Papers by Mehdi Safaie Qalati
Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies, 2021
This paper discusses cultural and cognitive factors that may affect degree pf aptness of metaphor... more This paper discusses cultural and cognitive factors that may affect degree pf aptness of metaphors. A given metaphor may have different degrees of aptness across different cultures. Geographical features of the area and the role of base concept in the lives of people are cultural aspects that may affect degree of aptness of a metaphor for people of a culture. A metaphor with ‘lighthouse’ as the base domain would have a higher degree of aptness for people living near the sea compared to people living far away from the sea. Folktale and religion are also important aspects of culture that may have some degree of influence on the aptness of metaphors. In summary, the cultural dimensions of the concepts that are involved in the base and target domains of a metaphor could affect degree of aptness of that metaphor for people of that culture. Finally, the roles of metonymic relations and semantic features in the degree of aptness are discussed.
Novice academic writers, particularly Iranian graduate students (IGSs), upon entering an academic... more Novice academic writers, particularly Iranian graduate students (IGSs), upon entering an academic community, are hypothesized to face probable difficulties in practicing rhetorical expectations set by the experienced (EXP) members, hence, not being able to write in a way acceptable to these professionals. To explore the probable rhetorical distance between them, this study investigated the employment of interactional metadiscourse markers (IMMs) in the writings of IGSs (MA and Ph.D.) and EXP figures in Applied Linguistics. 120 recent research articles (RAs) served as the corpus of the study. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) model of metadiscourse, all occurrences of the five types of IMMs were functionally identified, and compared. To detect any possible significant differences between the corpora, Chi-square tests were run. The results indicated that the IGSs used far less IMMs than the EXP ones in their RAs. However, the general pattern of their metadiscourse use was similar to the EXP ...
International Journal of Linguistics, Dec 20, 2012
Our study aims at ascertaining and formulating a framework that would account for the Kurdish dat... more Our study aims at ascertaining and formulating a framework that would account for the Kurdish data. We scrutinize all the dyads that occur in the selected corpus, and describe how they usually work on the basis of the two following variables: power and intimacy. According to our investigation, the use of terms of address in Kurdish is affected by the age, sex, occupation, ideology, political and social position of the interlocutors which can be stated as a result of the investigation of older material-such as qualitative analysis of observation followed by unobtrusive note taking of contemporary use, a corpus of several plays, accounts of travel, interviews, TV, radio and the careful observation of the use of terms of address of today. Kurdish culture is title + first-name and title + family name oriented. Titles like 'doctor,' 'professor,' and 'teacher' are used, with title and family names. First names in Kurdish culture are restricted in use. They are used most commonly among peer groups of young generation, and by an older person addressing a child or a younger person in the family.
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Papers by Mehdi Safaie Qalati