Lexical

This study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in English and Persian abstracts of Iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. For this purpose, one hundred English and Persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on Seddigh and Yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Halliday’s (1985) taxonomies. For contrastive analysis, the SPSS package was used. The results revealed some similarities and differences in the use of lexical cohesion sub-categories in the parallel English and Persian texts. The occurrence of all sub-types is nearly the same in the two groups of texts and the two- tailed t-test employed showed that the differences are not statistically significant. Both languages exhibit a general tendency in using repetition, but synonymy and meronymy are the least used sub-categories. Regarding the density of the texts, the analysis indicates that Persian abstracts are denser than their corresponding English ones.

Using rhetorical figures in specialized languages like the language of newspaper headlines is common. The present study attempted to conduct a contrastive analysis of the English and Persian sport newspaper headlines related to the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Toward this end, a corpus consisting of 400 English and 400 Persian headlines published during 12th of June to 13th of July, 2014 was collected. The framework developed by Lapsanska (2006), including phonological, lexical and morphological, syntactic, and semantic aspects, was employed. The frequencies of the use of sub-variables were calculated and chi-square tests were administered to determine whether the differences in the use of linguistic means between the two languages were statistically significant. The results showed that English and Persian sports newspaper headlines were similar in the use of rhythm and metaphor. However, they were generally different in four aspects particularly in the use of alliteration, foreign words, idiomatic constructions, formation of new words and phrases, hyperbole, phrase, and personification. The results can have pedagogical implications for journalism students, English for specific purposes (ESP) students, teachers, and translators.