Persian Language

Extended abstract
 
1. Introduction
Conditional construction is a linguistic universal that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. The conditional sentence is a compound statement composed of two main and subordinate clauses namely apodosis and protasis respectively. Most languages use conditional connective words to mark this construction. In Persian, “agar” has the most frequency among the conditional connective words. Except this word, there are some other connective words that can be used as a conditional connective word such as “tâ, čonanče, vaGti, hargâh, be šarte inke, hattâ agar,…”. Regarding the importance of conditional construction, this study examines verb’s tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses of the conditional sentences in the contemporary Persian language based on the theoretical framework of Declerck and Reed (2001).

2. Theoretical framework
Declerck and Reed (2001: 65-66) have proposed a kind of typology for the different types of possible worlds cross-linguistically. Possible world is a situation in which things and incidents exist or could exist. Whereas a real possible world is a situation in which things really exist, an unreal possible world is a situation in which they could exist.  Based on this typology, the  possible world of a  protasis clause can be factual or theoretical. In the case  the possible world is theoretical, it can be neutral or non-neutral. The non-neutral possible world itself is divided into closed, open, tentative and counterfactual worlds. The canonical pattern of tense system in languages of the world portrays a distinction between past and non-past or future and non-future tenses.  English and Persian use a dual distinction between past and non-past tenses. In this research, we aim to examine the  tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses based on the type of the possible worlds of  protasis clauses.

3. Methodology
In order to investigate the tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses in the conditional sentences of Modern Persian, we selected 10 fiction books of the most famous contemporary Persian authors. Selecting approximately 5000 words and 25 pages of each book randomly, we extracted conditional sentences  through the sample. The corpus involving 50622 words and 254 pages, showed 286 conditional sentences. To derive the tense of the possible worlds, the type of the conditional construction of each conditional sentence was determined based on the theoretical framework of Declerck and Reed (2001) and the tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses was analyzed using the statistical calculations. Finally, we examined the relationship between the type of the conditional construction and the tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses.

4. Results & Discussion
The present contribution presented an attempt to investigate the probability of occurrence of past and non-past tenses of the protasis and apodosis clauses separately with regard to the data and the use of computations and statistical analysis methods. The study identified that  the tense variation of protasis and apodosis clauses in Persian is fewer than the English cognates . It was also argued that Persian represents a strong tendency in applying clauses that the tense of protasis and apodosis is non-past to be of the “open” division. On the other hand, we demonstrated that there is a strong tendency for the tense of protasis and apodosis being in the past to be of  factual characteristics. The study concluded that as for the open conditionals, the speaker often uses conditional construction to portray a situation which, as yet, has not occurred or could later occurr. Therefore, the tense is often non-past. On the other hand, exploiting factual conditional, the speaker represents a situation believed in the truth of its occurrence. Therefore the past tense will serve to express the factive situation.

5. Conclusions & Suggestions
Examining the corpus of the present research, we concluded that Persian conditional sentences can be classified according to Declerck and Reed’s typology. It was further indicated that in Modern Persian, the types of conditional constructions address  factual, neutral, closed, open, tentative and counterfactual divisions. We also showed that the past and the non-past tense of the protasis clause were almost equal-with the non-past to be slightly more than the past- while in the apodosis clause, non-past tense was more than the past form. Furthermore, the study exhibited that there is a tendency between the tense of the protasis and apodosis clauses and the conditional type in Modern Persian; however, the tendencies are not absolute and it is not possible to guess the type of conditional construction certainly based on the tense of the verbs. Investigating the relationship between the modal meanings of protasis and apodosis clauses and the type of conditional constructions will be performed in further studies.

