Semantics
mojtaba pordel
Volume 12, Issue 2 , December 2020, , Pages 281-315
Abstract
The Poems written by Garoos Abdolmalekian have been among successful Blank-Verse Persian poetry over the last two decades – selling well and numerous reprints testify to this claim, as well as recent translations of his poetry selections into English, French, Swedish, Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish. ...
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The Poems written by Garoos Abdolmalekian have been among successful Blank-Verse Persian poetry over the last two decades – selling well and numerous reprints testify to this claim, as well as recent translations of his poetry selections into English, French, Swedish, Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish. By employing the Conceptual Blending Theory proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) and the conceptual means it provides for analyzing creative literary texts, the present work, with a hint at the theories of the nature of poetry, aims at a scientific, systematic investigation of the reasons lying behind this success. What comes through this process reveals that Abdolmalekian's work, owing to his use of novel imagery in his poems, enjoys a high degree of literary creativity, and consequently a high esthetic value. Analyzed in terms of the Conceptual Blending Theory, these images are resultant from an employment of hyperblends and double-scope integration networks as well as a rich variety of vital relationships. Moreover, observance of the governing or optimality principles in setting up blends and integration networks, which makes his poems, while having a high creativity degree, not deter his readers from approaching his poetry, thus contributing to the esthetic appeal of his work, which has a share in hid overall literary success.
Hadaegh Rezaei; Adel Rafi; Mojtaba Pordel
Volume 9, Issue 17 , July 2018, , Pages 49-79
Abstract
Extended abstract
1- Introduction
From a philosophical perspective, one could say that during the history of literary criticism within the twentieth century, there have been two principal views on the nature of literary texts: One considers literary works as self-contained esthetic objects, which ...
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Extended abstract
1- Introduction
From a philosophical perspective, one could say that during the history of literary criticism within the twentieth century, there have been two principal views on the nature of literary texts: One considers literary works as self-contained esthetic objects, which ambiguity, indeterminacy and uncertainty constitute an indispensable part of them; the other seeks to examine literary works as to reveal a single specific reading which represents historical consciousness in its different aspects, political, social and so on and so forth. Among various literary criticisms, cognitive poetics belongs to the first attitude to literary works, as it does not intend, by reducing literary texts to the historical, political and/or social context, to obtain one single interpretation. Rather, cognitive poetics, by describing the cognitive operations involved in the process of reading which experienced readers trigger in their mind while confronting literary texts, aims to study how different interpretations of one single literary text are formed. The formation of interpretations by readers is a cognitive operation which takes place through the unpacking of the text and recombining it into a meaningful integrated whole.
2- Theoretical Framework and Methodology:
The present article, in a descriptive and analytic manner, and within the framework of cognitive poetics, aims at a study of one poem by one of the Persian blank-verse poets through an analysis of the possibilities this framework could provide for the fact that how literary works are interpreted by different readers. The theory, which is thus put into practice from within the cognitive poetics framework, is called the conceptual blending theory put forward by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002). Generally speaking, according to this cognitive theory of meaning construction, every poetic text could be considered as a conceptual blend, or a set of conceptual blends, which is created through a number of cognitive processes such as selective projection, mapping, compression, decompression, as well as the construction of networks called integration networks. And for a reader to reach a particular interpretation among the possible interpretations, it is necessary for him to repeat all these cognitive operations again in his own right in the mind. Difference in the reconstruction of the integration networks operating behind the conceptual blends, and also in the cognitive operations which lead to the reconstruction of the Integration Networks, brings about different interpretations of one and the same text. It turns out that the conceptual blending theory, taken in conjunction with some elements from another theory within the cognitive poetics framework, namely the conceptual domain theory proposed by Ronald Langacker (1987), provides a powerful theoretical tool for the description and explanation of how different readings of one and the same text emerge. Furthermore, the conceptual blending theory offers another instrument, called optimalty principles, which can be used to assess the extent to which one particular interpretation enjoys a well-formed semantic structure, a theoretical tool that could also provide reasons for preference of one reading over the other.
