Alireza Korangy and Farzad Sharifian, eds. Persian Linguistics in Cultural Contexts

Abstract

This book provides a general overview of the culture of Persian-speaking societies as materialized in language. The editors’ main purpose in compiling this book is to highlight how language and culture interchangeably impact one another withing a culture that naturally behooved both. This book centers around the new field of cultural linguistics (hereafter CL), concerned with how people in each society use language to express themselves. The book opens with an introduction by Alireza Korangy and Farzad Sharifian, followed by eleven chapters that address the relationship between language and culture in Persian-speaking societies. Within this book, the authors have strived to uncover the existing associations between cultural cognition and language. Exploring this relationship is contingent upon elucidating the cultural criteria of the society. The editors maintain that the awareness of culture and the people living within that culture contribute to an in-depth understanding of the meanings of expressions that individuals employ in their interactions.In these chapters, the authors attempt to provide different conceptualizations of some terms used in Iranian culture to give readers a general overview of CL. The chapters of this book focus on such topics as “address terms” and “conceptualization” of a variety of sorts that denote feelings in Iranian society. Chapter 1 engages with the relationship of language and culture with the translation culture of Iran. Chapter 2 elaborates on the relationship between “politeness, and what Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi calls, ‘address terms.’” In the third chapter, William O. Beeman examines the concept of ‘ta‘ārof’ as a social-behavioral component in Iranian life. Chapter 4 also focuses on the generalities of “address terms” within Iran. Chapter 5 exposes us to the mechanisms of Iranian “compliments” and “compliment responses.” Chapter 6 considers the conceptualization of “violence” in the Persian language. Chapters 7 to 11 explore myriad topical issues within the Persian-speaking Iran such as emotions like sadness (gham), animal conceptualizations, shame (sharm), death (marg), and compliment (tahsīn)The first chapter examines the relationship between translation—from a linguistic perspective— and culture as a nonlinguistic factor. In this chapter, Pouneh Shabani Jadidi explores the semantics of translation and the cultural categories. The given examples in this chapter indicate that in Iranian culture, due to its patriarchal system, verbs such as talāq dādan (to give divorce) are used for males, and verbs like talāq gereftan (to receive divorce) are used for females. Shabani Jadidi presents the four maxims proposed by Paul Grice in 1975, such as quantity, quality, relation, and manner; namely, she uses Grice’s maxims to introduce the relevance theory of translation. Finally, she concludes that most of the existing difficulties in translation from one language to another are attributed to cultural differences.The second chapter reveals that there is significantly more congruence between “address terms” in the use of language, and “politeness” is one sociolinguistic factor. In discussing the relationship between “language” and “politeness,” Mohammad Hossein Keshavarz states that the two Gricean maxims, quality and manner, are violated. Keshavarz points out that when an individual uses an expression like “It’s warm in here,” having ambiguity in comparison with another expression like “Open the window (please),” the maxim of manner has been violated. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that the maxim of manner has not been violated in this case. However, the expression “It’s warm in here” violates the maxim of relation since the request should be relevant in a direct speech. In other words, the speaker here wants to state something intentionally and indirectly, showing a case of implicature. Additionally, Keshavarz indicates that the use of “address terms” and [im]polite words are not confined to the spoken language and they appear in written language, such as email communication, a subject that has recently received much attention by many scholars. In this case, referring to the section of salutation, Keshavarz states that the word ‘jenāb’ (honorable) is preceded by the greeting form salām followed by Title + Last Name + the endearment term ‘azīz’ (dear). But it seems that what has gone unnoticed by Keshavarz is that the title ‘doktor’ (doctor) is used alone in spoken language without the addressee’s title and the last name; nonetheless, it is not clear what Keshavarz means by the word “title.” Because in the example ‘salām doktor, chetorī?’ (how are you, doctor?), the word ‘doktor’ in Persian is a title, as the word ‘āqā (master or Mr.) is also used before a person’s name. I would argue that Iranians use the word ‘ɂaqa’ instead of “doktor” and say salām ‘āqā, chetorī? (how are you, sir?).Chapter 3 refers to the concept of ta‘ārof as a sign of politeness among Iranian people. William O. Beeman states that Iranians use this social behavior on different occasions. Beeman believes that political and social uncertainty in Iran is the outcome of the ta‘ārof system. He further argues that all Iranians, regardless of ethnicity, language, and religion, use different actions to show ta‘ārof in their interactions with others. Beeman refers to some occasions in which Iranians employ this behavior, such as seating, and greeting—inside as well as outside of their homes. For example, when going through doors, they let others go first, and when sitting down in a room and a person comes in, they stand up. Iranians pay particular attention to seating. For example, they try to make the others who have a higher position in society sit far from the door of a