verb

Russian language, with regard to its grammar, is a language with its own special complexities, hardly found in other languages. Although languages are different from each other, they have some similarities as well. The Iranian learner, while learning Russian, analyzes the sentences using patterns similar to his/ her native language patterns. Occasionally, such native patterns cause the learner to make glaring mistakes. Verb, in Russian language, is a word that grammatically conducts a noun and its modifiers (падеж). The difficulty, which the learners encounter is the lack of a complete agreement of verb conduction. That is to say, it is possible for a verb in Persian language to conduct its dependent word in a particular manner, which the very same verb, in Russian language, might conduct its defendant word in a different manner. It is even possible that the verb conduction by the same verb in the two languages might occur by means of two totally different prepositions. In other to avoid such errors, it seems necessary to make the learners aware of their occurrences at the very initial steps of language learning.

The concept of tense is an important issue in the morphological and syntactic analysis of words and sentences. The connection between this concept and other parts of the sentence, including the verb, and understanding its structural, semantic and conceptual differences has always been considered by Russian and Persian linguists. In this article, various types of direct and figurative applications of the Russian present tense are studied considering their equivalent expressions in the Persian language. While the present tense exists in both mentioned languages, there remain distinct conceptual, semantic and structural differences, of which lack of knowledge leads to difficulties and mistakes in learning, translation and research. Realizing the research deficiency on this particular subject and based on the issues of teaching Russian language to Persian-speaking students, interesting results are pointed out in the case of direct and figurative application of the Russian present tense and its comparison in the Persian language.

This study aims to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the introduction section of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian and international journals. A corpus of 20 research article introductions (10 from each journal) was used. The corpus was analysed for the syntactic features (tense, aspect and voice) and semantic meaning of verbs. The findings showed that in both groups of introductions, the common tenses were the present and past, rather than future. In introductions published in the international journal, the present tense was used more often than in those published in the Iranian journal, whereas past tense was used twice as frequently in Iranian journal introductions. Regarding the aspect of verbs, the simple aspect was common in both groups of introductions, but more frequent in Iranian journal introductions. The perfect aspect was more common in international journal introductions. Concerning voice, the active voice was predominant in both groups of introductions. Semantically, verbs with mental, activity, communication and existence meanings were common in both groups. The semantic meanings of verbs were not significantly different in the two groups of introductions. The findings of this study can have implications for novice, non-native writers in Applied Linguistics in helping them design and write more appropriate research article introductions.

The purpose of the present study is to analyse abstracts related to Applied Linguistics, and more precisely the discourse functions of grammatical subjects and verbs. The corpus consisted of 50 PhD thesis abstracts written on the subject of Applied Linguistics. All of the abstracts were written from 2010 to 2014. The theses from which the abstracts were extracted are available in the ProQuest database. Based on the model put forth by Swales and Feak (2004), the elements of the abstracts were identified. In accordance with Ebrahimi (2014), frameworks were used to analyse discourse functions, while the realisation of grammatical subjects and verbs was analysed for tense types. The results revealed that the “introducing part of study” and “research-related objects” were the predominant types of grammatical subjects. Indeed, these performed more discourse functions in Applied Linguistics PhD thesis abstracts compared with other grammatical subject types. The results also indicated that simple past tense was predominant in aim, method, and results sections, while the simple present was predominant in the background and conclusion sections.

This research has been done to investigate the relationship between verb comprehension and verb production of Persian learners in Persian language writing as a second language, based on the processes of ideational metafunction in Halliday’s systemic functional grammar. The statistical population was the Persian learners of the international center of teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers in Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. The data collection method was based on field study and random sampling method. The data were gathered through tests, interviews and essays which were divided into two parts: verb comprehension and verb production. The results of the tests were analyzed for verb comprehension, while the outputs of compositions were used in verb production. The collected data then were analyzed by SPSS. The results indicated that there was a positive correlation between comprehension and verb production of mental process at elementary levels. On the other hand, no correlation was found between Persian learners’ verb comprehension and verb production at intermediate level. Furthermore, there was a negative correlation between comprehension and production of the behavioral process at intermediate level and the comprehension and production of the material process at the advanced level. This showed the effect of three factors on creating a positive and negative correlation between processes in foreign Persian learners: 1) the objectivity and subjectivity of processes, 2) the versatility of processes, 3) Persian learners’ language level.