The study of compliments has attracted the attention of many scholars (e.g., Goffman 1971; Lakoff 1973; Brown and Levinson 1978; Amouzadeh 2001; Golato 2002; Sharifian 2005) and has become a major issue in the area of interactional sociolinguistics. To date, many models of politeness have been put forward in the literature. In this study, Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) politeness model was u...

This study investigates the non-native production of rhotics by Mandarin speakers learning Persian as L3 and it compares the results with that of native speakers. In the light of the findings, one of the predictions made by the Speech Learning Model was tested. According to this model, speech acquisition happens at a position-sensitive allophonic level. A series of informal /casual interviews w...

Modern Persian permits coda clusters, many of which violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle. In a syllable counting task, Persian speakers consistently perceived clusters in CVCC target items as monosyllabic, whereas English speakers generally perceived clusters existing in English as monosyllabic but those not existing in English as bi-syllabic. Moreover, the latter were perceived as monosyl...

We propose the use of a hierarchical adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (HANFIS) for automated speaker verification of Persian speakers from their English pronunciation of words. The proposed method uses three classes of sound properties consisting of linear prediction coefficients (LPC), word timelength, intensity and pitch, as well as frequency properties from FFT analysis. Actual ...

Using Spencer-Oatey’s (2004, 2008) Rapport Management approach, this study was conducted to elicit the reprimanding response behavior of native Persian speakers and EFL Learners. The participants of this study were 30 native Persian speakers and 60 EFL learners. To fulfill the purposes of this study, a six-binary situation Interactive Discourse Completion (IDCT) Task was utilized. Emotion Liker...

This paper examines the effects of lexical stress on intensity and duration in Persian both in the presence of the intonational prominence contrast and in the abstraction from the compounding accent condition. A production study was conducted in which 10 speakers produced Persian lexical and reiterant disyllabic minimal stress pairs spoken with and without an accent in a fixed carrier sentence....

In a previous production experiment, post-focus compression (PFC) of F0 and intensity were found to be present in Persian. It was also shown that F0 and duration were the main correlates of prosodic focus in Persian. However, the perceptual relevance of PFC in Persian was not yet clear. The present paper reports the findings of an experiment on focus perception in Persian. Native speakers of Pe...

How do people conceptualize motion events and talk about them? The current study examines how gestural representations of motion events arise from linguistic expressions in Persian, which has characteristics of both Talmy’s satelliteand verb-framed languages. We examined native Persian speakers’ speech and gestures in describing 20 motion events. We focused on two motion event components: path ...

This contrastive study, in the first place, examined the generic structure and, in the second place, explored the face theory proposed by Arundale (2006) in 140 doctoral dissertation acknowledgments written by native speakers of Persian (NSP) and native speakers of English (NSE) in 7 disciplines representing soft sciences to find out what discourse genre components writers employ to articulate ...