3- Results and Discussions:
The analysis of the selected poem, through the application of the theoretical instruments provided by the conceptual blending theory, theoretical instruments such as schema induction, vital relationships and their different kinds of compressions, together with the exploitation of a number of concepts taken from Langacker's conceptual domains theory like profiling, demonstrate that how and through what cognitive operations readers construct different meanings of one and the same text. Thus, during the process of meaning construction, through the operation of one particular cognitive function or the omission of it (for example, compression of vital relationships or selective projection of different conceptual structures), readers may reach different interpretations of the same text. In general, the possible interpretations of the poem selected for analysis in this inquiry can be subsumed under two categories: Those interpretations that occur within the conceptual domain of love. In each one of these readings, it is the conceptual domain of love that is activated from the long-term memory into the working memory, only that in each case a different part of the complex, intertwined network of the conceptual domain of love is profiled. In these interpretations, according to the readings the experimental readers have provided the researchers with, three patterns can be distinguished, which may designated as "modest", "boastful" and "passionate" or "romantic". The interpretations of the other category, instead of the conceptual domain of love, activate other ones, and thus are potentially infinite.
4- Conclusions and Suggestions:
To conclude, the conceptual blending theory, in a sense, can be regarded as the cognitivist account of the poststructuralist theory of unlimited interpretation, providing the relativist notion of reading with a description and explanation which are based upon empirical data. In addition, the present research demonstrates that poetic texts are capable of ambiguity, polyphony and the possibility of different, even contradictory interpretations, and since the selected poem displays these features, it acquires one important criterion of poeticality. In addition, although the conceptual blending theory allows different interpretations of the same text, by applying its optimality principles, it chooses some of them over the others as optimal readings, and does not give all of them the same credit.
sanaz Alipour; shahla sharifi; Ali Izanloo
Volume 8, Issue 14 , November 2016, , Pages 111-139
Abstract
Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
In the last several years, it has been established that metaphor is not deviant and not any prevalent in rhetoric and in literary writing, but is actually an indispensable part of a natural language and thought. Emerging cognitive linguistics as an approach of looking ...
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Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
In the last several years, it has been established that metaphor is not deviant and not any prevalent in rhetoric and in literary writing, but is actually an indispensable part of a natural language and thought. Emerging cognitive linguistics as an approach of looking at both language and thought in recent years, has led to take metaphor in to account as a powerful new way of understanding and expressing abstract imaginations by concrete and perceptible things. Metaphor is here broadly defined as a set of correspondence or a mapping between two conceptual domains, following the central tenet of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and discourse is understood as verbal communication in natural situation. Metaphor is cognitive-linguistically defined as a conceptual domain, the source (e.g., WAR) and the target domain (e.g., ARGUMENT). To study metaphor, its functions in sentences, its underlying mappings, its effect on processing and so on, they need to reliably and systematically identify in order to create a solid basis for analysis. To fulfill this, we present the metaphor identification procedure followed by an example of how the procedure can be applied to identify metaphorically words in this text, then we suggest a format for reporting the result of MIP. The result of this study has proved that although using this method for identifying metaphor is not easy at all, but at present MIP is the optimal, authentic, reliable and explicit method for identification metaphor.
2. Methodology
In order to get our aim i.e. identifying and analyzing of metaphor in real texts, I will take a data-based approach. The corpus I work on contains some parts of news articles. In this study I will use MIP as a systematic, explicit and repeatable method for metaphor identification. This method is in fact a response to the vast amount of intuition-based research.
