https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/ Journal of Research in Linguistics en daily 1 Tue, 22 Dec 2026 00:00:00 +0330 Tue, 22 Dec 2026 00:00:00 +0330 https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30024.html In the complex sociolinguistic landscape of Iran, this study investigated the language attitudes of native Baluchi speakers toward their mother tongue, the national language of Persian, and Persian spoken with a Baluchi accent. Employing a Matched-Guise Test with 207 participants, the study measured ratings across dimensions of solidarity, competence, personal attractiveness, and aggressiveness. A series of repeated measures ANOVAs revealed a clear attitudinal hierarchy. While Baluchi commanded strong affective loyalty, standard Persian was rated the highest on status-related traits (competence and attractiveness). Crucially, the accented Persian guise was rated significantly lower than both other varieties across most positive dimensions, with effect sizes ranging from medium to large. The study’s primary contribution lay in demonstrating that an ethnically-congruent accent on a high-status language can, paradoxically, create an "in-between" identity that is judged more harshly than either the standard or the minority language. These findings highlight the powerful role of accent in shaping social hierarchies and underscore the need for policies that address accent-based bias. https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30425.html This study presents a structural analysis of three-word lexical bundles in English research article abstracts from the field of linguistics, comparing abstracts authored by native English-speaking scholars in international journals with those written by Arab scholars in local Arabic journals. Drawing on a specialized corpus of approximately 175000 words compiled from international and local Arabic journals, the study employed a corpus‑driven and comparative approach to identify and categorize bundles according to the structural taxonomy of Biber et al. (1999). The findings revealed a macro-level convergence in the dominance of phrasal structures with both groups relying heavily on Noun Phrases (NPs) and Prepositional Phrases (PPs) to convey information density. However, certain micro-level divergences were observed. While the Non‑Native Speaker (NNS) group demonstrated a slightly wider inventory of unique bundles, the Native Speaker (NS) corpus exhibited a significantly higher overall frequency and density of bundle usage. Structurally, the NNS group displayed a marked underuse of (DET) + NOUN + VERB + (SCONJ)/(DET) patterns compared to their NS counterparts (χ² = 7.32, p < 0.01). While the analysis revealed no statistically significant differences between the two groups in the use of passive voice constructions or complex syntactic structures, a qualitative tendency was observed: The NNS group exhibited a somewhat greater reliance on passive voice and anticipatory it patterns. This tendency likely reflected the influence of prescriptive pedagogical norms commonly emphasized in English for Academic Purposes instruction. The study therefore advocates for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy that extends beyond structural templates to foreground the acquisition of active voice and stance‑taking formulaic sequences—explicitly targeting the underused (DET) + NOUN + VERB + (SCONJ)/(DET) pattern that marks authorial presence in native writing. https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30414.html This study examined a crucial factor in determining the directionality of conversion: frequency of occurrence. The primary objective was to assess the psycholinguistic methodologies, which contributed to identifying the direction of conversion in Persian: What happens cognitively during listening comprehension of converted item? Specifically, it investigated whether the well-established principle that higher frequency facilitates faster processing can help resolve this issue (directionality of conversion). Furthermore, it explored whether theoretical predictions align with empirical evidence obtained through psycholinguistic experimentation (psycholinguistic reality). The study adopted the theoretical framework of Shapiro and Levine (1990), which employs cross-modal lexical decision tasks measured by using the DMDX software, which records processing times in milliseconds during listening comprehension of sentences containing various types of conversion (e.g., adjective to noun/adverb, verb to noun, and noun to adjective). The independent variable was the type of conversion within the sentences, while the dependent variable was the reaction time of participants to visual stimuli. A total of 25 female university students aged 18–30 years, who were matched according to specific criteria, such as academic performance and grades, participated in the study. The findings suggested that frequency of occurrence as documented in corpus data (Bijankhan & Mohseni, 2018), along with processing time, serves as a reliable indicator of conversion directionality. https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30433.html The Middle Persian (MP) motion verb āmadan develops, alongside its lexical meaning, a secondary sense that encodes ‘change-of-state’—a semantic shift that marks the inception of its subsequent lexicalization and grammaticalization in New Persian (NP). In Early New Persian (ENP), in addition to functioning as a light verb in compound constructions and thereby giving rise to novel meanings, this grammaticalized verb emerges as a multifunctional grammatical marker, most notably encoding inchoative aspect. It also serves as a passive marker in ENP, a function that does not persist into Contemporary New Persian[1] (CNP). In the modern period, the grammatical scope of āmadan expands further: beyond its inchoative function, it acquires avertive readings in specific contexts, while also expressing hortative and epistemic modalities. Moreover, in CNP, it assumes a role as a discourse marker. This study traces the grammaticalization pathway of āmadan across three historical stages—Middle Persian (MP), Early New Persian (ENP), and Contemporary New Persian (CNP)—in order to illuminate the development of these diverse grammatical functions. [1] By Contemporary New Persian, we mean the standard and official language of Iran. https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30543.html Enclitic Compound Verbs in Persian are among the most controversial structures in the language. Grammarians and linguists have expressed diverse opinions regarding these constructions, and this divergence is even reflected in the variety of terms used to label them. The present study adopts a descriptive–analytical method and a morphological–typological perspective to examine these verbs. The central question addressed in this research is: given the distinct characteristics of Persian light verb constructions, how do they behave in terms of morphological and typological properties? To answer this question, examples of these verbs were first identified and analyzed in both prose and poetry, followed by a review of various linguistic and grammatical viewpoints concerning them. Finally, their morphological and typological features—such as the presence of present and past forms, positive and negative forms, initial and final structures—were investigated. The findings of the study indicate that these verbs are present both in Standard Persian and in dialectal varieties, though their number is limited. The verbal components of these constructions are also restricted, with šodan “to become,” gereftan “to take,” and budan “to be” being the most frequent. One of the most