1st Edition
Persian Linguistics in Cultural Contexts
Korangy and Sharifian’s groundbreaking book offers the first in-depth study into cultural linguistics for the Persian language. The book highlights a multitude of angles through which the intricacies of Persian and its many dialects and accents, wherever spoken, can be examined. Linguistics with cultural studies as its backdrop is not a new phenomenon; however, with this text we are afforded an insight into the complex relationship that exists between human cognizance and human expression in this ancient civilization. This study helps develop an innovative understanding of history, intent, and meaning as understood by a culture and by a people, in this case the Persian-speaking folk of Iran. The chapters are insightful resources for analyzing and augmenting our knowledge of linguistics under the rubric of Persian culture but also for proposing and foregrounding new ideas in this field of study.
Introduction
ALIREZA KORANGY AND FARZAD SHARIFIAN
1. A cultural linguistic survey of nuances in translation
POUNEH SHABANI-JADIDI
2. Self-abasement and other-elevating through Persian address forms and self-reference terms
MOHAMMAD HOSSEIN KESHAVARZ
3. Ta’ārof – the key to Iranian social behavior
WILLIAM O. BEEMAN
4. Inflectional morphemes in Persian address terms: a sociolinguistic analysis
HOOMAN SAELI
5. Compliment response strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers: new patterns and new cultural schema
ZOHREH R. ESLAMI AND ALI DERAKHSHAN
6. Violence in Persian
MOHAMMAD RASEKH-MAHAND, RAHELE IZADIFAR, AND MOJTABA ALIZADEH-SAHRAIE
7. Conceptualizations of sadness in Persian
MEHRI BAGHERI
8. Cultural conceptualizations of animal expressions in Persian
VAHEDE NOSRATI
9. Cultural conceptualizations of sharm (shame) in Persian
SARA GHAZI
10. Not-being in the presence of being: conceptualizations of death in Rumi’s Mathnavi
SEPIDEH HOZHABROSSADAT
11. Cultural conceptualizations of compliments in Persian
ZAHRA ABOLHASSANI-CHIMEH
Biography
Alireza Korangy received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, USA. His field of research is classical Persian and Arabic philology with a special emphasis on poetics, rhetoric, and linguistics. He has also done extensive research on the contemporary linguistics of Iran and its corresponding folkloric traditions (Sorani Kurdish, Kurmanji Kurdish, Gilaki, Lori, Baluchi, etc.). He is faculty at the American University of Beirut and has previously taught at the University of Virginia, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Harvard University.
Farzad Sharifian held the Chair in Cultural Linguistics within the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia. He was a pioneer of Cultural Linguistics and was widely published in leading international journals and edited volumes. He was the author of Cultural Conceptualisations and Language (2011, John Benjamins) and Cultural Linguistics (2017, John Benjamins). He was the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Language and Culture (John Benjamins), and the Editor-in-Chief of Cultural Linguistics book series (Springer Nature) and Routledge Advances in Teaching English as an International Language book series (Routledge). He received several awards for his research, including the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, Germany.
