Sharif Digital Repository

This survey research investigated the attitude of Iranian Azeri native speakers towards Azeri language. A questionnaire was developed and its reliability was estimated (r = 0.74) through a piloting phase on 54 Azeri native speakers. The participants, for the main phase of this study, were 400 Azeri native speakers with different social and educational backgrounds and from some densely Azeri-populated provinces in Iran. They completed either the online or the printed version of the survey, the results of which indicated that Iranian Azeri native speakers have a high level of positive attitude towards their mother tongue in spite of the negligence of this language in the Iranian educational... 

Iran is home to a treasury of languages representing diverse language families: Iranic, Turkic, Semitic, Indic, Dravidian, Armenian, and Kartvelian, as well as sign languages. Despite valuable research carried out by Iranian and western scholars, there is still no comprehensive publication depicting the geographic distribution and linguistic status of language varieties in Iran. In order to work toward this goal, the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) (www.iranatlas.net) was officially launched in 2015 as an international, online research programme. The present study opens with a historical overview of the research context and underlines the ongoing necessity of constructing such an atlas... 

Minority language studies have received increasing attention over the last decade in Iran. Drawing on Spolsky's (Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. Language policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) language policy theoretical framework, this inquiry reports on the language ideologies, practices, and management efforts of an under-explored group of Kurdish families residing in the city of Kermanshah. To this end, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork guided the collection of data from 40 Kurdish-Persian bilingual parents. The thematic analysis of data revealed glaring inconsistencies among the three elements of family language policy (FLP). That is parents' strong attachment to... 

The study explores language maintenance and shift patterns from a family language policy perspective in Azerbaijani-Farsi bilingual families in the City of Zanjan, Iran. The city is the capital of Zanjan province which is surrounded by Azerbaijani, Kurdish, and Farsi speaking provinces giving it a specific demographic make-up to explore language maintenance and shift processes from a family language policy perspective. Thirteen parents (six fathers and seven mothers) from upper, middle, and lower socioeconomic statuses were interviewed about their language ideologies, practices, and management with respect to the maintenance of their ethnic language, Azerbaijani, and the official language of... 

The article offers a different interpretation of Antony Flew's views about the problem of religious language. This interpretation shows that Flew's ideas can be perceived as a critique of belief in the content of religious statements, rather than a critique of their meaning. By interpreting his thought in this way, it is clear that Flew's approach is not new and we can find similar ideas in the history of theological thought. In connection with this interpretation, the authors analyze prevalent theories related to this problem in order to identify the principal doctrines used to find a new solution. In this regard, the new potential solution is assessed in order to complete the approach... 

The present study is a nationwide survey of language identity among English language learners in Iran. The participants who completed the survey in this research included 1851 English language learners from different parts of the country who belonged to different genders, age groups and English language proficiency levels. The main instrument was a validated questionnaire which included 19 items and was administered online and by hand. The results of this survey revealed that Iranian English language learners had a moderate level of language identity and there was no significant difference between the language identity of male and female participants. In addition, the results indicated that... 

In this paper, we present our attempts to design and implement a large-coverage computational grammar for the Persian language based on the Generalized Phrase Structured Grammar (GPSG) model. This grammatical model was developed for continuous speech recognition (CSR) applications, but is suitable for other applications that need the syntactic analysis of Persian. In this work, we investigate various syntactic structures relevant to the modern Persian language, and then describe these structures according to a phrase structure model. Noun (N), Verb (V), Adjective (ADJ), Adverb (ADV), and Preposition (P) are considered basic syntactic categories, and X-bar theory is used to define Noun... 

Local educational institutions produce in-house English for Specific Purpose (ESP) materials according to the curriculum policies designated and developed by the Ministry of Higher Education In Iran. To this end, this book aims to be used in the Iranian setting at the tertiary level for undergraduate students majoring in Mechanical Engineering. Moreover, the style of English usage in this ESP textbook is American.
Regarding the content of the textbook, it has both thematic organizations in which the topics are relevant and includes sufficient treatment of the target language areas necessary for the students. The principle organizing approach of this textbook is theme-based. In addition,... 