room. Beeman refers to the expression befarmāyīd bālā meaning “please sit at the top” to show the presence of this behavior among Iranians and maintains that this expression is used when a person is a preferred persona and of a higher social status. In contrast, the person who has a lower position starts a greeting. From Beeman’s perspective, Iranians consume nothing before offering it to a person who is near them. In a restaurant, a person who wants to pay the bill usually finds a way to go out for some reason to “wash hands” or “make a phone call.”Chapter 4 focuses on the use of “address terms” in Persian as Keshavarz did in chapter 2. In the introduction to this chapter, Hooman Saeli discusses the relationship between “address terms” as a linguistic factor and “politeness” as a nonlinguistic factor. Saeli believes that these terms are the sign of cultural norms among the interlocutors who communicate with each other. These terms are also known as common address, which Persian interlocutors use for different individuals with distinct positions. According to Keshavarz (1988), Saeli states that under normal situations Iranians are expected to indicate a degree of humility when they address themselves and elevating others when addressing them. Saeli collected four endearment terms of jān and jūn for “dear,” and jānam and jūnam for “my dear” to investigate how and why the interlocutors choose particular forms of endearment when referring to people of different ages, genders, and sociocultural distances. The subjects participating in this study were twenty native Persian speakers (ten males and ten females). The results of this quantitative research showed that the use of these four endearment terms varied significantly. Additionally, Saeli investigated the results of the use of these terms for family members, friends, and teachers. The results for family members showed that the males used jūn and jūnam less frequently to address family members than did females. For old and opposite-gender friends all endearment terms were frequently used except jūnam. Regarding teachers, they addressed students using jan more frequently compared to the other three terms. Taken together, the results indicated that the female subjects tended to use more address terms ending with /-am/ (i.e., jānam, jūnam).Chapter 5 examines how Persian speakers in Iran use natural compliments and compliment responses. In this study, Zohreh Eslami and Ali Derakhshan collected data from a large sample of Iranian Persian speakers in different situations. The authors collected the data in one of their conversation classes, including female and male language users of different ages at Golestan University in Iran. They believe that compliments are social speech acts that establish a harmonic relationship between the complimenter and the complimented. They classified the compliment behavior into three subcategories of “accepting,” “rejecting,” and “deflecting or evading.” The results of this quantitative study showed that Iranians largely tended to accept the compliments. Therefore, among these three subcategories, the most frequently used category was “accepting.” The second highest utilized subcategory of this behavior was “rejecting,” and the third subcategory was “evading.”Although chapter 6 is entitled “Violence in Persian,” Mohammad Rasekh Mahan, Rahele Izadifar, and Mojtaba Alizadeh-Sahraie have confined their discussion to just the metaphor of anger in this chapter. However, anger is a private emotion occurring under some circumstances that can motivate and energize an individual to act. This behavior can make an individual exhibit destructive behavior, but it can also prompt an individual to make constructive changes. On the other hand, violence is a public emotion that is rarely constructive. As mentioned, anger can motivate and energize individuals to commit destructive or constructive actions, whereas the nature of violence is slightly different from anger because it is usually destructive. For example, one point that has been mentioned by Rasekh Mahand, Izadifar, and Alizadeh is that “anger is an illness” and therefore cannot be considered as violence as believed by this author.Chapters 7 to 11 focus on conceptualizations of emotional categories like qam (sadness), sharm (shame), marg (death), and tahsīn (compliment), has been studied by the authors in these chapters. All these studies were carried out using qualitative methods. Although the authors in chapters 5 and 6 of this book focused on the emotional category as the authors in chapters 7 to 11 did, the methodological nature of chapters 5 and 6 are quantitative. The chapters are more informative and have remained more faithful to the title and the purpose of this book. However, the authors have focused on just cultural categories among the three types of cultural conceptualizations, including cultural categories, cultural metaphors, and cultural schemas. Upon reviewing this book, the authors could have elaborated on other cultural conceptualizations; such as cultural metaphors and cultural schemas. Other categories that were not taken into consideration in this book are colors, attributes, foodstuffs, kinship terms, events, among others, all of which are primarily reflected in the lexicon of human languages.1Overall, this book, edited by Alireza Korangy and Farzad Sharifian (2021), and published by Routledge, is a timely and valuable work, especially for Iranian linguistics. Although some chapters might have a few misconceptions as mentioned above, this well-written book has a pioneering stance in the field and can be used as a reference for researchers who are interested in topics related to CL. It is hoped that the other types of conceptualizations like cultural metaphors and schemas, and other cultural categories be considered by researchers who are interested in cultural linguistics.