Application of Barthes' "Death of the Author" to qur'an: possible or impossible?

Qur'an as the sacred book of Muslims has been subjected to different types of interpretations from the beginning of its revelations, approximately from 1400 years ago. All the Islamic theology scholars, even unmuslims, tried to make a contribution as the best of their abilities to its understanding. By the advent of new post-structuralist approaches of textual analysis techniques in West, the possibility of interpreting this holy book has obsessed the modern textual analysts all over the world. This article tried to investigate the possibility of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” as one of the most controversial theories of modern text analysis. Considering the fact that, the author of Qur'an has not been a human to compose the text based on the dominant social, cultural and economical context of that time, the application of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” to the Qur'anic interpretation seems to be logically impossible. Furthermore, as the Qur'anic verses are classified into two categories of “Mohkamaat” and “Motashabehaat” based on Quran itself, this theory of text analysis can be utmost be applied to the latter in order to offer a better comprehension of the “Mohkamaat” as there are various interpretations of these “ayahs” in Islamic literature

Political practice of literary analysis: how to read literature more closely

The development of literary/textual analysis is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary; inter-textual, historically and socially-aware, and politically-motivated critical practices. This study is an attempt to show how literary/textual analyses are relied on a number of interrelated, competing and methodological political arrangements. In brief, this article is an account of the development of critically and politically-aware practices of literary analysis and implicitly inculcate that how literary analysis can be done employing political interpretations. Hence, some key concepts for critical practice of literary analysis such as interdiscourse, intertextuality, ideology negotiation and feminist/political criticisms of literature are investigated. Finally, an example of a politically committed analysis of literature is provided to show how theoretical foundations function in practice

The Effect of Explicit Pronunciation Instruction on Listening Comprehension: Evidence from Iranian English Learners

This study was an attempt to examine the effect of two methods of instructing English words' pronunciations on Iranian EFL learners’ listening comprehension. Pretest-posttest design was employed to scrutinize the possible improvements of three classes of intermediate English learners (two experimental and one control group) as listening comprehension was concerned. A 25-item listening test was constructed inspired by the Cambridge Key English Test listening materials to measure students’ listening ability. All groups were exposed to the same listening test as the pre and the post-test, however, only the experimental groups received the special treatment regarding the phonetic symbols and phonemic transcription, segmental features (group A) and supra-segmental features (group B). After the application of the study’s treatment, data analysis process initiated which indicated that experimental groups who received explicit pronunciation instruction had a better performance than the control group on the final listening test. In addition, the findings suggested that the experimental group which received segmental pronunciation instruction had a better performance than the experimental group which received supra-segmental pronunciation instruction. Generally, the findings imply that pronunciation instruction can positively affect the listening comprehension ability of intermediate EFL learners

Using English Discourse Markers: A Comparison of Persian and English Dentistry Authors

With regard to the role of discourse markers as key elements in creating any coherent and natural piece of languages, the present study aimed at investigating the implementation of English discourse makers in academic papers written by Persian and English dentistry researchers. To this end, 20 papers by Persian authors and 20 by English-speaking authors were selected and analyzed line by line. The findings revealed that discourse markers were more frequent in papers produced by English-speaking researchers. However, the papers in both groups contained almost an equal range of discourse markers. In addition, distribution of discourse markers among different sections of papers and under different sub-classes of discourse markers was almost similar in the two groups. Despite similarities in the implementation of discourse markers between papers produced by Persian and English researchers, the papers written by Persian authors still lacked coherence; this could be attributed to the underuse and misuse of discourse markers in these papers and the fact that discourse markers are not the only elements that make a text coherent

The frequency of expressions and proverbs in different Iranian generations' speech styles