This study investigated Iranian language students' perception of and familiarity with plagiarism, their attitudes toward their professors regarding this issue, and their reasons for doing so. The participants were 122 undergraduate and graduate language students in Translation, Literature, TEFL, and Linguistics who filled out a validated and piloted questionnaire. Overall, the results indicated that students had different views about the definition of plagiarism and plagiarism was mostly perceived by students as using someone else's words as if they were their own rather than taking someone's ideas without permission. It was also found that in their academic career, students mostly consider... 

According to Arthur (2006, p. 200), “Through the use of literature, a language learning experience might become at the same time a source of immediate pleasure and satisfaction for the student. This possibility makes literature an appealing teaching device for ESL teachers”. However, numerous factors may contribute to the teachers’ lack of interest in using literary texts as a teaching tool. This study was an attempt to investigate Iranian EFL teachers’ attitude toward using literature in language classes and their perception toward the probable reasons of some teachers’ lack of interest in doing so. Altogether forty-four language teachers (19 females and 25 males, with a mean age of 26)... 

Azerbaijani and Turkish are two closely-related languages from Oguz branch of Turkic languages, which are said to be mutually intelligible. Regarding this background, we designed an experiment within the framework of receptive multilingualism to investigate the role of linguistic factors in intelligibility of the Turkish language to Iranian Azerbaijanis. The study was carried out by controlling extra-linguistic factors such as language contact and negative attitude in order to make the findings attributable to only linguistic factors as the main focus of the present study. In the study, 40 native speakers of Azerbaijani in Iran were exposed to the Turkish language through short videos... 

Modeling languages as programming languages need precise and unambiguous semantics to be used appropriately, the formal semantics is significant for designing CASE tools and model verification. Several approaches have been used throughout these years to describe the semantics of modeling languages, but in spite of programming languages, these semantics frameworks are not used in large scale for modeling languages. This paper reviews the history of developments on semantics frameworks for modeling languages. © 2009 IEEE  

We study here the algorithmic analysis of systems modeled in terms of availability languages. Our first main result is a positive answer to the emptiness problem: it is decidable whether a given availability language contains a word. The key idea is an inductive construction that replaces availability languages with Parikh-equivalent regular languages. As a second contribution, we solve the intersection problem modulo bounded languages: given availability languages and a bounded language, it is decidable whether the intersection of the former contains a word from the bounded language. We show that the problem is NP-complete. The idea is to reduce to satisfiability of existential Presburger... 

Grammar induction is a basic step in natural language processing. Based on the volume of information that is used by different methods, we can distinguish three types of grammar induction method: supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised. Supervised and semisupervised methods require large tree banks, which may not currently exist for many languages. Accordingly, many researchers have focused on unsupervised methods. Unsupervised Data Oriented Parsing (UDOP) is currently the state of the art in unsupervised grammar induction. In this paper, we show that the performance of UDOP in free word order languages such as Persian is inferior to that of fixed order languages such as English. We... 

In this paper we present a formal definition of the basic concepts and notations of Object Role Modeling (ORM) using the Z formal specification language. Most of ORM concepts such as object and relationship types, value types, objectification, reference schemes, sub-types, roles and constraints such as uniqueness, mandatory, cardinality, subset, equality, exclusive and ring constraints are specified formally. Population is specified as objects, relationships and roles instances. These are specified using Z axioms and diagram instances are specified using Z schemas. This would enable validation and reasoning on the formal properties of ORM diagrams such as detecting constraint contradictions... 

Modeling languages are needed to describe the conceptual construct underlying software. Several modeling languages have been proposed during the last decades. Cognitive complexity is one of the common problems in designing modeling languages. Users have to split their attention and cognitive resources between two different tasks when working with complex language: solving the problem and understanding the elements composing the language. Several researches have been accomplished to evaluate cognitive complexity of modeling languages, among them, metric based and empirical approaches aremore important and convenient than others. In this paper, we compared these two methods. Results show that...