Persian Sentences Research Articles

Analysing of EFL Learners' Linguistic Errors: Evidence from Iranian Translation Trainees

This paper aims to investigate the Linguistic errors of Iranian translation trainees. The question this study tries to answer is what the most frequent linguistic errors of English translation students are. To answer this question 50 junior students of translation training programme from the Islamic Azad University of Lahijan participated in the experiment. They were selected randomly from among 80 students who participated in an OPT general proficiency test. They were given 20 Persian sentences. The sentences were simple, declarative, affirmative and active. For the analysis of errors “Corder's” taxonomy was used. The analysis indicated that the errors resulting from wrong selection of words, permutation and errors of incorrect use of tenses were the most frequent errors respectively.

A computational grammar for Persian based on GPSG

In this paper, we present our attempts to design and implement a large-coverage computational grammar for the Persian language based on the Generalized Phrase Structured Grammar (GPSG) model. This grammatical model was developed for continuous speech recognition (CSR) applications, but is suitable for other applications that need the syntactic analysis of Persian. In this work, we investigate various syntactic structures relevant to the modern Persian language, and then describe these structures according to a phrase structure model. Noun (N), Verb (V), Adjective (ADJ), Adverb (ADV), and Preposition (P) are considered basic syntactic categories, and X-bar theory is used to define Noun phrases, Verb phrases, Adjective phrases, Adverbial phrases, and Prepositional phrases. However, we have to extend Noun phrase levels in X-bar theory to four levels due to certain complexities in the structure of Noun phrases in the Persian language. A set of 120 grammatical rules for describing different phrase structures of Persian is extracted, and a few instances of the rules are presented in this paper. These rules cover the major syntactic structures of the modern Persian language. For evaluation, the obtained grammatical model is utilized in a bottom-up chart parser for parsing 100 Persian sentences. Our grammatical model can take 89 sentences into account. Incorporating this grammar in a Persian CSR system leads to a 31% reduction in word error rate.

RETRACTED: An Inquiry into Intonational Pattern of the Complex and Compound Sentences in Persian [SBSPRO 28C (2011) 851–854

RETRACTED: An Inquiry into Intonational Pattern of the Complex and Compound Sentences in Persian [SBSPRO 28C (2011) 851–854

A comparative study of morphosyntactic and discourse errors of intermediate and advanced EFL learners’ writing

The main purpose of the present paper is to identify the morphosyntactic and discourse errors of language learners at sentence and essay levels. To achieve this end, a total number of 50 Iranian university students were selected to participate in the study. Two types of test were administrated to the participants: a recognition test and a production test. In the former, the participants were asked to read 42 English sentences and identify the erroneous morphosyntactic forms; and in the latter, they were required to translate 14 Persian sentences into English and also write a two paragraph essay. Using Ferris’ (2002) model, the results indicated that there was a direct relationship between the number of errors and the participants’ level of proficiency. The results also revealed statistically significant differences between error identification and error production of both freshmen and seniors Iranian English language learners.

Quantification Scope Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Persian and English

This study investigates the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing noun phrases with double quantified constituents from a processing perspective. The questions this study tried to answer were: whether or not the preferred interpretation for doubly quantified ambiguous sentences in English was influenced by English learners' L1 scope interpretation possibilities; whether or not the preferred interpretation of ambiguous sentences with double quantificational noun phrases was driven by surface configurations of sentences in English and Persian for SL learners of English either in off-line or on-line reading; and finally, whether or not the referential contexts of ambiguous sentences with double quantificational noun phrases in English and in Persian guided interpretation preferences for SL learners in off-line and on-line readings. Using an off-line judgment task and an on-line truth-value judgment task combined with a self-paced reading technique, the data of the study were collected from the Persian speakers and English learners. The results obtained from offline tasks indicated that the interpretation preferences of L2 learners of English were influenced by their background language. However, such influences were not found in the self-paced study. Furthermore, it was indicated that the surface configurations of sentences strongly affected L2 learners’ interpretation preferences favoring isomorphic interpretation for the universal quantifiers included in the subject position. Concerning the semantically referential-context effect on ambiguity resolution, the collected data revealed that context played a crucial role in the processing of scope ambiguity since the RTs for acontextualized stimuli were more than for contextualized ones in constructions with QNP-QNP in Persian and English.

Quantification Scope Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Persian and English

This study investigates the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences containing noun phrases with double quantified constituents from a processing perspective. The questions this study tried to answer were: whether or not the preferred interpretation for doubly quantified ambiguous sentences in English was influenced by English learners' L1 scope interpretation possibilities; whether or not the preferred interpretation of ambiguous sentences with double quantificational noun phrases was driven by surface configurations of sentences in English and Persian for SL learners of English either in off-line or on-line reading; and finally, whether or not the referential contexts of ambiguous sentences with double quantificational noun phrases in English and in Persian guided interpretation preferences for SL learners in off-line and on-line readings. Using an off-line judgment task and an on-line truth-value judgment task combined with a self-paced reading technique, the data of the study were collected from the Persian speakers and English learners. The results obtained from offline tasks indicated that the interpretation preferences of L2 learners of English were influenced by their background language. However, such influences were not found in the self-paced study. Furthermore, it was indicated that the surface configurations of sentences strongly affected L2 learners’ interpretation preferences favoring isomorphic interpretation for the universal quantifiers included in the subject position. Concerning the semantically referential-context effect on ambiguity resolution, the collected data revealed that context played a crucial role in the processing of scope ambiguity since the RTs for acontextualized stimuli were more than for contextualized ones in constructions with QNP-QNP in Persian and English.Key words: Quantification, Scope Ambiguity, On-line Tasks, Off-line Tasks

Persian POS tagging using probabilistic morphological analysis

Part of speech (POS) tagging as a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP) has attracted many research efforts and many taggers are developed with different approaches to reach high performance and accuracy. In many complex applications of NLP, tagged corpora are among essential resources and designing an algorithm to create or enrich these resources is of high importance. Handling unknown words is a challenge in POS tagging which usually decreases the performance of taggers. This paper presents a POS tagger for Persian. It exploits a hybrid approach which is a combination of statistical and rule-based methods to tag Persian sentences. The proposed tagger uses a novel probabilistic morphological analysis to tag unknown words. As a secondary result of this research a knowledge base of Persian morphological rules with their probabilities is built according to a corpus. Experimental results show that our method improves the tagging performance and accuracy.

Grammaticality Judgment of Garden Path Sentences in Persian

Grammaticality Judgment of Garden Path Sentences in Persian

Acquisition of bitransitive sentences in Persian and Chinese: differences between comprehension and production tests.

48 Iranian and 48 Chinese children, from 3 to 5 yr. old, were tested for their comprehension and production of two forms of bitransitive sentences in their respective languages. There was evidence that sentential forms in which the transfer object was mentioned next to the transfer action were acquired better by the subjects than those in which the two were separated by the recipient of the transfer object. Sentences that were closer in structural or semantic aspects to extra-linguistic experiences were handled better. Some differences were obtained between sentence comprehension and sentence production, apparently due to psychomotor factors in the language-related behaviors of the children.