3. Discussion
One of the problems in metaphor research in last years has been identifying and explicating metaphoric language in real discourse. The difficulty with this line of work, however is the metaphor scholars often differ in their intuitions about what constitutes a metaphoric word or phrase. Metaphor researchers often do not provide criteria in their empirical investigations for specifying what is, and what is not metaphorical, and not surprisingly focus on different aspects of metaphorical language depending on their own theoretical orientation and research purpose. Variability in intuitions and lack of precision about what counts as metaphor make it difficult to compare different empirical analysis. More important, the lack of agreed criteria for metaphor identification complicates claims about the frequency of metaphor, its organization in discourse and possible relations between metaphoric language and metaphoric thought. In 2007 Pragglejazgroup -a group of scholars from a variety of academic disciplines- have attempted to create an explicit, reliable and flexible method for identifying metaphorically used words in spoken and written language. This article presents the "metaphor identification procedure" (MIP), followed by an example of how the procedure can be applied to identifying metaphorically used words in a news text. This research show sour procedure and outlines the way it may be used by metaphor in different empirical researches. The procedure aims to establish, for each lexical unit in a stretch of discourse, whether its use in the particular context can be described as metaphorical.
4. Conclusion
MIP has been created by Pragglejaz Group to provide a reliable, explicit and authentic tool for the identification of metaphorically used words in different contexts. Although some scholars may claim that they can use their intuition for identifying metaphor, their intuition may be different and hurt the reliability of the research. Our experience suggests that researchers will need to spend some time getting acquainted with the procedure by applying to texts. Metaphor identification by using MIP is a hard work and must be done slowly and analysts must go through all the steps of the procedure constantly and step by step for each lexical unit. Various decisions must be made at each step of the procedure that often require researchers to determine how they will proceed when encountering specific instances of language in different contexts. The finding of this research demonstrates the value of doing linguistic metaphor identification and analysis in the way that was done in the metaphor in Discourse Project. At the end, we can say that MIP can be used to address very specific research questions, for instance, one emerging issue in metaphor research concerns the density of metaphorical expressions in discourse, used as in different discourse genres (news, academic, fiction, conversation).
Reza Pishghadam; Shahla Sharifi; Atena Attaran
Volume 6, Issue 11 , July 2015, , Pages 55-77
Abstract
Considering the importance of Mashhadi in comparison with other dialects, the present research aims at analyzing the verb "go" when it means "become", and comparing Mashhadi and English in this regard. Moreover, this study seeks to investigate how variables such as age, gender, educational and social ...
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Considering the importance of Mashhadi in comparison with other dialects, the present research aims at analyzing the verb "go" when it means "become", and comparing Mashhadi and English in this regard. Moreover, this study seeks to investigate how variables such as age, gender, educational and social levels play roles in employing the verb "go" in Mashhadi dialect. To this end, 300 conversations were recorded in various situations uttered by male and female participants, aging 13-76, with different educational levels (academic/non-academic), and from different social levels (low/middle/high). The results were displayed in tables. In addition, in order to explore participants' attitude towards Mashhadi dialect, 10 of the aforementioned participants were randomly selected and interviewed. Data collection in English section was done with the use of information banks and reference books. The results of this study suggested that utilizing the verb "go" with the meaning of "become" is influenced by age, gender, educational and social levels. Moreover, there are similarities and differences between Mashhadi and English with regard to employing this verb.
Shahla Sharifi; Mojtaba Namvar Faragi
Volume 4, Issue 7 , September 2013
Abstract
In different linguistic studies, usually only one type of collocations has been investigated and in the classifications that have been introduced for different types of collocations, just formal and grammatical properties of the words within collocations have been mentioned. This study, for the first ...
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In different linguistic studies, usually only one type of collocations has been investigated and in the classifications that have been introduced for different types of collocations, just formal and grammatical properties of the words within collocations have been mentioned. This study, for the first time, introduces eight criteria such as Pivot word, Feature percolation and separability for defining Persian collocations. Persian collocations are also classified from different points of view such as adjacency, number and type of words and textual and contextual properties of collocating words, in different classes of collocations such as adjacent and nonadjacent collocations, simple and complex collocations, semantic collocations, contextual collocations etc. Regarding different criteria introduced in this paper and considering the size of the linguistic corpus with more than 200 thousand words, the results of this study can be used in different studies on Persian collocations and different types of word combinations. It is also possible to use the achievements of this study in lexicography and teaching special Persian collocations to foreigners learning Persian.