Background: Auditory rehabilitation is one of the important tasks of speech-language pathologists. So, it is necessary to know auditory behaviors in order to make some decisions about the children with hearing loss such as determining the effectiveness of the current rehabilitation programs and/or devices. The Auditory Behavior in Everyday Life (ABEL) questionnaire is a valid and reliable assessment tool in English which is developed by Purdy et al. (1995). The aim of this study was to translate and adapt ABEL questionnaire for Persian language. Methods: The ABEL consists of three factors of auditory-oral, auditory awareness, and conversational/social skills. First, the questionnaire was translated and culturally adapted from English to Persian by an independent Iranian translator. The back translated version was compared with the original one in terms of the semantic/idiomatic equivalence. Then the questionnaire was completed two times by 43 mothers of 4-to-6 year old children with hearing loss who were using either hearing aids or cochlear implants. Finally, the results of the test-retest reliability were statistically compared in order to assess internal consistency. The statistical tests which were used include Cronbach's Alpha, Spearman correlation, and Pearson correlation tests in significance level of 0.05. Results: There was a significant strength correlation among the items of the factor 1 (Alpha=0.94), factor 2 (Alpha=0.86), factor 3 (Alpha=0.82) and three factors (Alpha=0.96). There was a significant strength correlation at the 0.01 level between the scores of each factor in test-retest include auditory-oral (Spearman's rho=0.94, P<0.001), auditory awareness (Spearman's rho=0.92, P<0.001), and conversational/social skills (Spearman's rho=0.82, P<0.001). Conclusion: The Persian version of ABEL questionnaire is a valid and reliable tool for the assessment of auditory performance development in Persian-speaking children wearing hearing aids or cochlear implants. So, the ABEL questionnaire can be applied by parents/caregivers, clinicians, and researchers in order to appraise children's auditory behaviors in everyday living.

Eser, yazarın dostlarının ricası üzerine ve şu üç hedef gözetilerek yazılmıştır: 1) Farsça yazılmış manzum ve mensur eserlerin daha çabuk ve iyi anlaşılmasına yardımcı olmak, 2) Farsça'nın kelime haznesindeki Arapça ve Derî kelimelere okuyucuyu aşina etmek, 3) Bunları yaparken anlamayı kolaylaştırmak adına estetikten ödün vermemek (sehl-i mümteni)...

Due to its limited number of simplex verbs – a total of around 250 – the verbal lexicon of Persian is mainly formed of complex predicates (CPs), that is, syntactic combinations, including a verb and a non-verbal element, mainly a noun, such as bazi kardan ‘to play (play do)’, qadam zadan ‘to walk (step hit)’, also known as light verb constructions. Persian CPs have been a focus of interest since 1990s. Their formation (i.e. morphological/lexical vs. phrasal/syntactic) and their interpretation compositional vs. idiomatic) have been thoroughly investigated and various syntactic analyses have been proposed to account for their properties (e.g. Mohammad and Karimi, 1992; Dabir-Moghaddam, 1997; Family, 2006; Folli et al., 2005; Goldberg, 1996; Karimi, 1997; Karimi-Doostan, 1997; Megerdoomian, 2012; Müller, 2010). However, most of these studies are mainly concerned with theoretical issues and only explore a limited set of data. As a consequence, their generalizations turn out to be inaccurate when a larger set of data is taken into account (see e.g. Samvelian 2012; Samvelian and Faghiri 2014).
The separability of the component of a CP is one much debated issue. More precisely, while it is uncontroversial that the non-verbal element (the nominal element to simplify) can be separated from the verb by verbal inflection, clitics and auxiliary, it is controversial that truly syntactic constituents can also separate the components of a CP. Most studies claim that the latter can only be separated in a limited fashion and account for the (in)separability in syntactic terms (e.g. Dabir-Moghaddam, 1997; Goldberg, 1996; Karimi-Doostan, 1997; Karimi, 2005). On the other hand, Samvelian (2012), providing a set of attested examples, argues that the separability of CP components is a matter of tendency, due to their semantic relatedness, rather than syntactic constraints. If the issue of separability is not a matter of syntactic (or hard) constraints, one should be able to identify the soft constraints (or preferences) involved. In this respect, the issue of separability of the components of a CP can be discussed from the point of view of word order preferences. Indeed, studies on word order variations across languages have identified a number of (functional) factors that may influence the relative order of constituents, where the order is not constrained by the grammar. Semantic relatedness and collocational relation are two factors that are known to favor adjacency (cf. e.g. Hawkins, 2001; Wasow, 2002). Hence, the tendency for the components of a CP to appear adjacent to each other is not surprising.
Other functional factors such as heaviness and animacy are shown to intervene in word order preferences as well. Adopting a quantitative approach in line with studies on word order variation (see e.g. Faghiri, 2016), the goal of this study is to provide a better understanding of the issue at stake by identifying the factors that (dis)favor (non)adjacency.