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This research examines the lexical processing of head-first endocentric compounds in Persian based on semantic transparency. This study shows whether the processing is related to the morpheme-based, whole-word, or dual-root models. Moreover, this research concludes whether the processing is associated with sublexical or supralexical models. Two separate masked priming tasks are conducted. In the first experiment, the compound word is the primed word and the modifier is the target. In the second experiment, the prime is the compound word and the target is the head. Three conditions are considered: transparent, opaque, and orthographic-overlap. In order to analyze the result, mixed models are used. The results show significant priming effects for transparent and opaque conditions. While no priming effect is shown for the orthographic-overlap condition. It can be concluded that the lexical processing of head-first endocentric compounds is independent of semantic transparency. The processing is morpheme-based and it is on the basis of the sublexical model. Furthermore, the semantic processing of these words is supralexical. Moreover, the lack of priming effect for the orthographic conditions is seemingly associated with orthographic complexity in the Persian writing system.
 

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This article explores the effect of iconicity and textual cohesion on processing causal relations in Persian discourse using an experimental method. A reading-time task with a within-subject design was set up. Twelve 3-sentence experimental scenarios and 12 filler scenarios were constructed. Iconicity and cohesion were the independent variables and participants’ reaction time (RT) was the dependent variable. The cohesion variable manipulated the degree of cohesion between the first and second sentences of scenarios. The iconicity variable manipulated the order of the second and third (cause and effect) sentences of scenarios. Forty-eight participants read the scenarios and verified if the target sentence, which asserted the implicit causal relation between the second and third sentences of scenarios, was correct. The RTs of the participants were collected using DMDX program. The data were then submitted to a mixed-model analysis in R. The main effect of iconicity and cohesion on participants’ RTs was found. There was no interaction effect between iconicity and cohesion. The target sentence had the shortest RT in the condition with iconic and high-cohesion scenarios. Also, the target sentence in the condition with iconic but low-cohesion scenarios was processed as fast as the target sentence in the condition with non-iconic but high-cohesion scenarios. The findings confirm the facilitatory effect of iconicity on understanding causal sequences. The results also show that if, for discourse reasons, information is provided non-iconically, the existence of highly cohesive relations between the causal sequences and the previous context can compensate the non-facilitatory effect of non-iconic sequences.

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We examined two assumptions of the "Conceptual Metaphor Theory" (CMT) using corpus-based method. According to the first assumption, linguistic metaphors are merely reflections of conceptual metaphors; so linguistic metaphors have a marginal and secondary role. According to the second assumption, conventional linguistic metaphors are systematic. A 50-milion token sample of Hamshahri collection of Persian texts was selected as the corpus of the study. All of the corpus analyses of calculating the collocations and extracting the concordances were carried out using Ant Conc corpus software. Data analysis failed to find evidence in support of the first assumption provided by CMT, but the second assumption was partially confirmed. The findings suggest that the semantic patterns of linguistic metaphors are more complex than those predicted by CMT, and language use factors play an undeniable role in shaping the semantics of metaphoric expressions.  

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The problem of discovering the identity of anonymous authors has engaged humans' attention during the ages. In present times, with the revolution brought about by digital computing and electronic corpora, and also with the applications made available by stylometry research in forensic linguistics, systematic analysis of texts in different languages has expanded the understanding of researchers on the different aspects of linguistic styles.
In the present study, the possibility of authorship attribution based on idiolect has been investigated in Farsi. One of the linguistic elements that is claimed to be the seat for idiolect is function words. Function words have been the focus of attention in the authorship attribution research since it has been shown that they are processed unconsciously, have high frequency in texts, and remain independent of text topic. In this paper, the possibility of differentiating texts written by different authors has been studied using Farsi function words. The research questions were: 1) Are Farsi functions words capable of differentiating authors in Farsi prose? 2) Of monograms, bigrams, and trigrams, which one is the most efficient in differentiating author styles? 3) What is the minimum cut-off point for successful differentiation of author styles in Farsi?
First, a corpus of five Iranian scholars’ writings was compiled, normalized and divided into different sample texts. Then 20 most frequent words were extracted from different author samples and n-gram sequences (up to tri-grams) were analyzed using principal component analysis and cluster analysis in the Stylo package of R.
Findings showed that function words in Farsi were capable of differentiating authors’ writings with monogram words performing better than bi-gram and tri-grams in small size samples. Findings also indicated that under the experimental conditions used in this study, the minimum number of words for a text to be successfully attributed to an author is about 4000 words. This cut-off point is reached using 20 most frequent function words. It is concluded that different authors don't use function words in the same manner. In fact, while some high-frequency function words appear in the writings of all authors, they are given different priorities by different authors.
 

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In this study, corpus method was used to test an assumption of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) that systematic and conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions have literal meaning in the source domain. The conceptual metaphors LIFE IS A JOURNEY and IDEAS ARE PLANTS were selected for analysis and three keywords from source domain of the metaphors were chosen and matched with their English equivalents. Hamshahri 2 collection of Farsi texts was selected as the corpus of the study. For ease of processing, one third of the corpus comprising of fifty million word tokens was randomly sampled as the working corpus. Collocates of the source-domain keywords, as realizations of fixed metaphoric expressions, were extracted using AntConc software and their concordances were examined. It was found that 1) in conventionally fixed metaphorical expressions, when source-domain keywords were used metaphorically they had collocates that rarely appeared with the same source-domain keywords used literally, and 2) source-domain keywords had gradable degrees of metaphoricity. The findings were interpreted as suggesting that the meaning of fixed metaphoric expressions may not be systematically connected to the metaphor's source-domain meaning.