درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

The effect of language on culture has been an interesting issue in applied linguistics. One of the main critical domains of culture-related language issues is pronunciation. The importance of pronunciation in some cultures is doubled when its importance goes beyond the daily use of language. Many illiterate Muslims in non-Arab countries must perform their religious duties in accurate Arabic pronunciation.  Since illiterate learners can not be treated with regular and traditional educational intervention to complete this incumbent religious task, the current research has employed dynamic intervention, an approach adopted from the socio-cultural theory of Vygotsky (1978), for instructing a sample of these people in Iran. First, the main pronunciation problems of these participants were identified. Then using a native speaker’s judgment, the effect of this educational intervention was calculated in a pretest-posttest design. A paired t-test was used to interpret the collected data. The findings showed that dynamic intervention has a meaningful effect on the improvement of pronunciation in the Iranian illiterate participants of the study. This study could have implications for language teachers, language learners, and researchers in different fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

Due to the important status of martyrdom in the context of Islam and Muslim thoughts, especially Shiites, some orientalists such as Wim Raven have sought to write works in this field. Throughout an article published as "Martyr" in the Encyclopedia of the Qur''an, Raven has explored the meaning of martyrdom and its genealogy, using the books and articles by other western scholars, especially Goldziher and Wensinck. According to them, he believes that "martyr" in The Qur''an means "witness" and "hearer of confession", and that reference of the term to the concept of "being killed in the path of Allah" is the result of a semantic transformation that occurs in the Old Testament and the use of "shahīd" in the sense of martyr owes to hadith literature. Orientalists believe that the term "shahīd" in the sense of martyr is a loan and post-Qur''anic word whose root is derived from the Syriac origin of Sahda. In the present article, with a descriptive-analytical approach, after examining Raven''s semantics discussions and outlining his viewpoints and sources, we have considered the semantics of "martyrs" in lexical and Islamic books and then analyzed Orientalists'' viewpoints in this regard. According to the historical analysis of the usage of the word "shahīd" in the sense of "the killed", its application is traced back to the outward contiguity of the concept of the killed with the basic meaning of the word "shahīd" (witness and presence). That is to say, due to the adjacency of the presence some of the killed on the battlefield and their practical witness to the faith of God and the Prophet, the concept of "being killed" is linked to "the presence", and gradually, this contiguity has led to the independent usage of the word "shahīd" in the sense of "the killed".