An Interdisciplinary Study of Narrative Structure in Dash Akol as a Short Story and Dash Akol as a Movie

This paper undertakes an interdisciplinary study of the short story “Dash Akol” and the movie adapted from it. “Dash Akol” is a short story written by a famous Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat in 1932. Hedayat’s “Dash Akol” was made into a movie in 1971 by Masoud Kimiai. There are some discrepancies between the short story “Dash Akol” and the movie, triggering a number of significant implications. This article discusses these discrepancies along with Hedayat’s and Kimiai’s narrative techniques. To this end, it applies Genett’s (1988) Narrative Discourse and his three main narrative methods: narrating, characterization, and focalization. Meanwhile, it brings in Rimmon-Kenen’s (2002) strategy to study characters, and Stam and Burgoyne and Flitterman-lewis (2005) to show the ways in which the movie has deviated from the story. In terms of characterization, it studies traits such as, action, speech, naming and setting

Exploring the Metaphors of Loyalty, Courage and Friendship in Harry Potter Novels and their Turkish Translations

In studies on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Metaphor Master List scholars have come up with over the years, the metaphors (target domains) of loyalty, courage and friendship figure among very important ones. In this study, we undertake to explore these three metaphors in the Harry Potter series, as these three conceptual domains also happen to constitute three underlying themes in these novels. Cross-linguistic work in this regard is in its infancy and would benefit from ongoing research, because our knowledge of metaphors is only useful insofar as we can determine if a domain is universally and cross-linguistically also used to conceptualize a given target concept similarly in another language, or if it is found to be subject to some variation between the two languages being compared. We look at how these three generic-level concepts are conceptualized in English and their translations into Turkish, and if the cross-domain mappings are similar/different in the two languages, offering further insights into how far cognitive reality and its metaphorical realization differ between English and Turkish from a Cognitive Linguistics vantage point

Linguistic Devices Used in Newspaper Headlines

Nowadays mass media plays crucial roles in people’s lives. Online newspapers constitute a part of media discourse, which makes for extremely important bodies of text for the purposes of research in discourse analysis. In news headlines, careful and sensitive use is made of linguistic devices in order to make the headlines unique and different, influence the readers, create trust for the newspaper, and, most importantly, invite and encourage the reader to proceed to the whole story and the main body of the report/news report. In this spirit, this study is a linguistic analysis of headlines in the political section of established online American newspapers. The data for this study comprises 50 headlines collected from 5 online newspapers revolving around the theme of Donald Trump. It aims to explore the linguistics structure of newspaper headlines in the sample articles from these 5 most widely read newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. In this qualitative-quantitative study, use is made of the model by Montgomery (2007) that takes account of a comprehensive picture that pays due respects to linguistic, semantic and discursive properties of headlines alongside each other in a complete package. The findings are mapped out in the form of figures and charts. The results of the frequency analysis showed that newspapers mostly used ‘full sentence’ and ‘ellipsis’ in their headlines. The qualitative analysis revealed that most of the semantic, linguistic and discursive strategies used in headlines are geared to the ‘tactical incompleteness strategy’, a helpful notion and a part of Montgomery’s model

Revisiting the Role of Social Dimensions in Metaphorical Conceptualization: Implications for Comparative Literature and Translation

Cross-cultural and within-culture variation in conceptual metaphors is a much-debated subject in Cognitive Linguistics research. The theory points out that such variation occurs on a series of dimensions, like social, ethnic, regional, stylistic and subcultural dimensions. The social dimensions consist of the separation of society into people, youthful and old, and working class and average workers. The purpose of this study was to undertake a deeper look at the distinctions caused in metaphorical conceptualization due to the attitude each individual or group of individuals possesses, especially with regard to the economic status of each group. To this end, twenty individuals were selected, with the only variable existing amongst them being their financial status. Each person was asked to write three paragraphs on three separate topics, adding up to sixty paragraphs, in an attempt to try and determine differences in metaphorical conceptualization. The results reveal interesting insights largely supporting the thinking in the theory on individual and cross-cultural variation in Conceptual Metaphors rooted in social agents’ financial statuses. Other research like the current one would contribute to our Cognitive Linguistics understanding of the social dimensions of Conceptual Metaphor variation and universality

Bringing the Attitudinal System of Affect to the EFL/ESL Classroom as a Way of Further Critical Education and Reflection: An Analysis of Affectual Language in Two American Presidents’ Inauguration Speeches

Appraisal/Evaluation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a rather new framework for the analysis of evaluative language, focusing on how human beings reveal their emotions directly or indirectly, how they take stances, and how they align or dis-align themselves with social subjects. Through an attitudinal analysis of the system of Affect in lucid and teacher-friendly ways, this paper aims to smoothly invite ESL/EFL teachers into possible employment of this model in classes of intermediate levels and above, to align themselves with and avoid losing sight of the constant need to maintain a critical pedagogical atmosphere in foreign language literacy and education. To this end, we provide a simple analysis of the affectual language of two inauguration speeches delivered by two American presidential candidates, geared to equipping teachers with some quick tools of reflective and critical pedagogy and use the exploration and display of different categories of Affect in the classroom to engage students in critical reflection on the world and everyday events

Bringing the Attitudinal System of Affect to the EFL/ESL Classroom as a Way of Further Critical Education and Reflection: An Analysis of Affectual Language in Two American Presidents’ Inauguration Speeches