Seyyedeh Maryam Fazaeli; Shahla Sharifi
Volume 5, Issue 8 , April 2013, , Pages 131-144
Abstract
Some Persian proverbs concern a problem and how to encounter it. The present paper seeks to examine such proverbs. Findings indicate that in the analyzed proverbs, force image schemas have three options. In the first option, a problem is depicted as a barrier that cannot be removed. In these proverbs, ...
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Some Persian proverbs concern a problem and how to encounter it. The present paper seeks to examine such proverbs. Findings indicate that in the analyzed proverbs, force image schemas have three options. In the first option, a problem is depicted as a barrier that cannot be removed. In these proverbs, there is no recommendation or solution for solving the problem. In the second option, the problem can be solved by providing a proposed solution. And the third one presents a problem as a barrier that can be left behind. Statistical investigations show that in the examined proverbs, the second and third options had the highest and lowest frequencies respectively. In proverbs of the second type, there are proverbs expressing solving problem through desirable and suitable solutions. This group has the highest frequency. In the studied proverbs, the frequency of force image schemas options present insights to Iranian ethnological psychology; the dominant thought in Iranian behaviour and manner had been resistance against problems, search for a solution for any problem and attempt to select the best way for the problem. Most of the studied proverbs indicate that Iranian folk have strong spirits against problems.
Shahla Sharifi
Volume 3, Issue 5 , January 2012
Abstract
Kakhki dialect is one of the dialects of the south of Razavi Khorasan Province which is spoken in a subdivision of Gonabad, called “Kakhk”. This dialect and two other dialects (Khaniki and Ferdowsi), as far as the researcher knows, are the only linguistically described dialects in the Razavi Khorasan ...
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Kakhki dialect is one of the dialects of the south of Razavi Khorasan Province which is spoken in a subdivision of Gonabad, called “Kakhk”. This dialect and two other dialects (Khaniki and Ferdowsi), as far as the researcher knows, are the only linguistically described dialects in the Razavi Khorasan and South Khorasan provinces which have the ergative case marking. Ergative case marking in this dialect has led to some interesting morphological features. Some of these features will be studied in this paper. The results of the research show that functions and positions of the nominative and accusative clitic pronouns in this dialect are remarkably different from the ones in the standard Persian. Moreover, regarding the order of the clitic morphemes related to the verb base (the Bybee’s Relevance principle), this dialect shows features different from those of the standard Persian. Another interesting morphological features in this dialect is the addition of nominative clitic pronouns to the free pronouns with different functions. It was found that clitic pronouns in this dialect do not attach to the adpositions, and from this aspect, this dialect differs from the contemporary spoken Persian language.
Shahla Sharifi; Seyyede Maryam Fazaeli
Volume 2, Issue 3 , October 2010
Abstract
This article aims to investigate the linguistic representation of power in Molana’s letters within the critical discourse analysis framework. The power relationship is represented directly or indirectly. To investigate the linguistic representation of power, the letters were categorized in two types: ...
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This article aims to investigate the linguistic representation of power in Molana’s letters within the critical discourse analysis framework. The power relationship is represented directly or indirectly. To investigate the linguistic representation of power, the letters were categorized in two types: those addressed to non-relatives and those addressed to relatives. Each type then was divided into two subsidiary categories. The non-relatives category was sub-categorized to the letters addressed to politicians and letters addressed to Molana’s students, the other category was subdivided into the letters addressed to molana’s children and Molana’s daughter-in-law.
The results show that in most letters the representation of power is indirect. This indirectness serves the functions of saving the addressee’s face and politeness. In a limited number of letters, the representation of power is direct. This directness shows that Molana stands in a higher status relative to his students, children and in-laws.
