iranian men hold about women through verbal abuse.

Compounding is one of the most common and also very productive word formation processes among languages in the world. Because of its productivity and high frequency, it has precisely been studied by many Iranian and non-Iranian linguists. However, this productive process has not yet been studied in Mazandarani. In the present study, first Mazandarani compound words taken from Tabari dictionary, have been analysed in the form of a table and based on the criteria such as syntactic category, semantic classification of compound types (endocentric, exocentric and dvandva), the position of head and being verbal or nonverbal. By taking into consideration the above mentioned criteria and based on three fundamental concepts, namely, head, dependent (non-head) and feature percolation, the resulting compounds have been analysed separately. At the end of the article, after studying and evaluating the hypotheses, appropriate explanations have been presented. The high frequency of “N+ N → compound noun construction” refers to their predictability in meaning compared to other constructions. It means that there is a direct relationship between high frequency of a word formation process and its semantic predictability. Also, the reason why endocentric compounds are more frequent than others is due to the fact that both constituents of the compound are used in their original meanings. Hence, endocentric compounds are unmarked elements and are easier to learn in the process of language learning. The above mentioned findings are in line with markedness theory. That is why the frequency of occurrence of unmarked elements is higher than marked ones which is related to language universals.