Change is one of the fundamentals of every language. Every community consists of different generations with various perspectives toward life. The difference among different generations' vernaculars are so drastic that it would not be an exaggeration to claim that every generation of a society or a speech community has its own language or vernacular which distinguishes it from other generations or age-groups of the society in lexico-grammatical terms. This study put the frequency of expressions and proverbs in different generations' speech styles under investigation. Hence, inspired by stratified randomization technique, the researcher randomly selected a group of 24 middle-aged and similarly a group of 24 teenager participants of the two genders. Each of the age-groups consisted of 12 male and 12 female subjects in order to provide the possibility to determine the role of gender on expression or proverb usage. All the subjects were individually interviewed for elicitation of the needed data then their sentences were recorded and accurately transcribed for further investigation. By counting the expressions or proverbs in sentences of male/female teenagers' and middle-aged subjects of the research, their expression and proverb usage frequencies were illuminated. The study's results suggested that middle-aged speakers of Iranian community employed expressions and proverbs more than teenagers. This implies that the older would have a stronger relationship with the literature and are more satisfied with their culture and identity. Middle-aged subjects used those expressions which were deeply rooted in the literature and culture while teenagers were highly in use of those expressions and proverbs which were suddenly entered into the lexicon of the society by the advent of new television series or expanded advertisements of mass media, for example. Furthermore, it was found that males generally were more interested in using expression and proverb in their daily conversations than females

Iran’s Representation in news Discourse: A Corpus-driven Analysis of NOW Database

The main thrust of the present study was to explore the ideological perspective based on which the monolithic word “Iran” was presented in NOW (News on the Web) as the largest online news corpora. Having resorted to both corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, the word “Iran” was explored in terms of collocates, their categories, context and micro- as well as macro-discursive structures inspired by Van Dijk’s (2006) model. It was shown that most of the collocates have indexed “Iran” mainly in relation to “conflict” and “violence” while others were, in effect, supporting the threatening role played by Iran in the middle-east and in the world. The study also revealed that the representation of “Iran” is in line with “other-negative representation” ideology employed unanimously by the news on web (NOW) which attempts to represent, reproduce and control the way “Iran” is depicted by manipulating lexical, structural, semantic and syntactic features

Literary Interpretation from Linguistics Perspective: Applying Semantic and Structural Approaches in Analyzing English and Persian Literary Works

During previous decades, choosing the best method for literary criticism so that it would not taint the meaning of works has been attracted the attention of critics all around the world. Applying linguistic-based methods, as contemporary literary criticism methods, help critics to inform readers of literary and lingual senses while being committed to the text. This article has attempted to study and evaluate the ways of applying semantic and structural methods in presenting right literary analysis. Since the application of these methods is not language specific literally nor lingual, some practical examples of applying these methods are presented for studying and criticizing samples of English and Persian literatures

The Roles of Age and Gender in Applying Proverbs and Expressions in Daily Conversations of Shirazians

Change and transformation are the basic characteristics of languages. Each community incorporates different generations with different ideologies toward life and obviously use different dialects. The difference in dialects among different generations in Iran is so drastic that it seems people speak different languages. This research has attempted to study the amount of applying proverbs and expressions in different age-groups of the society. Therefore, two groups of 24 respondents were randomly selected from both male and female as the statistical population so that investigating age and sex factors in the type and amount of applying proverbs and expressions in the daily conversations become possible. All participants were interviewed individually and their sentences were transcribed accurately. By counting the number of proverbs and expressions in the sentences of Middle-aged and teenager groups, and also by counting the male and female participants, and considering their Expression Density; i.e., the proportion of the number of proverbs and expressions to the total number of the words of each sentence, and by using the method of inferential non-parametric statistics, these results have been achieved: 1.The Middle-aged Group use more proverbs and expressions than teenagers. Perhaps, because they are more familiar with the culture and literature, and they are much more aware of the delicacies of language and literature. 2.Teenagers also use proverbs and expressions; however, these are of the type of words which were inserted suddenly into the lexicon of the society through printed matters or media and cyber networks. 3.Moreover, men totally use more proverbs and expressions than women in their daily conversations

Are reading comprehension ability and its strategies transferable from L1 to L2? Evidence from upper-intermediate EFL learners in Iran

Considering the fact that being able to read efficiently would be a key tool for academic success, there has been a plethora of research conducted on this skill with a serious focus on the degree to which reading comprehension is the function of lexical and grammatical knowledge of the language. However, the present study was an endeavour to examine whether L2 (English) reading comprehension is ‘language-specific’ or related to ‘general reading proficiency’. Moreover, it has investigated reading comprehension strategies to see whether both poor and proficient Iranian readers use similar strategies for reading comprehension tasks in either languages or whether they employ different strategies depending on the language. The sample of 87 upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners was recruited for the study that took seven months to complete. Statistical analyses revealed that L2 reading comprehension is not language-specific but primarily related to ‘general reading proficiency’. It was also found that proficient readers employed more or less identical strategies for reading comprehension tasks of different languages, while this was not the case for poor readers