مطالب

In Construction Morphology (CM), a compound is treated as a construction at the word level with a systematic correlation between its form and meaning, in the sense that any change in the form is accompanied by a change in the meaning. Compound words as one type of complex words are coined by compounding patterns or templates which are called abstract schemas in CM. These abstract constructional schemas generalize over sets of existing compound words and specify how new compound words can be created. The schemas dominate the compounds so that these words inherit all predictable morphological and semantic properties from these schemas. In fact, this is mainly the constructional schema which determines the properties for every compound word not individual constituents of a compound word. Therefore, the form and meaning of a compound, as a whole, are affected by formal and semantic/syntactic properties of the construction itself. Also, the dominance of schemas and subschema as over the compound words reinforces the idea of hierarchical lexicon. In addition, CM adopts a paradigmatic approach to word formation; that is, the creation of new compound words is caused by the extension of a systematic form-meaning relationship in a set of existing compound words to new cases resulting in new compound words. Regarding these properties of CM, This paper aims to study one type of Persian compounds, that is, compound nouns in the framework of Construction Morphology. From this perspective, two types of compound nouns including endocentric and exocentric compound nouns are treated in a rather similar way because the compound noun construction as a holistic schema plays the main role in specifying the syntactic features, head(if any) and semantic content of compound nouns, not their constituents. According to findings of this study, the analysis of Persian compound nouns based on this model increases the degree of generality in compound noun formation and develops the concept of holisticity in the form and meaning of compound nouns as well as it highlights the paradigmatic relationship in Persian compound noun formation templates.

The present study was an attempt to investigate to what extent Iranian EFL teachers practice critical discourse analysis in the English language classroom during their teaching. To reach this aim, a 27-item questionnaire was designed and administered among 120 male and female Iranian English teachers in different language schools in Tehran. Following descriptive statistics through which the mean, standard deviation, and reliability of the questionnaire were calculated,a factor analysis was conducted to assess the construct validity of the designed questionnaire.The results of the statistical analysis clearly demonstrated the validity of the designed questionnaire.Once validated, certain within group comparisons (with respect to the demographic factors of gender, age, and educational degree) were conducted to see how the different demographic subsets of the sample responded to the questionnaire. The study also discusses the implications of such measurement for ELT and points out a number of suggestions for further study.

The present article studies Quranic quotations in the poetry of Mohammad Iqbal Lahori based on the approach of intertextuality. Iqbal is one of the greatest poets and intellectuals of the Eastern Muslim world. Quran is a source of inspiration both in his life and poetic career. His poetry is interwoven with Quran through intertextual Quotations. These Quranic quotations are central to the production of meaning in Iqbal’s poems. The present research limits itself to Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality. Kristeva (1980) states that meaning is not inherent in the text rather it is produced through the intertextual relations between texts. This research aims to apply Plett’s (1990) set of structural codes of quotations to Iqbal’s poetic text to expose the role of scriptural quotations in his poetry. The findings of this paper show that Quranic quotations mostly follow the rules of general quotations; except that as authoritative words they are open to some transformations at surface structure but not at deep structure. The semantic fixity of Quranic quotations does not prevent their application as means of power for purposes not endorsed by Quranic instructions. Finally, the authoritative nature of Quranic quotations allows Iqbal not to employ quotation markers in his text wherever he makes use of them.

Even before modern technological era, there was a close relationship between religious education and technology. Religion has helped many people to understand new technologies and technologies have led to new understandings of religion, and even new forms of religion. Religious education can focus on a variety of sacred concerns including myth, ritual, symbol, scripture, doctrine and experience, and furthermore as Jeff Astley (Astley, 1994) says in a context can and does ecompass indoctrination, personal formation, reasons and emotions. However these concerns tend to fall into two general categories the ethical one (or relational) and transcendental one. Nowadays a variety of video games explicitly aim toward religion. Video games researchers note that within video games, religion tends to suffer from a narrative and procedural incongruity. For example Michael Walthemathe suggests that video games provide a narrative and procedural platform for playful identity formation and ethical reflection, Ian Bogost (Bogost, 2007, p. 288) observes that religious video games are undermining their religious aims by adopting the conventions of mainstream video games genres without regard for their implicit procedural rhetoric. Also Harry J. Brown (Brown, 2008, pp. 104 – 107) notes that along with the promotion of an ethical concern for the weak, video games promote a reactive ethic of vigilantism and violence against all members of a given social class or oppositional alignement. So if video games once struggled for legitimacy as a cultural product, today the business of video games is booming, and increasingly the art of video games is turning to religious themes as not just inspiration but as central plot elements. We find moral decisions, invented religions, the power to create and experience virtual religious spaces and much more outcomes like these. Through a consideration of a list of popular video games this article proposes to show how video games teach their players the new gospel of cyberspace, where they can be what they want without effort and major consequences for the real life.