significant results is that approximately 85% of Persian light verb constructions exhibit similar semantic behavior and are typologically homogeneous. For instance, sensory verbs such as sard… budan “to be cold,” garm… budan “to be warm,” gorsneh… budan “to be hungry,” and tashneh… budan “to be thirsty” show identical structural and aspectual patterns, possessing both initial and final forms. https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30634.html In recent years, social media have become one of the most consequential arenas for the representation, evaluation, and contestation of police performance. In this space, police action is represented not only through official reports, but also through videos, news posts, user comments, hashtags, reposts, and intertextual links. Drawing on an integrated model and a mixed-methods design, the present study examines supportive and oppositional discourses about the police on Iranian social media and seeks to identify the meaning-making mechanisms and conversational dynamics through which police action is variously delegitimized or reoriented toward the reconstruction of public trust. The data were coded in binary form (0/1) according to 22 discourse features derived from the study’s integrated analytical model. The findings indicate that pro-police discourse is predominantly stabilized, hegemonic, and legitimizing in nature. This discourse represents police action through mechanisms such as active assertion, reference to conflict-related events, and the mitigation of negative aspects of police conduct, while conversationally sustaining itself through a high degree of discursive continuity. By contrast, anti-police discourse is event-centered, reactive, affectively charged, and generalizing. Through mechanisms such as indetermination, suppression, individual specification, and passive assertion, it links police conduct to violence, injustice, and violations of citizens’ rights. The study concludes that reducing negative media attacks against the police cannot be achieved merely through denial or promotional content production. Rather, it requires transparency, rapid accountability, reform of field conduct, rights-oriented dialogue, and the redefinition of police discourse around an institution that is authoritative, law-abiding, and accountable. https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30648.html Despite the fact that Persian and Arabic have somehow the same orthographies, the common names of Iranians and Arabs that originate from Arabic have different English spellings. The present paper aimed at addressing these differences. Firstly, different pronunciations of common graphemes in Persian and Arabic orthographies were scrutinized. Then, the differences between the English spellings of common names in these two languages were analyzed based on different pronunciations of these common graphemes. The corpus of English spelling of Arabs’ names was based on various acedemic sources as well as googling English spelling of Arab celebrities. However, the corpus of Iranians’ names spellings was based on the authors’ linguistic intuition and experiences regarding the customary and accepted methods in spelling Iranians’ names in English. Finally, the pronunciation changes of these graphemes from Arabic to Persian were analyzed within the framework of optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004) in order to specify which phonological processes they underwent and which constraints (rankings) caused the processes. According to the findings of the present paper, differences between English spellings of common names of Iranians and Arabs are generally due to different pronunciations of common graphemes in Persian and Arabic orthographies as well as the differences between their phonologies. Moreover, the degree of correspondence between English writing system and Persian/Arabic writing systems, in addition to the customary methods in transliteration are among other reasons why common names of Iranians and Arabs have different English spellings. https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30732.html Arbitrariness and motivation are two key concepts in the study of the relationship between meaning and word-form, rooted in Saussure's views on the relationship between the signifier and the signified. By arbitrariness we mean that the relationship between form and meaning is not based on natural or logical necessity, but rather on the collective agreement of speakers. In contrast to this, lexical motivation means that the form of a word relatively reflects its semantic content. Most simple words are arbitrary, but some of them are motivated as a result of semantic extension based on metaphor and metonymy. The motivation of complex words arises from the fact that their meaning can be relatively inferred from the composition of the meanings of their parts. In this research, by adopting an onomasiological approach, a model is presented regarding the relationship between meaning and word form, in which the meaning of words are represented as conceptual components within a three-layered frame. The outer layer indicates the semantic category and the morphological head of that word. The middle layer is the locus of relations, where the relationship between the outermost and innermost layers is established. The innermost layer is semantically the complement of the middle layer. This frame can serve as a basis for word motivation in two ways: (a) diagrammatic iconicity; and (b) the representation of cognitive associations of metaphor and metonymy. Analyzing morphology through the layered semantic frame makes it possible to have a unified account of right-headed, left-headed, and exocentric words. https://jrl.ui.ac.ir/article_30790.html This article examines how causal responsibility for healthcare harm is linguistically constructed and contested in Human Rights Watch's 2019 advocacy report Maximum Pressure: US Economic Sanctions Harm Iranians’ Right to Health. The analysis applies two complementary instruments: Halliday and Matthiessen's (2014) transitivity system, which maps process types and agency attribution at the clause level, and Fairclough's (1995, 2003) concepts of nominalisation, recontextualisation, and interdiscursivity, which account for the transformations produced when official policy language is embedded within an advocacy frame. Applied to the full report as a multi-genre corpus, the analysis identifies three grammatical mechanisms through which the gap between formal humanitarian exemptions and practical healthcare access is discursively translated into invisibility: the nominalisation of exemptions as self-operating objects; the generation of systemic risk through deictic indeterminacy in official rhetoric; and the diffusion of causal agency across nominalised institutional abstractions in corporate compliance correspondence. HRW’s counter-discourse responds to each mechanism through disciplined recontextualisation: it substitutes named agents and material-process verbs for institutional abstractions, embeds policy excerpts within explicit causal frames, and deploys patient narratives to make structural harm corporeally visible. Applying the same instruments reflexively to HRW’s own choices, the article demonstrates that counter-discourse is itself constituted by discursive selections (including the systematic suppression of patient political voice and the curation of maximally salient cases) that warrant critical examination. The study contributes to CDA methodology by demonstrating what sustained transitivity analysis and recontextualisation theory yield when applied rigorously to a multi-genre advocacy text as a site of active discursive contestation.