فردوس آقاگل زاده

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.

In this article, a contrastive analysis of reformists and fundamentalists’ press texts, related to nuclear talks has been performed in specific periods of time, before and after the last round of nuclear talks between Islamic Republic of Iran and the 5+1 group, especially the United States’ related texts in Iran’s Persian newspapers as representatives of the two opposite discourses, from the perspective of the Critical Discourse Analysis approach by using socio-semantic features of Van Leeuwen’s model (2008). This study goes beyond the structural description of the discourse practices and examines the ways through which a system and structure make possible a special type of action. To do so, discursive texts of the two Iranian Persian publications belonging to two rival groups: E’temad as the representative of reformists and Keyhan, the fundamentalists’ representative, have been analyzed, both qualitatively and quantitatively. In response to the research questions (How is the linguistic realization of the discursive structures performed in the given texts? And are Socio-Semantic features determined by power relations?)The result shows that the opposite ideologies dominating the minds of journalists of the two political groups are reflected in the texts and statistical analysis of the corpus also states that the Socio-Semantic features are determined by different ideologies, related to power relations. In other words, language and discourse at underlying levels are laden with ideology, power relations and dominance, and at surface levels, with discursive features and structures.

This paper provides an Optimality-Theoretic account of dissimilation in standard Persian as well as some other accents and dialects of Persian. As such, this work starts by introducing Optimality Theory (henceforth OT) and its basic concepts and then it investigates dissimilation in this framework. It argues for the superiority of OT over derivational approaches regarding a case in which both dissimilation and assimilation, with no clear feeding order, are involved.

Legal translation is a special type of Language for Special Purposes (LSP) translation involving cross-linguistic communication in the legal context and it tends to involve more cultural specific components. Since the main functions of legal language are normative and performative, it is important to make sure what the actual purpose of the translation of a legal text is. On the other hand, legal translators are expected to produce not parallel texts but texts that are equal in legal effect. So, they must be able to understand not only the legal concepts and the legal effects they are supposed to have, but also how to achieve those legal effects in the target language, especially when it is based on a different legal system. The vast differences in Persian and English legal systems and legal cultures, and consequently the associated incongruity of terminology, highlight the many challenges in legal translation. This paper aims at presenting a strategy through which we can convey the legal culture of SL (Persian) to TL (English) and while creating similar legal effect in TL, improve the quality of legal translation, relying on the two notions inspired by Venuti (1998), i.e. domestication and foreignization. In this regard we analyzed legal translation of 20 Persian to English Divorce Decrees within the domain of Private law, the study of which has been seldom attempted despite the customary presence of these instruments in the legal routine. As a result of this analysis we can conclude that legal texts in different legal systems are translatable and a similar legal effect can be created in TL provided that the legal genre of the source text is preserved and also functional and conceptual equivalences are employed through foreignization and domestication.

This paper, largely motivated by Hoey (2001), revisits the issue of Written Discourse Analysis and, in particular, the Problem-Solution Pattern. Much discussion embarrasses the way in which texts are pro-duced and understood. The different functional approaches include Halliday and Hasan’s approach, van Dijk’s process-oriented approach, the procedural approach of de Beaugrande and Dressler, and the Problem Solution approach of Michael Hoey. These approaches attempt to answer the question: what is a text? How is it constructed and how can it be interpreted? According to Hoey, the processes of reading and writing in any discourse are based on culturally popular patterns of organisation between the writer and the reader. The text may be seen as an interaction between the writer and the reader in which the reader seeks to anticipate the questions that the writer is going to answer. In conclusion, analysing some texts indicates that the problem solution method is a comprehensive and easy method for producing narrative and non-narrative texts.

The present study focuses on the evaluation and critical reviewing of equivalence translation process and output. The choices of equivalents were examined by Fairclough’s model (2011) of critical discourse analysis. According to this model, interpretation and explanation of socio – cultural, socio – historical and situational context as macrostructures which examine everything about texts are complementary pairs for descriptive analysis which examine everything in texts as microstructures. To clarify the discussion, translated texts (Meta texts) are analyzed and compared with their source texts (Proto text). The results indicated that in order to find a framework for equivalence; there is a significant need for discursive features which are partly critical and partly descriptive (semantic) as units for translation criticism. These discursive components in translation process have been coined in this study as “CRISEME”.

This paper attempts to introduce the dimensions of bi/multi-lingualism as a cognitive linguis-tic phenomenon, which can be thought over in sociological, biolinguistic, cultural and psy-cholinguistic perspective. The main research question being asked as how bi/multilingualism is a cognitive phenomenon and what are the bilinguality problems and how do they repre-sents in linguistics? Linguistic interference, bilingual acquisition, and mental lexicons notions and multi lingual representation in the brain are the main problems of the subject. There are, at least, two dif-ferent types of linguistic transfer, positive and negative or interference. The mental lexicon is the constituent of the grammar consisting of phonological, morphological, semantic, syntac-tic, and pragmatics information which speakers have stored about individual words and morphemes in their minds.The paper, therefore, is an attempt to answer and deschibe the above questions.

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.