Journal of Foreign Language Research

Journal of Foreign Language Research

A comparative study of the coding of deictic verbs and expressions and their interactive nature in the Persian language by analyzing "The Frog Story" and "Alice in Wonderland" and a series of video clips

Document Type : research article

Authors
Ali Jamali
Fatemeh Bashiri
Department of English Language and Literature, Ilam Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ilam, Iran
10.22059/jflr.2024.375102.1121
Abstract
As stated by Matsumoto and Kawachi (2017), deixis is actually a line of a path in addition to a specific ground (i.e. the speaker) and for this reason, it is conceptually different from a path of motion. Indeed, deictic expressions exhibit a distinct set of behaviors from directional expressions (e.g., Up in English), line of path (e.g., TO), or trajectory plus conformation (e.g., INTO), and therefore deserve separate studies. In this article, we are going to examine deictic verbs and expressions in Persian language. For this purpose, after examining the lexicalization pattern of Persian, which is generally based on the analysis of The Frog Story (Mayer, 1969) and the Persian translation of the novel Alice in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865), we will evaluate how deictic expressions are coded in Persian in comparison with English, Japanese and Thai languages (Matsumoto et al., 2017), and if these items are interactive in nature in addition to the spatial role as reported by Matsumoto et al. (2017) regarding these components. Speakers of Persian language use these components more frequently when the movement is not only towards the speaker but also in his area which is defined by the limits of visibility and interaction, and also when the movement is accompanied by an interactive behavior such as greeting at the speaker. These findings are in line with the results of Akita and Matsumoto (2017).
Keywords
Motion event
Talmy Typology
Deixis
Deictic expressions
Interactive role of language
Subjects
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Journal of Foreign Language Research
Volume 14, Issue 2
Summer 2024
Pages 253-268