مطالب

This article examines the performance of justice in Qajar Iranian society (1789-1906) and the ways in which social hierarchies operated in the determination of justice. As in ancient or medieval European society, people were not considered equal before the law. Men were treated differently from women, while non-Muslims were subject to substantially different expectations and punishments. Sunnis and those belonging to other Shi’i schools of Islam such as the Isma‘ilis and Zaidis had fewer rights than Twelver Shi’is in legal disputes and were subject to more restrictions. But even men belonging to Twelver Shi’ism, the largest branch of Shi’ism and a majority of Iranian, were not equal before the law. In addition, partly because of the duality between ‘urfi customary law and sharia religious law, and party because of clerical power, laws were neither unanimous nor centralized, which meant justice was often arbitrary. Qajar justice commonly practiced corporeal punishment and executions, usually performed in public, and these served as a means of both chastising the people and entertaining them. Finally, the institution of slavery remained in force. Slaves, as moveable properties, occupied a position between humans and commodities and were subject to very different sets of regulations and punishments. One consequence of this patch quilt of laws was that European powers, starting in the Safavid era, demanded the right to adjudicate legal disputes between their citizens who resided in Iran and the local populace. These agreements, which were known as capitulation treaties, offered protection to persecuted minorities of Iran and runaway slaves. But they also allowed foreign powers to become involved in Iran’s domestic affairs and to monitor maritime trade in the Persian Gulf. All of these social hierarchies would be questioned in the course of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and new laws would be promulgated in the hopes of creating a modern state with equal rights for citizens.

This paper examines the differences between two types of categorization and then the use of conventional metaphor and metonymy and their relationship among Persian-speaking Iranians. Recent studies on categorization show that Persian speakers, similar to the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, categorize based on thematic relationships, unlike the European Americans who categorize based upon taxonomic relations. These studies have shown that Eastern Asians, with regard to categorization, act on the syntagmatic axis and the units in the context, and Westerners act upon the paradigmatic axis. Therefore, the hypothesis was put forth that these different cognitive functions are also represented in the application of metaphor and metonymy that is, those who use the category-based classification are more likely to use metaphors, and those who are inclined to use the relationship-based categorization tend more toward using metonymy. Examining the Persian corpus of 30,000 sentences confirmed this hypothesis. Persian speakers, who categorize based on relationships, use metonymy, which works on syntagmatic axis and based on the contiguity of two things, more than metaphor, which is based on the similarity and paradigmatic relation between two entities. The present study confirms this fact again that cognition is not the same in all human beings.

In this study, corpus method was used to test an assumption of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) that systematic and conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions have literal meaning in the source domain. The conceptual metaphors LIFE IS A JOURNEY and IDEAS ARE PLANTS were selected for analysis and three keywords from source domain of the metaphors were chosen and matched with their English equivalents. Hamshahri 2 collection of Farsi texts was selected as the corpus of the study. For ease of processing, one third of the corpus comprising of fifty million word tokens was randomly sampled as the working corpus. Collocates of the source-domain keywords, as realizations of fixed metaphoric expressions, were extracted using AntConc software and their concordances were examined. It was found that 1) in conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions, when source-domain keywords were used metaphorically they had collocates that rarely appeared with the same source-domain keywords used literally, and 2) source-domain keywords had gradable degrees of metaphoricity. The findings were interpreted as suggesting that the meaning of fixed metaphoric expressions may not be systematically connected to the metaphor's source-domain meaning.