Appraisal/Evaluation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a rather new framework for the analysis of evaluative language, focusing on how human beings reveal their emotions directly or indirectly, how they take stances, and how they align or dis-align themselves with social subjects. Through an attitudinal analysis of the system of Affect in lucid and teacher-friendly ways, this paper aims to smoothly invite ESL/EFL teachers into possible employment of this model in classes of intermediate levels and above, to align themselves with and avoid losing sight of the constant need to maintain a critical pedagogical atmosphere in foreign language literacy and education. To this end, we provide a simple analysis of the affectual language of two inauguration speeches delivered by two American presidential candidates, geared to equipping teachers with some quick tools of reflective and critical pedagogy and use the exploration and display of different categories of Affect in the classroom to engage students in critical reflection on the world and everyday events

Discontinuous Residue and Theme in Higher-Order Semiotic: A Case for Interlocking Systems

The fallacy persists in discourse analysis research to explore lexicogrammatical phenomena detached from any adjacent plane of the meaning potential. In an attempt to dispel this and toss out some preconceived notions about what a modern SFG vantage point should involve, this study homes in on one aspect of SFG within prose fiction in particular, which is very revealing in terms of how separate system networks are actually in synergistic simultaneity, and how SFG allows one , phenomenally well, to bring such synergies out, getting to the heart of the fact that language pervasively operates on multiple planes of textuality simultaneously. Thus, building upon Halliday’s 2004 work, the quest is if it is interpersonally significant when the Residue is split into two parts; more importantly, if it is also laced with some lexicogrammatical quality on the textual plane, in light of the fairly well-entrenched assumption that there is always Theme at work when the Residue is split. Halliday is the only scholar to touch upon the topic of Discontinuous Residue and its relationship to Marked Theme in the culmination of his groundbreaking career, i.e. his 2004 work. Having driven home the proposal to make into a watchword the ubiquity of interlocking macro-semantic system networks, some pedagogical and research implications and suggestions flowing from this are brought up

The System of Engagement in a Sample of Prose Fiction and the News

Emerging within Systemic Linguistics, Appraisal/Evaluation is a framework for analyzing the language of evaluation, providing techniques for the systematic analysis of evaluation and stance as they operate in whole texts and in groupings of texts. There are three systems in the Appraisal framework: Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. This study sets out to analyze the use of the system of Engagement within a sample of English Literature (prose fiction) and the News (news articles). Engagement is a medium through which the speaker or the writer engages dialogistically with others (i.e., the addressees, within the process of evaluation). A corpus of 20,000 words was selected from each genre, involving five cornerstones of short fiction and a collection of news articles from CNN, Reuters, BBC, Daily Mail and Yahoo News. The study sheds light on the fact that both genres are strikingly close in using the four subsystems of Engagement, and both are inclined towards dialogic expansion, albeit for different generic reasons, with dialogic contraction taking a backbench. Appraisal as a whole is a promising model to explore texts in different genres, paving the way for richer more illuminating analyses of the interpersonal semantics operating in them

Revisiting Common Source and Target Domains in Conceptual Metaphors in a Sample of English Fiction: Implications for Literacy Practices and Advanced EFL Pedagogy

Metaphor research has always been conducted with various purposes in mind, among which the diachronic analysis of metaphor variation in discourse is outstanding. The current work followed a qualitative research mould to analyze the use of conceptual metaphors within the two novels Persuasion and The Fault in Our Stars, belonging to 19th and 21st centuries, respectively. To this end, a framework of common source and target domains proposed by Zoltán Kövecses was adopted. The analysis was conducted using the Metaphor Identification Procedure, a reliable method for marking metaphorically used words (Pragglejaz Group, 2007). The majority of the identified source and target domains in the two samples were identical, supporting the common domains in the framework, although some novel domains were also identified. With the support found for these common source and target domains and their being expected to repeat prominently in different advanced literary and semi-literary genres, the present analysis resonates with important implications for upper-intermediate and advanced EFL pedagogy, as well as teachers and syllabus designers, when literature-text, as part and parcel of the upper-intermediate EFL context, is introduced to the classroom

A critical discourse analysis of Covid-19 in Iranian and American newspapers

The policies and ideologies of countries are reflected in the propagated media of that country, and newspapers are no exception. Covid-19 has affected the lives of people all around the world. The present study investigated the ideological differences in reporting the news related to Covid-19 in light of Van Dijk’s ideological square framework. To do so, a representative sample of 56 news articles was chosen over a period of one year (from January 2020 to the end of January 2021) from one Iranian and one American newspaper, the Tehran Times and The New York Times. Overall, 2,977 clauses were analysed both qualitatively, to find out the reason of occurrence, and quantitatively, to determine the frequency of occurrence for each microstrategy. Evidentiality, Hyperbole, Metaphor, National Self-Glorification, Negative Lexicalisation, and Number Game were the most frequent micro-strategies. Such high frequencies of the strategies can make for effective discursive apparatus to make readers believe what news articles claim is true. The most salient implication of this study would be raising readers’ and academics’ awareness of the need to view news articles critically to avoid negative ramifications of ideological propagandas. In the same vein, newspapers need to be cognizant of the micro-strategies they consciously or sub-consciously employ since certain micro-strategies can be used to manipulate readers’ minds and help news agencies to feed their readers certain ideological and political agendas